New mum Emma Clifton asks the age-old question – when does feeling like a fully-fledged adult FINALLY happen and when will I feel like a grown up?
In early 2004, I was sitting with Poppa, my only living grandparent, and I asked him how old he felt. At age 85, Poppa had lived a life that included three children, fighting in World War II, working in social welfare for decades and wearing a sensible hat, shirt and jacket every day, even when he was just sitting inside his own lounge. At the time, he was mourning the loss of my Nana, his wife of over 50 years, and, little did we know, was in the final months of his own battle with heart failure. He was as grown-up as a grown-up gets, or so I thought.
He thought for a moment. “12?”
I have been thinking a lot about this in the past few months, as I am now a parent and I had always assumed that becoming a mother would help me effortlessly shift, emotionally and logistically, into Adult Woman World. This has not happened. In fact, parenthood has so far been my husband and I thinking, ‘Who the hell is in charge here?!’ and then realising, ‘Ah sh-t, it’s us.’
When will I feel like a grown up?
When I take my hulking great four-month-old out for walks around the neighbourhood, there is always some part of me that is waiting for kind strangers to say a) ‘Look how beautiful this baby is’ (an undeniable fact) and b) ‘Gosh, aren’t you young to have a baby?’
Tragically, the latter has never happened because I am 38 years old and the ‘young mum’ ship has sailed so long ago, it is now docked somewhere unreachable. I may not feel like a grown-up, but I definitely look like one. Besides, having a baby and then literally carrying a baby makes me feel old as the damn hills (My back! My shoulders!). But while my spinal column feels like it is made out of crumbling plaster, I am afraid to report that I do not feel a second more mature than I did before I had a baby.
Parenthood has so far been my husband and I thinking, ‘Who the hell is in charge here?!’ and then realising, ‘Ah sh-t, it’s us.’
Emma Clifton after asking, ‘when will I feel like a grown up?’
Sure, I make appointments with the paediatrician and I talk to La Leche consultants and I attempt to fill out a mortgage form, but I also think about dressing my baby up as a plum pudding for Christmas and debate buying the pink Birkenstocks from the Barbie movie. Despite the fact that I have outlived both Princess Diana AND Jesus, I keep waiting for the adult gene to kick in, to stop feeling like I’m playing pretend.
But what if it’s never coming? What if most of imposter syndrome is rooted in the fact that all of us feel like overgrown kids, stumbling through life; albeit overgrown kids with every-increasing health insurance premiums and rogue hairs that grow out of our chin?
The fuzzy pink explosion of the Barbie movie and the fact that it has brought in literally one billion dollars in under a month seems to indicate this. The very famous speech made by America Ferrera’s character – I don’t need to quote it here, because you’ll have seen 75 posts about it on Instagram just this morning – speaks partly to this phenomenon. It is hard to be an adult woman, in a world that still doesn’t quite know what to do with you, but as the movie also points out, it’s hard to be an adult man as well, particularly when you thought the patriarchy was one thing (horses) but it’s actually more about crushing responsibility and power dynamics.
Are we all, gender aside, just looking for a break from our adult cos-playing, from endlessly unloading the dishwasher and putting out the bins on a Thursday night?
You look at the photos of the tens of thousands of people going to Barbie screenings or attending the world-conquering Taylor Swift and Beyoncé tours, decked out in glitter, neon and sequins, and tell me that people haven’t been waiting for an opportunity to play dress-up. What is Instagram, or TikTok, than grown-up show and tell? ‘Here is the book I read, here is what I did on the weekend’, only instead of breathlessly telling our school class, we’re now shouting it into the void? Would we all be a little less lonely if we took off our adult masks and let our weird inner kid have their turn in the sun? Is the idea of ‘treat culture’, of buying yourself a little something each week, just our own gold star system? Only now instead of being bribed to eat our vegetables, we’re now rewarding ourselves for surviving another week of adult life.
Maybe the mantle of adulthood will hit me in the next few years but, as Alice has written here, 40 means a whole lot of different things these days. And then there’s endless chat about how 60 is the new 40, and 50 is the new 30, and so on and so on. Or maybe, if I’m really lucky, I might get to the stage of my grandfather, sitting in his favourite chair, circling back to his younger, easier years, never forgetting that underneath our sensible hats, we really are just 12 years old.
