All Grown Up

“Maybe when the grandkids came,” my father-in-law ventured.

Now if that’s the response of my uber-responsible, mature, and wise father-in-law, there’s little hope for me, who writes a column so I can do fun stuff and get away with it because “I’m working on an article.”

Another word for my ostrich approach to reality, sanctified by my generation, is “adulting.” As an English teacher, I’m not getting into the validity of the word adulting; I’m just accepting it as a universally colloquial millennial expression.

I think I do a decent job adulting; I still have my job, and social services hasn’t taken my kids. Apparently, though, it’s a really hard thing to accomplish these days, with people proudly posting on their statuses how much they’ve adulted that day (seriously, you get credit for eating a vegetable), and waiting for the effusive responses of their peers on how awesome and big and adult-like they are and that they aspire to adult (new verb) as well as they do one day. There are even official “adulting courses,” offering classes to help you transition into real life — I can’t imagine how people have done it until now.