Remember when you were a kid and there were all these awesome things you were planning on doing when you were grown up? Like stay up late. Or eat whatever you wanted.
I was the third child, which meant I had an earlier bedtime than my two older siblings. I thought this was grossly unfair and spent many a bedtime fuming at the injustice and thinking things along the lines of, "Just wait until I'm grown up! I'm going to stay up REALLY LATE."
Yeah. Here I am, grown up, and all I want to do is go to bed at 8 p.m.
When A. was a kid, he remembers always wanting to get mozzarella sticks as an appetizer at restaurants. He was never allowed to, and he vowed that when he was grown up, he would order mozzarella sticks.
One week, when he had a trial and was eating very hurried lunches at a restaurant near the courthouse in the Small City every day, he ate mozzarella sticks every day. For a week. Those sticks of fried cheese, in addition to a Pepsi, were his lunch. He was a grown up! He had arrived!
He also got pretty sick of mozzarella sticks. I don't think he's had them since.
Today was a classic example of Grown-up Suckage: A. did the taxes. I painted the bathroom ceiling while the kids were napping. It was nothing at all like the exciting dreams of adulthood we cherished as children.
Then again, I am now free to eat an entire chocolate bunny in one sitting, a privilege not yet afforded to my three-year-old, so there is that.
What do you remember thinking would be the most awesome thing about being an adult?
9 comments:
i don't know what the most awesome thing is, but i know that every time i go to the town clerk to pay my taxes, i feel wonderfully, exotically grown-up.
Being able to go somewhere without telling my parents where I was going.
It felt really weird the first few times we went somewhere after getting married and didn't call mom and dad to tell them where I was going and who I would be with.
Beth
Can't really remember; seems as though I've never been anything else but an adult. Don't know if that's good or bad, just the way it is with long term memory.
I also can't remember if I had any all consuming wants as a kid.
Wait. No. Scratch that. I didn't grow up with junk food. So I desired for years to eat twinkies unfettered by my botanist mother's pesky health regulations.
I bought a box with my first paycheck at age 15. Ate them all. Bought another box and have periodically bought twinkies in the years since. But I'm pretty granola now and don't eat that stuff anymore. *irony*
Oh, but the feeling of buying a box of twinkies with my own money. It felt amazing. For such a simple little thing.
Dammit. Now I want a twinkie. GMO be damned.
I thought it would be awesome to have no one tell me what to do. Ever.
One time, I think it was my first final exam in grad school, I decided to indulge in McDonald's for breakfast AND lunch that day to alleviate the stress. I was an adult, so I could. And my mouth felt so greasy and yucky, I never did it again.
I also remember yelling at my mom that I was going to find a job where I could wear jeans to work and she yelled back that those jobs didn't exist. And then the dot coms happened. Neener.
Going food shopping and buying whatever the hell I wanted.
Marcy in Pittsburgh
I wanted fast food for lunch instead of the "hamburgers" that my mom would make instead because "we have food at home and you're not eating that crap".
Yeah. I see her point.
Also, sugar cereal, soda and delivery pizza. We lived too far out in the country for anyone to deliver to us, so my mom would get that lame "Take and Bake" crap that was never as good. And we could have juice, water or milk with it which is nowhere near as fabulous as a Coke Classic.
MARCY! I hear that, girl. I used to make fantasy grocery lists. Did I know how to live or WHAT?!
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