Our daughter is finishing up her junior year in high school and the other night she said to me (in a huff), “Ugh! I wish I was just an adult already!” She probably doesn’t believe this, but I vividly remember that feeling.
To be honest, I hated high school. Not every minute, but a large part of it. I had a few really good, close friends, but didn’t fit into any particular clique. I was in band for a while, did yearbook for one semester, “played” golf one season (I was never even in a match. All I managed to do was get hit upside the head with a seven iron during practice once.), but I never really latched onto one activity that made me feel like I belonged. What I loved to do most in high school was write, which is neither a sport nor a group activity, and so I ended up alone in front of my word processor (yes, Emma, this was before laptops) “talking” to characters in my stories.
My entire senior year probably consisted of one giant eye roll and huffy breath at my parents for their rules, their old fashioned ideas, their irritating need to know my whereabouts EVERY WAKING MINUTE. Geez. My dad referred to my mother and me as The Porcupines, because we’d prick one another if we got too close. I let them know whenever I could that I was SO READY to get out of there.
But what I didn’t realize, of course, was that was it. That was the end of my childhood. Once I entered college I had obligations and rules that ADULTS had. After graduation I didn’t lie across the foot of my parents’ bed and talk to them anymore. I didn’t watch TV in my pjs with them. In college--or worse, in my first house--I never heard my mom yell from their bedroom, “Charlie! Come to bed!” I had to pay my own bills and figure out my own menus for the week and do my own laundry and think about what in the world I was really going to DO with my life for the next sixty or seventy years. I had to grow up, which was what I wanted, but not really.
I hope Emma doesn’t spend her senior year that way. I hope she gets involved in some activities (she’s already done cheer, drama, robotics, and marching band, which is more than I EVER did) and has fun with her friends and lies across the foot of our bed to tell us stories. I hope she hangs out with her brother and sister (I didn’t have any to enjoy) and watches TV in her pjs and savors one more year without adulting. I hope she ENJOYS the end of her childhood, so that, when that door closes, she can sigh with contentment and a new purpose looking ahead. I wish I had. I feel like I slammed that door somewhere in my junior year, only to be stuck in a miserable hallway, waiting for the door to my REAL life--adulthood--to open. It was a very hard year, battling for my independence, and it was really quite a disappointment when I finally got it. All that arguing to be my own person, to make my own rules, to stay up as late as I wanted, and I find that I really just want to go to bed at 8 o’clock anyway.
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