The Scintilla Project: Day Two

The prompt: When did you realise you were a grown up? What did this mean for you? Shock to the system? Mourning of halcyon younger days? Or the embracing of the knowledge that you can do all the cool stuff adults do: drink wine, go on parent-free vacations, eat chocolate without reprimand? 

The short of it--I'm not grown yet. I'm thirty-eight, and if the powers that be wouldn't spare me this earthly existence in the throes of past years' miseries, that Bitch--capitalized with all due reverence-- had better let me live long enough to make sense of it all.

The long of it--depending when asked, I'll dig deep into my mental crates and offer you a tale or twelve of victory and some defeat, starring me, in what sometimes looks a lot like a -- neck roll, eye roll, pursed-lips-- grown ass woman, but one can never be too certain.

Was it my wedding day? I was eighteen years and a whole fourteen long summer days old. Mayhaps...

It could have been the twenty eight hours of grueling anything-but-natural, natural childbirth. Or, the time spent thereafter in NICU deciphering medical jargon whilst my painfully engorged breasts leak and my child lay cyanotic. Maybe it was when I finally got to bring him home...or, last December when he left home.   

Maybe, it came in the subtle silence of the formative years, his and mine and ours, when we were three. Or was it amidst the storm when I fled, or when he fled, or when I fled again? No umbrella, no coat.

 

Perhaps, I clenched the moment like a baton? Twenty-four and relaying back and forth between two lives, two loves: the one that felt right and the one that was right. Then again, I just knew I felt a certain tinge of something when I committed...recommitted, to the latter. Sacrifice, take one for the "team", isn't that what grown-ups do?

Did I lay my claim to adulthood at 26; one last push and bellow, the birth of child number two. Or is it in my admirable resistance to push back when she pushes my buttons; vitriol spewing from pink, angry, pubescent rage-filled lips?  

The moments when it all falls apart are as relevant on the journey as when it all comes together. Maybe it's all of these things collectively, and maybe it's none at all. Growing... grown...I just want to hold on long enough to make sense of it all.