What Makes You Feel Like a Real Grown-Up? What Makes You Feel Like a Kid?
An open thread...
Readers,
Even in my late 50s, every single time I make lunch or dinner (so, five or six days a week) I feel VERY GROWN UP.
Perhaps it’s because I don’t have kids, so I never shifted into parenthood, an indisputable marker of adult maturity. Or maybe it’s a function of growing up a Gen X latchkey kid, who was praised as a “big girl” for fending for my little sister and me from the time I was 11—whipping up noodles and cottage cheese for us, or “garden” tuna salad with celery and carrots, or Weaver’s chicken from the freezer with toaster-oven-baked potatoes, while my single mom worked late or attended night classes for her master’s degree. Today, even when I’m making something simple, it gives me a marked feeling of adult pride.
On the flip side, when I’m drawing with crayons, I magically transform into a kid. Even though I don’t have any real drawing skills to speak of, I love to doodle and color. With a crayon in hand, time dissolves and I’m a little girl again, with my first box of Crayolas—the 64-color box with the sharpener in the back.
It’s amazing to me how in the same day, sometimes back-to-back, certain behaviors and activities can make me feel like a bona fide adult, while others can make me feel like a child. I’m curious about whether you all have similar experiences, so I figured I’d invite you to tell me about it here.
What behaviors and activities make you feel like a grown-up? What behaviors and activities make you feel like a kid? Tell me in the comments.
Every morning I get a similar feeling of being grown up when my husband Brian and I make our bed together. Before me, Brian wasn’t a bed-maker. I’ve been one since I was 6, and my mom told me, “When you make your bed, you have a good day.”
A well-behaved child, I started tending to this daily task back then, circa 1971, and I’ve never stopped. I got Brian on board, and now, every day between waking and coffee, together we dedicate 15 to 30 seconds to this ritual. We don’t go crazy—no hospital corners or anything fancy like that. But we bring neatness and order to the room, like a couple of capital A Adults. (We also repeat the same joke about how if we don’t smooth out that wrinkle, or tuck in that corner, we risk Architectural Digest stopping by and shaming us. 😂)
(Related: I enjoyed this post on
about the not insignificant triumph of making your bed when you’re new to recovery. It includes a great cartoon on the subject by , who illustrates all the posts on The Small Bow, plus the Ask a Sober Oldster series, a monthly collaboration.)In January I got to indulge my inner child artist for 30 days straight. I took part in artist
’s 30-Day Art Habit project through her wonderful newsletter, . Each day she posted a lesson, followed by a prompt, for which we were supposed to devote only 10 minutes—a safeguard against perfectionism.It was so much fun, I’m now planning to take part in Wendy’s weekly Grown Up’s Table program, with lessons and prompts offered on Sundays. Wendy and I are also talking about collaborating on a course of some kind for paid subscribers to Oldster, this spring or summer. Stay tuned!
Starting March 18th, I’m also treating my inner child artist to
’s six-week course, Comics for People Who Can’t Draw. I’m both excited and terrified.🖍🖍🖍
Anyway, back to the prompt for this open thread:
What behaviors and activities make you feel like a grown-up? What behaviors and activities make you feel like a kid? Tell me in the comments.
-Sari
When I was a preteen watching Dallas, I thought being an adult would mean having a huge collection of slinky, shorty robes. And I do!
I feel like a kid when I crack open a new notebook! That is, I feel like Harriet the Spy.
Waking up at 4:30am 3 days a week to move my body without judgment (yay past body image hang ups) makes me feel very Adult. Swinging on swings makes me feel like I’m nine years old again, about to jump out of the seat and fly…