#MicroblogMondays: I'm an adult now??

(Not exactly a "micro" post, but it's what I've got today!) 

In a post yesterday, Mel posed the question "When Did You Become an Adult?" She was thinking about this after reading a 2016 article from The Atlantic ("When Are You Really an Adult?"). 

My response (before I read the article): 

I’m an adult?? (lol)

I suppose I thought I was an adult when I turned 18 and was able to go to a bar and to an R-rated movie without an adult. (The first one was “Animal House” — I took my younger sister with me.) Spoiler alert: I was not. I had NO idea, lol. I think it’s a gradual process with lots of milestones along the way and (as I alluded above) some might say it’s an ongoing lifelong process. There’s all the traditional life milestone (heading off to university, getting our first job, getting married, buying a home…) but there are lots of other milestones along the way too (losing people we love, illnesses, achieving a longtime goal…).

I suppose some might say that you become an adult when you have a baby and take on the responsibility of raising a child. It’s certainly an issue that those of us who don’t have kids wrestle with. Our pronatalist society prompts some of us to question whether we’re “real” adults (or a “real” family) if we don’t have kids; some of us feel that others (parents) think that way about us. (Sometimes we certainly get treated that way — I’ve heard many stories about the single childless aunt who winds up at the kids’ table on family holidays or gets relegated to the couch while the grandkids get their old room to sleep in when everyone is together at Mom & Dad’s house…!) I may not have a (living) child, but I daresay I was as much an adult the day I held my stillborn daughter in my arms — and then handed her back to the nurse to be taken to the morgue — as any mother who took her baby home from the hospital. Or the day I made the decision to stop infertility treatments because they had taken such a toll on my mental health and general wellbeing.

I think I feel a post coming on.

I wrote my comment before I read The Atlantic article, which is pretty interesting and makes some of the same points I did (so I wasn't too far off the mark...!). Sample passage:  

...if you think of the transition to “adulthood” as a collection of markers—getting a job, moving away from your parents, getting married, and having kids—for most of history, with the exception of the 1950s and ’60s, people did not become adults any kind of predictable way.

And yet these are still the venerated markers of adulthood today, and when people take too long to acquire them, or eschew them all together, it becomes a reason to lament that no one is a grown-up. While bemoaning the habits and values of the youths is the eternal right of the olds, many young adults do still feel like kids trying on their parents’ shoes.

(Some (*cough!*) "older" adults too!) 

To my point about how others regard and treat us... this is very true for those of us who haven't been able to have the children we wanted: 

Many young people, Jensen Arnett says, still want these things—to establish careers, to get married, to have kids. (Or some combination thereof.) They just don’t see them as the defining traits of adulthood. Unfortunately, not all of society has caught up, and older generations may not recognize the young as adults without these markers. A big part of being an adult is people treating you like one, and taking on these roles can help you convince others—and yourself—that you’re responsible.

With adulthood as with life, people may often end up defining themselves by what they lack. In her 20s, Williams Brown, the author of Adulting, was focused mainly on her career, purposefully so. But she still found herself looking wistfully to her friends who were getting married and having kids. “It was still really hard to look at something that I did want, and do want, that other people had and I didn’t,” she says. “Even though I knew full well the reason I didn’t have that was due to my own decisions.”

A couple more excerpts on the "having kids = adult" theme:  

...It’s not that you can’t be an adult unless you have kids. But for people who do, it often seems to be that flip-the-switch moment. In Jensen Arnett’s original 1998 interviews, if people had children, “having a child was mentioned more often than any other criterion as a marker of their own transition,” he writes.

...If adulthood is, as Burrow says “the negotiation of feeling accountable and responsible with the other lens of people endorsing and validating that view,” having children is one thing that seems to both make you feel like an adult, and get other people to believe you are one. The twin forces of identity and purpose, he says, are “really important currency in our current society,” and while kids may certainly give you both, there are plenty of other ways to find them.

The article mentions taking care of aging parents as another marker of adulthood. I think that's true. I don't live near my parents, but certainly whenever we're there and I see how much they've aged since my last visit, I find myself feeling more protective of them -- role reversal!  I'm not sure if it's because my sister & I don't have kids ourselves -- to some extent, I think you're ALWAYS a kid to your parents, no matter how old you are! -- but I know my sister & I have talked about how our parents expect us to do certain things, and how we're not sure they realize that WE aren't as young as we used to be either...!   

