#adulting

Remember when you were a kid and the thing you wanted most in the world was to be a grown-up so that you could do whatever you wanted and not have to clean your room or eat your vegetables or do your homework? Remember how great Little You thought that would be? You could make your own rules. You could stay up late and watch as much TV as you wanted and eat cereal for every meal!

Remember how every adult you met seemed to have their lives together? They could do anything. They could fix door hinges and change the oil in their car and go up on the roof to retrieve your ball that got stuck up there without anyone shouting at them to get down before they broke their neck. They had really long conversations on the phone and with other impressive-looking adults about things that made absolutely zero sense to Little You at the time but sounded really mature and important.

Little You was adorable.

Oh, Little You. So young. So impressionable. So, so, SO WRONG.

This adulting lark is pure and unadulterated bullshit. Most of the time I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing at all. Oh, I can pretend just fine, but the eight-year-old who lives inside of me is in constant freak-out mode.

Shit, I have to pay property taxes this month.

Shit, the car needs to be serviced.

Shit, the autopay on the electric bill didn’t go through for some stupid reason, WTF?

And it’s not just financial stuff, it’s everything.

Did I remember to close the bedroom window before I left?

How many more days’ worth of that prescription do I have, and do I need to order it this week or can it wait?

It’s unfair. As we age, our memories go to hell in a handbasket, and the number of things we need to remember increases exponentially. Our health starts to flag. We can’t digest the things we used to. We get winded going up the stairs. Places we didn’t even know we had start to ache. Oh, and hangovers become a real son of a bitch.

Another joy of adulthood is figuring out what’s going to happen to your stuff when you finally shuffle off your mortal whatsit. And before that, you have to deal with your parent’s stuff. I was on Skype with my parents Monday night having a discussion about the shuffling of funds in the event of the inevitable — for any and all of the three of us. I found myself saying things like, “Wait, wait, wait — what’s the yield on the dividends of these investments if we sell the third property versus what it’s bringing in currently as a rental? What are the tax implications if we do one over the other? Can I see the numbers on this so I can do a side-by-side comparison? Not that I don’t trust the guys at Merrill Lynch, necessarily, but I’d still like to see the last ten years of movement on these stocks.”

I’m sitting on my sofa and these words are coming out of my mouth and somewhere inside my brain my inner eight-year-old is jumping up and down screaming, “Where did you learn this stuff? Do you even know what you’re saying?!” The weird thing is that I do. I just don’t feel like I do. There’s a thing called ‘Impostor Syndrome’ which is believed to be suffered by most people at least once in their lives. Put succinctly, it is the fear that even though you do know something, you actually don’t, and someone is going to call you out on it. That’s what my inner eight-year-old was doing to me last night as my parents and I hashed out the potential future of our financial entanglements.

The thing is, I do know things. I can do things. I just have this constant nagging doubt following me around that still makes me want a ‘real grown-up’ when I’m up against something unfamiliar. Like, you know, taxes and stuff. Which is why I have a tax person now. And in my opinion, she’s at least sixteen times the adult I am.

Which makes me wonder what her inner eight-year-old is whispering in her ear?

So, yes, I get to set my own bedtime and dictate my own diet and slack off as much as I want, but it’s not nearly as easy as Little Me thought. There’s too much other shit to do.

Adults have to adult, whether or not they think they’re doing it right.

And sometimes, that means having detailed conversations about estate planning that include exchanges like:

“So, if we don’t set up the secondary trust and your mom just amends her will to include the third property as a line item — which means it still goes straight to you — and she predeceases me, and I somehow become destitute, would you let me have the monthly dividends on it?”

“I dunno, Dad. Are you gonna be a dick about it?” ::Mom cackles insanely:: “I’m sure we can come to some sort of agreement.”