What Adults Do
Adults have houses. Adults have children. Adults have car payments and lawns to cut. They have clothes to buy for the kids and gas to put in the car.
Does having kids and houses and cars make you an adult? No, but kids and houses and car payments quickly separate the adults from the non-adults. You can usually tell which parents aren’t adults by the way their kids act. If the kids are unruly and rude and obnoxious, I’d say the chances are much higher that the parents aren’t much more than adolescents themselves. If the front lawn is up to the windows and the inside looks like crap, the chances are much higher that the folks inside aren’t adults. They’ve never acquired adult habits.
My parents I’d consider to be adults. My father worked an honest job for 40+ years to put food on the table and pay the mortgage and put clothes on my back. My mom worked as well to pay for the things we needed and to raise our standard of living. The grass got cut. The inside of the house stayed tidy.
My parents have adult habits and in many ways I do not.
I spent 5 years of college building those non-adult habits. It’s the essence of college. Freedom for the first time! No need to go to bed at a specific hour. No one telling you what to do! Complete freedom! I continued and refined those habits in 2 years of graduate school. Many of them I continue to this day.
My parents never had the luxury of having the same habits that I’ve developed. (See above, re: 40+ years on the job, etc.) When you have to pay the mortgage and put food on the table “not working and letting days slip by” isn’t an option. I’m not saying that they’re perfect. I’m not saying that I’d want the type of life that they’ve made for themselves, and I’m also not suggesting that by not wanting that type of life that I think it’s less than admirable in any way.
The only thing that I’m saying is that my parents have adult habits and that in many ways I still don’t want to see myself as an adult. (To this day I have a phobia of dealing with the parents of my students because in some way I see them as adults that could rebuke me, rather than as equals.)
I need the type of habits that helped my father work a job 40+ years. It’s not that I want a “job”. What I want is to take the time he spent working at his “job”, instead investing in my own projects and my own creativity. I want to apply the type of adult habits that my parents have used to create a reasonably stable life for themselves in retirement towards creating the life of my dreams.