Look, over there. The grass is greener
Once upon a time adulthood couldn’t come fast enough – no one to say ‘eat your spuds’, ‘it’s time for bed’. Suiting yourself – short skirts, makeup, joining CND, choosing when you wake up. Now I live among the grown ups all the time. I’ve joined their gang. I’ve qualified. You might imagine it’s all picking and choosing, expressing myself. Cool and creative – driving my personal bus along my individual highway. Well you’d be wrong. From this side of the fence, being a grown up is rubbish, proper stinky, sticky, smells of shit rubbish not the nice clean crumpled paper sort. Don’t be fooled into thinking that earning your own money and deciding to eat chocolate and bacon for supper at the signs you’re an adult. Neither is being able to gamble, access porn or get a tattoo. Having sex, drinking gin and driving a car don’t define an adult even though they are quite fun.
- Grown ups put other people first. And not in that slightly gratifying ‘look how big I’m being about this’ way either. They just sigh and put their plans back in the mental filing cabinet.
- Grown ups get to stay up all night with children, babies and worry. It used to be a badge of honour, now it just gives you bags.
- Grown ups suddenly realize they are too old for the night
clubs they can finally afford.
- Grown ups are the ones who end up doing all the stuff that
other people don’t want to.
- Grown ups fill precious space in their heads with meal
plans, after-school activity rotas and fictitious conversations with teachers.
- Grown ups can buy party dresses but then find they haven’t
got anywhere to wear them.
- Grown ups have loads of booze (look the cupboard is full of bottles),
but they don’t drink it because they know it’ll make the morning feel horrible.
- Grown ups find themselves crying when they read the news.
- Grown ups have all the gadgets and apps they need to access
every single song they could ever want to listen to, only they can’t remember
who it was that had that hit, you know the one, with the chorus.
- Grown ups know they have to be patient and kind when they
understand someone is upset – though they’d rather not.
- Grown ups have to bother with stuff that come in the boring
white envelopes.
- Grown ups have to go to funerals when they’d rather be
anywhere else.
- Grown ups aren’t boring because they want to be.
- Grown ups know time is precious but they can’t help wasting it forgetting what they came upstairs for.
