Sometime in my late twenties I encountered the internet-concept of ‘adulting,’ and proceeded, as one does if one is me, to develop a small complex around it. I wanted to adult successfully, and the many ways I wasn’t, weighed on me. But I’m here, in this newsletter, to let you in on the good news: I shouldn’t have been so hard on myself, and you shouldn’t either.
First, a definition, for those fortunates among you who don’t spend too much time online. Adulting is, basically, code for acting like our received impression a functional adult. A functional adult balances their checkbook. A functional adult does laundry on a schedule, even for towels, and meal plans and meal preps and keeps a working shopping list, and grocery shops once for seven days at a stretch. A functional adult makes sure there’s always extra back-up toilet paper in the bathroom, and food in the freezer for those I don’t feel like cooking nights. A functional adult has a financial plan, pays their taxes in advance, and remembers where the band-aids are.
Adulting is a state of attainment, of advance preparation, of stability and routine. It’s the opposite of working through lunch until you’re about ready to pass out at 4pm, then eating anything that happens to be nearby. Get halfway through cooking dinner only to discover you don’t have the can of tomatoes you thought you did? Adulting fail. Frantically whirlwind-cleaning your apartment before the guests arrive? (Remember guests?) Staying up all night the night before a tax deadline trying to high-contrast scan some decayed receipts? Should have been a better adult. Adult felt like a mirage: an image created by a combination of my angle of view and the conditions of the atmosphere. Most adults I knew, that is, my adult peers, regularly failed to ‘adult’ in some way. I sure did!
And then I became a parent.
Now, look. Without going into too many details, parenting is wonderful, and it’s also a bit of a mess. There are fires everywhere. Hopefully, most of those fires are only metaphorical. There’s always something you could be doing that you’re not.
But after about a year, I stepped back and: huh. We take big shopping trips once a week, now, and write a master list for them—not because it’s virtuous to do so, but because stepping out for that can of tomatoes is, all of a sudden, a big deal. Someone has to mind the kid, and depending on your child care situation there might not be another someone available. Maybe you can bring the kid to the store, but then you’re getting out the stroller, maybe packing the diaper bag, and of course there’s COVID. Your turn radius expands dramatically. All of a sudden you’re playing Bowser in Mario Kart.
I found myself doing my taxes way in advance for the first time in my life, and not noticing or feeling particularly virtuous about it. I didn’t set out thinking that this would be the year—rather, there wasn’t enough flex in my schedule to accommodate a last-ditch desperate dash toward filing, so my choices were ‘early’ or ‘not at all.’ We started cleaning weekly, then every night—again, out of necessity. It’s the difference between a navigable house and a house caltropped with legos. We’re more of a planning family now, more logistical. Tight last-minute maneuvering becomes harder—almost impossible—so we recruit the present to help us with the future, like a less mobile joint in our body will seek mobility from other joints. As in the body, this isn’t a pain-free process. But it was the need that changed, not the norm, or the value we placed on adhering to the norm.
As I noticed more instances of this pattern, it occurred to me that there’s a selection bias at work in conversations about adulthood. Most people have only lived with and around a particular subset of adults, in modern (Western) society: their parents, and the parents of their friends. Because parents serve as our prominent models for day to day household maintenance adulthood, it’s an easy slip to think that parenting is just what adulthood looks like, and if your childfree existence doesn’t look like a parental lifestyle, you’re not doing adulthood right.
No, say I! Trying to live like a parent when you’re not one, now, seems a bit like… gearing up in full military kit for a visit to the Barnes and Noble. Sure, it might prepare you for ANYTHING, but practically it’s preparing you for way more than you’re likely to meet, and people might look at you funny in the parking lot. If hyper-prep is your thing, great—but I wish I could tell my younger self to chill out about this stuff. Life’s hard enough. Think about what you need, think about the life you want, and think about what systems get you there. Just like writing. Keep your eyes on your own paper.
I don’t mean to say ‘therefore making your bed in your 20s is for suckers’ or ‘don’t meal plan,’ or whatever. Most of the big difficult changes I’m describing, we made because we had to, but they have made our lives better in a host of ways small and large. They’ve also made our lives very different. It is, I think, good to take some responsibility for your own surroundings, at the level of bed, food, and so on, within reason, if nothing else as practice for taking on larger responsibilities—though obviously it’s harder for some people to do this than it is for others. But if you’re comparing yourself to a perfect image of adulthood (or any other aspect of your identity), and feel yourself falling short, and suffer as a result, it may be helpful to ask: is it possible that some aspect of particular standard is just not relevant to my needs and life situation? Is it possible I’ve formed it based on people whose operational demands are just plain different from mine?
Now, the bonus level, the one I’m working on: this is true of parenting too, I bet. That is, ‘good parenting’ may be the same sort of mirage. Start with your family’s needs, and their present pain, and figure out how to address those. But I can’t speak wisely to that at the moment, because I’m still living it, and it’s hard to figure out what we’re living while we’re living it. Which is, I guess, one of the many reasons we write.
Who knows: maybe you’ve all figured this out already and I’m just late to the party. But if you need to hear it, here it is. I don’t think you’re doing it wrong.