Photo: Valerii Panasiuk (Shutterstock)
Not long ago, my wife and I hosted a small party. It was lovely. Everyone had a nice time. The food was delicious. Nothing was broken.
The next morning, we were pleasantly surprised that our house was still clean, so we went grocery shopping. On the way home from the store, we were discussing legal marijuana, and how weed is now so potent, you can get extremely high without really trying to. What ever happened to just being a little stoned, am I right?
When we tried to put the groceries away, we realized our guests had brought so much beer and wine (and consumed so little) that we didn’t have room for all the food we bought.
“Ugh. This is the worst,” I said. “All the weed from the weed store is too strong, and there’s so much booze in the fridge, I can’t fit in all this food!”
This is when I realized I was an adult.
Tell us your coming-of-age stories
What about you? I’m interested in hearing what lead up to the realization that you aren’t a kid anymore. I’m not talking about “official” coming-of-age rituals like your Bar Mitzvah or Rumspringa. I mean that invisible milestone, the moment where it actually sank in that you are not a child anymore, and you’re not a teenager, a post-adolescent, or a Millennial either, but instead, you somehow became a full-fledged, fiber-eating, worried-about-your-401(k), grown-ass adult.
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Maybe it was the first time you hid the fact that you were smoking a cigarette from your child? Or the first time you were genuinely excited to try out a new recipe? Maybe when you realized your parents were right about a lot of things?
Or maybe you’re not there yet. Maybe you’re resisting the siren song of shoe inserts for your plantar fasciitis and mid-price SUVs that get good gas mileage and have an excellent safety rating. What are your strategies for staving off the seemingly inevitable?
Either way: Fill our comment section with these stories that we all might commiserate and reflect upon the joy and horror of adulthood.