On Being a Grown Up

Senior year of college, several of my friends shared one-quarter of a sprawling old New England manor, a house depressed by its own conversion from affluent one-family home to ramshackle, under-manicured, spliced-int0-four-apartments college rental housing. I, too, lived in once-lovely old home, but way off-campus, so it was my friends' house that became my second home: close to campus, filled with a constant parade of people. It was the site of countless parties, movie nights, celebratory wine bottle-uncorkings as one by one we got into graduate school, accepted jobs, decided to move to Europe and bartend. At weekly dinner parties, all our clever, hilarious, and ridiculous quotes were written on poster-boards on the wall, preserved for us to laugh at again the next weekend.

Towards the end of our senior year, the parties picked up in their frequency and intensity as we all tried to experience as much undergraduate abandon as possible. Sometimes it would become too much for me and I would slip outside, often alone but just as often joined by another temporary refugee. Such was the case one night less than a week before commencement. Sitting on the crumbling first-floor porch of the once-grand house, the din of the second-floor party became a dull background hum. I was sitting, eyes closed, breathing in the brisk-Massachusetts May evening, when a friend eased himself down on the steps beside me.

"Hey," he said. "Seen my girlfriend?"

"She might be in the kitchen," I replied.

"As well she should be," he said with a smirk.

I punched him.

He laughed. "So. Sunday. We'll be Bachelor's, or something. College graduates. Grown-ups."

I shook my head. "Nope."

He raised an eyebrow, gave me a this'll be good look. "Nope?"

"No, I decided that's not how it works," I said, making it up as I went along: "See, you get four years in high school... freshman year, sophomore year, junior year, senior year. Same thing in college, four years, freshman-sophomore-junior-senior."

"We were first-years here," he corrected me. "They called us first-years, not freshmen, because freshmen is sexist. We're at PCU, remember?"

"Says the guys who just said women should be in the kitchen. Anyway, the point is, you get four years. That's the increment. So I've decided that post-college, you get four years before you have to be a grown up: a freshman year--"

"First year."

"Fine - a first year, sophomore year, junior year and senior year out-of-college. You have all that time to figure out how to be a grown-up outside of the college bubble, and then, that fifth year out of college... that's your first year as a grown-up."

He considered this, then nodded: "Good call."

So let it be written, so let it be done -- we had established a new precedent, comfortably far away. After all, freshman year felt so long ago. How quickly could another four years go by?

I woke up a few mornings back and realized: in the blink of an eye. I've used up my four years. In fact, I missed my theoretical commencement, which would have fallen several months ago... and now I find myself halfway through my first year as a self-designated grown up.

I thought, that can't be right. I started to look for clues and the evidence mounted quickly: I not only pay taxes, but complete and file them on my own. I own my own car. I've been paying my own housing, insurance, and general expenses for years. I have a dog and a Master's degree and have been chipping away at my undergraduate loans for some time now. I have business cards. I've moved cross-country multiple times. Last week I had a conversation about pop culture with someone who was born in a year that began with "20" instead of "19" (this is a first-grader who knows her reality television like no other). The friend who bore witness to my post-college adult-track curriculum is soon to be married, and many others are showing similarly alarming signs of maturity.

At some point, we crossed over.

There are plenty of adult milestones I have yet to hit in my own life - I don't think marriage, buying a house or having kids are activities on the immediate horizon, and I'm still sketching out the exact structure of the blueprints for "what I want to be when I grow up." But standing in this new location, surveying the land of Adulthood, I have come to a terrifying realization: There are no grown-ups. It's just us out here, looking around with the same puzzled expression, wondering where all the adults went, and trying to pinpoint just when it was that we stopped having any friends living on the second floor of a decrepit old Boston mansion with insistent music, and quotes on the wall, and a quiet porch for refuge.