The Secrets of Being GROWN UP

When you're a child all you can think about is what you're going to do when you are 'all grown-up.' You wish away your childhood summers in the hope of 'getting older' and being able to 'do more.'

Then come your teen years. No one likes the teen years. I suppose that is where the term 'teen angst' comes from. When you're 15 you're too young to drive; not old enough to work at a 'real' job, and all you can do is watch all the cool kids go driving by in their Honda's loaded chock full with obnoxiousness, rocketing hormones, and those people who are older than you.

Finally, you hit sixteen. You can drive (or, if you are me, you cannot because you were caught stealing a car and going joy-riding at fifteen). You can stay out later. You're still too young to buy cigarettes and beer. Oh, the adult pleasures that life has to offer--if you're old enough.

Finally 18: you can vote! The year I turned eighteen was a Presidential election year, I remember how excited I was to have my opinion actually count.

And then the Pièce de résistance: your twenty-first birthday (to be celebrated with a rip-roaring hang-over the second day of your twenty-first year).

We spend the first years of our lives pining away to be 'grown-up'. When you finally realize that you are a 'grown-up' (the fact of our grown-up-ness rather sneaks up on us and bites us in the butt when we're not looking, as I have found out) you wish you were a kid again.

No one wishes for the grown up tasks of life that we don't count on: the mundane tasks that we all do to survive day-to-day. You don't see your parents paying the bills, washing dishes, cleaning the house, or folding laundry. All you see, when you're young, is the fact that they can stay up late, drive a car, spend money, and pretty much do whatever they want (or so it appears-).

Some of the secret joys of adulthood (and no, I'm not talking about the Kama Sutra, or The Joy of Sex , although those are certainly fun...) are things like scaling Laundry Mountain, the newest baddest, most tedious ride at the world renown resort Adulthood:

Why is it that we wish our lives away? What we gain in freedom we also lose in freedom. It is a paradox. You finally get to be in control of your life, but at the same time life has control of you.

We all have things that we regret, that we'd do differently if we had the option to do them over. As I get older I constantly hear the echoes of things my father said to me as I was growing up ring true. One of them is that you can give all the advice in the world, but people will never listen. They have to learn for themselves, first hand.

How very true that is. My parents always told me to enjoy being young while I could, because the older you get the faster time flies.

Tempus Fugit. What an understatement.

It is a shame that when we are young and carefree and pining away to 'grow up' we can't heed such advice. I certainly wouldn't change my life circumstances now (my husband, my family, career, etc.) if I were given a choice. But I think I would have slowed down a bit more, enjoyed having someone take care of me more.

As for now, I shall return to one of the joys of being grown up: Conquering Laundry Mountain (yes, that is my laundry in the living room. It is amazing what being a slacker for a few days will do in terms of making a boring task, like laundry, monumental to complete).