Z’s bride-approved shoes finally arrived in the mail, and she sent me a picture of herself in full bridesmaid: pastel-colored strapless dress and off-white, open-toed low-heeled pumps. I haven’t been in a wedding since my brief turn as a flower girl in the early ’90s, and, unlike Z, no one I’m especially close to is getting married soon. Many of my friends are single; none are engaged. But a handful of people—a guy who had a crush on me in middle school; my best friend in the ninth grade—people I’ve lost touch with, are, at least according to facebook, getting married, having children, generally being, you know, adults.
When I was living in Texas, there was one old friend in particular whose facebook wall I would force myself to read. She had just gotten married, and she would post giddy updates about packing her husband’s lunches, working out with him, cooking dinner, cleaning the house. I had two roommates and none of us had signed a lease on the house we were living in; I could barely bring myself to make more than ramen for dinner most nights. Many of my failures as a teacher felt directly tied to the fact that I was only pretending to be a mature adult, an authority figure. The inadequacy reading about her busy days produced, felt like a kind of penance.
But the sense of failure was tinged with relief as well; there was something depressing about the posts too. The ecstatic cataloging of the mundane—was that all there was to look forward to if I ever managed to make it to actual adulthood? Was the reward for growing up the ability to be satisfied paying bills and buying furniture and planning out a week’s worth of sandwiches?
This weekend was a fairly productive one. On Saturday I did several weeks worth of laundry and cleaned my bedroom. I gathered some books together to sell, and threw out old receipts and organized my bedside table. Today I sold old clothes and bought a dress that’s almost certainly work appropriate. I picked up groceries and toilet paper. I dropped off dry cleaning. I responded to emails. I almost went to see a movie alone—both to prove to myself that I could, and because of the promise of air conditioning—but decided not to because it seemed, ultimately, like a waste of money. And, as Sunday afternoon turns into Sunday evening, I feel, on the whole, satisfied with how I spent my two work-free days.
It’s not that I’m more grown-up now. Certainly my life doesn’t look more adult: I still haven’t signed a lease; I don’t own any furniture; my mother still pays for my cell phone bill each month. But I’ve come around to the fact that a lot of adult life is taking care of the things that have to be taken care of: buying laundry detergent; frying an egg; taking out the trash.
I’m not so unconventional a person. I might wish to be a freelancer who travels the world writing articles on spec, but it’s not as if I’m actually going to quit my job and buy a plane ticket. And I don’t know if that’s good or bad or neutral—that a lot of my waking “free” time is going to be spent doing the things we do to keep ourselves alive and comfortable. It just is.
