At some point, without anyone asking my permission, I became an adult.
Imagine one day you’re a kid. You don’t owe the world anything. You look to others for guidance, and they provide it. Completely carefree.
And then you wake up in your thirties, and suddenly you are the adultier-adult others look to for guidance.
It’s a harsh reality sometimes when you look like an adult but don’t feel like an adult. Sometimes, I actually feel completely disconnected from myself because my mind says I should not be responsible for so many things. Then I look in a mirror and realize, nope. I’m definitely the adult.
I’m sitting here with four kids, happily married, and I have a big girl job. I drink coffee like it’s going out of style. I have a mortgage, bills, decisions to make, appointments to remember…
Apparently, that makes me responsible.
And nobody really tells you when it happens.
There isn’t a ceremony. No one hands you a certificate that says, “Congratulations! You are now responsible for literally everything.”
You just slowly accumulate responsibilities until one day you realize that if something goes wrong, people are looking at you.
Your kids have a question? You’re the answer.
Someone needs an appointment scheduled? Probably you.
There’s a bill that needs paid? You know where this is going.
Dinner needs to happen? Somehow, that’s also your problem.
And the weirdest part is that nobody asks whether you actually feel qualified.
Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember ever waking up and thinking, “Yes. I am fully prepared to be the person other people depend on.”
I still have moments where I want to call my mom and ask her what I’m supposed to do.
Sometimes I do.
Because apparently becoming an adult doesn’t actually make you stop needing your own adults.
I think that’s one of the strangest parts of growing up. When you’re a kid, you assume adults know what they’re doing. They seem so confident. They make decisions. They know where things are. They know what to do when you’re sick, what to do when something breaks, what to do when you’re scared.
Then you become one.
And you realize they were probably just winging it too.
Maybe that’s adulthood.
Maybe nobody ever actually feels like they have it figured out. Maybe we’re all just making decisions with the information we have, hoping we’re getting more right than wrong.
And maybe that’s okay.
Because somewhere along the way, I stopped waiting to feel like an adult and realized that apparently this is just what being one looks like.
You can be responsible and still be confused.
You can love your life and still occasionally wonder what the hell you’re doing.
You can be grateful for your family and still need five minutes alone in the bathroom.
You can have a career, a mortgage, children, a marriage, and a calendar full of appointments and still feel like the sixteen-year-old version of yourself is somewhere inside wondering when the actual adults are going to show up.
Except…
They already did.
It’s me.
Which feels like a questionable decision on someone’s part.
So here I am.
I don’t have a master plan. I don’t have all the answers. I’m not particularly interested in pretending that I do.
I just have a life that is somehow very full, occasionally ridiculous, sometimes incredibly hard, and almost always moving faster than I am.
And I have a feeling I’m not the only one who feels this way.
So I might as well write about it.
The funny stuff. The hard stuff. The things we don’t say out loud. The things that make us laugh when we’re probably supposed to be taking life more seriously.
Because apparently, I’m responsible.
I might as well write about what happens next.
Welcome to my shitshow.
Because somehow, I’m responsible.
Somehow, I’m Responsible 