...A close friend’s father said to me, “You never really grew up, did you?” I was shocked; I am 56, married, well-traveled with a masters degree and a stable career. What field did THAT comment come from? I wondered. I had to consider for quite a while before I understood his train of thought; I have never had children (by choice), therefore I must still be one myself. 

I disagree with his vision; I see myself as an adult. After all, my students are a fraction of my age, my marriage is rocky, my hair has begun to grey, and I pay all my own bills: ergo I am an adult. My knees hurt, I worry about retirement, my parents are elderly and frail, and I now drive when we go places together; therefore I must be an adult. 

(That sounds about right to me!)  

Worth reading! 

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Tangent:  Mel's post sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole on Sunday afternoon, lol.  When I read it, I immediately got the strains of a certain Can-rock song from the late 1980s running through my head, by an Edmonton band called The Pursuit of Happiness (TPOH). 

I'm not sure how much radio and video play "I'm An Adult Now" got outside of Canada, but (because of Canadian content regulations) it was a HUGE hit here. It's also a really catchy song (with a lot of humour in the lyrics -- see below!), lol -- and a rather iconic video too (shot on Queen Street in a rather grungy-looking late 1980s Toronto, for next to no money). (I wanted to embed it here, but the choices Blogger was giving me didn't have very good sound quality, so please use this link & watch!) 

I had the album/cassette it came from, "Love Junk" (now Older Nephew's), and a remastered 30th anniversary edition was issued a couple of years ago. (Here's a glowing review, republished in 2019.) Moe Berg, the lead singer/guitarist/songwriter (now a record producer) did a lot of publicity to promote it then, and I found a couple of interesting interviews (like this one, and this one), in which he reflects on writing (and still singing) a song called "I'm an Adult Now" (also another one from the album, "She's So Young" -- "She's so young, she's got the answer/She doesn't need to question her life like I do...") in his 20s, now that he's in his 60s (he just turned 63 in March). :)   

I also found a great blog post from 2017 about the song, written by a former DJ, which is also in keeping with the question being posed here:    

Fast forward to actually being an adult now.  I often hear my own students talking about the struggles of “adulting” (I like to tell them that the first part of becoming an adult is not calling it adulting, and I get eye rolls). To them, it’s things like looking for work, finding a mechanic, dealing with student loans, etc.  To us – if this song is to be used as our cultural artifact – it was drinking, dating, complaining about back pain, and noticing that the music got a little loud for our taste. I think we had it easier.

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here. 

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Here are the lyrics to "I'm An Adult Now": 

Well, I don't hate my parents

I don't get drunk just to spite them

I've got my own reasons to drink now

I think I'll call my dad up and invite him

I can sleep in till noon anytime I want

Though there's not many days that I do

Gotta get up and take on that world

When your an adult it's no cliche it's the truth

'Cause I'm an adult now

I'm an adult now

I've got the problems of an adult

On my head and on my shoulders

I'm an adult now

I can't even look at young girls anymore

People will think I'm some kind of pervert

Adult sex is either boring or dirty

Young people they can get away with murder

I don't write songs about girls anymore

I have to write songs about women

No more boy meets girl boy loses girl

More like man tries to understand what the hell went wrong

'Cause I'm an adult now

I'm an adult now

I've got the problems of an adult

On my head and on my shoulders

I'm an adult now

I'm an adult now

I'm an adult now

I can't take any more illicit drugs

I can't afford any artificial joy

I'd sure look like a fool dead in a ditch somewhere

With a mind full of chemicals

Like some cheese-eating high school boy

'Cause I'm an adult now

I'm an adult now

I've got the problems of an adult

On my head and on my shoulders

I'm an adult now

Sometimes my head hurts and sometimes my stomach hurts

And I guess it won't be long

'Fore I'm sitting in a room with a bunch

Of people whose necks and backs are aching

Whose sight and hearing's fading

Who just can't seem to get it up

Speaking of hearing, I can't take too much loud music

I mean I like to play it, but I sure don't like the racket

Noise, but I can't hear anything

Just guitars screaming, screaming, screaming

Some guy screaming in a leather jacket

Woah!

I'm an adult now

I'm an adult now

I've got the problems of an adult

On my head and on my shoulders

I'm an adult now

I'm an adult now

I'm an adult now

I've got the problems of an adult

On my head and on my shoulders

I'm an adult now

I'm an adult now

I'm an adult now

I'm an adult now