There couldn’t be a more fitting time to realize my own adulthood than now. A time when my children are approaching their attempts at adulthood, grappling with their loss of innocence while longing for freedom. As I navigate the middle years of my life, I remember too clearly images of those adults who impacted my future. The older people from my childhood, as I remember them, wore grown-up clothes and had grown- up hair. They spoke with grown-up voices and ate grown-up food. They rarely listened to me as they convened weekly around our dining room table to vent frustration or laugh at jokes I never understood. They pinched my cheeks as only grown-ups did and often forgot my name though they seemed to have no trouble remembering the names of the other grown-ups in the room. They lived in grown- up houses and watched grown-up movies until their grown-up bedtimes. And the invisibility I sometimes felt was quickly remedied by my mother’s loving, grown-up hug, something I once yearned for and now value with all my heart.
Obvious milestones such as turning eighteen and transitioning into college life never really met my expectations of adulthood. After all, once at college, I ventured home every weekend to wash clothes and eat something besides Rice- A-Roni and frozen corn. And the independence of moving into my own apartment offered me little more than a new zip code, as my new front stoop was merely a short drive to the other side of town. Even my final escape to New York City in pursuit of a career in front of the camera proved to be more of a risky opportunity than an adult-worthy pursuit of a dream only my mom and dad believed possible. It hardly measured up since I visited home twice a month by train to seek advice from my ever-present parents and borrow their car.
And though I cried real tears on my wedding night, they weren’t the tears that sometimes stem from finishing the final chapter of childhood and launching a new attempt at maturity. It was all hormones. Pregnancy hormones. Though I had so happily married the man I loved, I had also feared a loss; A loss of myself. Nancy, the girl who once pushed her way through lines at NYC auditions, would soon push a stroller weighed down by three bags of groceries dangling from the handles, and she would carry them up three flights of stairs. It haunted me as my belly grew first like a melon, then a basketball, and then a house.
But as that something inside me continued to grow and grow, I didn’t know that an auspicious future was changing me from within. I didn’t know that I, the woman who made a living as a temp and who had money crumpled up in the back pocket of her Levi’s, was about to encounter an alteration of her child-like perspective on life.
I was 29 when I realized I had become a grown-up. It was a crisp night in November, the night when Samantha, my now 16-year-old daughter, wailed out her first of many tears before being comforted by my belly. She was swaddled in a pink and blue striped hospital blanket waiting for me to love her. The thing of it is, I was always so loved. I was loved by all the grown-ups in my life; my parents, my grandparents, my older cousins, my teachers, my neighbors, and though I loved them all with every fiber of my being, this love was different, even better. For the child, innocently bathed in my tears, was about to be handed the baton of life and learn by my example how to be loved and then how to love. And I was the one who, by virtue of this event, had been chosen as her teacher.
It has been a rough time in recent days. I've been fired as my daughter's teacher. I don't quite know how to fix it. I don't even know that I want to. It's easier to hide in my blog. It's easier to plan a trip to Italy and reminisce on my Italian roots. Aren't grown ups suppose to know how to fix these things? I'm supposed to think this and feel that and react this way and blah, blah, blah. But really, I just want to sit in my mom's lap and feel her love and find inspiration from her unending wisdom.
I’ve heard it said that growing up is a rite of passage, that with every wrinkle, grey hair and new responsibility, we earn that rite. I don’t remember ever wanting to grow up. I didn’t dream of a career or traveling the world or marriage or children. I was really very happy playing in my room with my toys, listening to my Peter and the Wolf record and anticipating upcoming barbecues or sleepovers. I was perfectly content being embraced by all the growing up that was happening around me. My only wish for the future was that love could be present. The rest, I later learned, would fall into place. It is only now that I am learning how to cultivate my own grown-up wisdom.
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