Mosquitos Love Me This Time of Year

With but a short pause amidst the dedicated and methodical movements of packing away my belongings, I thought today about adulthood. Sorting bags full of smaller bags full of books full of words, I wondered about faulty pressures felt more than observed. You should be married already, you should be completely independent already, you should have a mortgage already, you should be climbing up that ladder of your career already, you should be mowing lawn and trimming shrubbery already. You should be wearing a tie to work already. But I was not living inside of these thoughts for they were that felt pressure carving out a voice for themselves. Instead, I was putting large gray bins full of books into the bed of my father's pickup truck and taking breaks to listen to WXPN play whatever folksy-roots songs they saw fit, lessening my thirst with iced tea straight from the jug. Instead of trimming hedges, I was washing clothes bought at Goodwill or stolen from my father's hamper.

I have been found myself pausing to consider adulthood because I don't think it really exists. Having moved from Boston, I have lost my favorite human observation facility--Common Ground's 80's night--my local Allston haunt. This weekend, however, I was blessed with the observation of my family at a barbecue. I saw people there who were not the gray-haired conversationalists of my childhood but something rather strange. I saw people who accepted this thing called adulthood because they believed it foisted upon them many years prior. But all the same interactions were there that seemed to have been there from their childhood. My mother, the facilitator, one uncle the instigator, one the speaker of presumed wisdom, one the constant clown, and a handful who were old in their minds before they were old in body. I've seen children act this same way and so I have a hard time believing that adulthood is some stable thing, some consistent state of being.

It appears to me that perhaps all of these pressures concerning adulthood are brought forth by an "ordering voice" that longs for nothing more than the hearing of its own pontifications which are little more than prevarications. Adulthood seems like the assumption of responsibility but when have I not needed to assume responsibility? When I didn't know things? How much has the last 5 years of my life proven that I know far less than I ever thought possible? Am I to be responsible for things I don't even know about yet prior to knowing them?

But then I see friends and acquaintances acting in a way that I can only call childish and I wonder about the other side of adulthood. Perhaps adulthood is that remarkable country where we can shoulder the wounds of childhood just a little bit better, where we can let things go. Knowing how nursing a grievance like an old wound can actually provide a place of stability, I doubt this is true. So I don't believe that adulthood exists. We just get better at being children.