The Daily Post’s Daily Prompt for July 23 is Adult Visions.
The day’s prompt asks:
As a kid, you must have imagined what it was like to be an adult. Now that you’re a grownup (or becoming one), how far off was your idea of adult life?
When I was about six years old I remember thinking that one day I would be eight years old. Eight seemed so old. So grown up. So far away.
I didn’t especially like the number eight at the time. I much preferred seven. Eight seemed sinister. Perhaps because it rhymes with “hate.” I’m not really sure, but that’s what my pre-eight-year-old mind thought about it.
Then one day, I turned eight years old. It was fine. I didn’t feel very old, but now all the six year olds looked really young.
Becoming an adult has been somewhat similar. I have a few aches and pains, but I don’t especially feel forty-something. I certainly don’t feel old or even that mature. I just kind of feel like me. But now when I see people who’re in their twenties they look so young. Practically babies!
Aside from not feeling especially “grown up” there are several things I didn’t expect about achieving adulthood.
One of the biggies is how busy I would be. It’s hard to manage my time and all the activities. Work. Mom stuff. Food. Cleaning. Once in a while down time is needed to reboot, but you end up having to steal it from somewhere because it doesn’t usually happen on its own.
You have to plan for your plans to change. No matter how much planning I do, events always seem to turn out different than I expected. Childbirth. Dinners. Picnics. Christmas. Travels. It’s like the line in “Harry Potter: Deathly Hallows” when Harry ask when it was that one of their plans ever worked out as they expected. (I’ll add a link to a video if I can find it.)
You still need to plan, but then you have to accept the situation when it turns out differently. That’s going to happen a lot more than you think it will when you’re younger.
The biggest thing I didn’t expect about adulthood is how much laundry there would be. It’s one of the great myths of being grown up. You think you’ll be free when you’re of age, but in reality there’s a never-ending stream of dirty clothes following you wherever you go. You’ll need to wash those.
Oh sure, you can fold the clothes and put mount laundry away. You’ll be mostly done. Maybe you can even skip a day. But unless you’re doing laundry in the buff, while your family is likewise in the buff, you will never ever be completely done with laundry. You can get the family to help, and I suppose you could hire other people. But the fact remains that you must still deal with it. Not even our cats have to deal with laundry. This is strictly a human thing.
They don’t tell you that part about growing up.
I’ll try to clue in my daughter. Perhaps her goal, as an adult, can be to someday hire somebody to do the laundry. I can help her learn how to handle the laundry situation efficiently and effectively, so that it doesn’t become a thing. I’ll plan that. We’ll go from there.
(By the way, I edited this as I thought of more things. But the laundry, it’s always a thing.)
aLightningbug 