Apparently I'm an adult now

More than a year ago, I posted a status on facebook that was something along the lines of "I wonder when I'll feel like an adult...?". The responses, while varying a little, basically came down to the same thing, "uh, why would you want to feel like an adult???!!".

This confused me. See, to me, being an adult meant feeling confident. Knowing what I wanted. Being certain about who and what I wanted to be when I grew up. It meant being patient and nonjudgemental. Being "adult" was something I looked forward to being.

I kept expecting it to come as I hit different milestones and junctures in my life. When I graduated from college. When I got married. When I got a "real" job. When we bought a house. When we started trying to get pregnant. When we found out about the infertility and started treatments. When we stopped treatments and went through the whole adoption process. When I went to and graduated from graduate school. When I became a momma, twice over.

I kept waiting to feel like an adult. But it never came. I continued to feel uncertain. About a lot. And for sure didn't get any more patient.

The last week or so has given me a sense of clarity about what everyone was trying to tell me. And they're right. Feeling like an adult sucks.

Being an adult doesn't mean feeling certain. It's talking to your husband about the casket he has to pick out for his mother. And holding your father-in-law's shaking hand has he follows his wife's casket out of the church on the way to the cemetery. It's trying to explain to your 5 year old why his Oma can't come back from heaven.

Instead of making me feel more certain, these things make me even less so. I feel more at a loss and the only thing I feel more certain about is that I much prefer to go back to a time when I didn't feel like an adult.

I promise to return to more jovial posts soon. Or at least my more typical rants on random subjects. I just had to process some of this somewhere. And this seemed as good a spot as any.

Today's lesson is an oldie but a goodie (and obviously not one I coined) - be careful what you ask for as you just might get it.