Adulting
A Six Grader or your Amway upline? We may never know.
I am not a fan of the word “adulting” for several reasons. First, “adult” is a noun and to add -ing to it to make a present participle is annoying. Second, it is a whiny present participle. The memes and comments associated with “adulting” take first world problems, like paying bills, going to work, doing your laundry, and make them seem like catastrophes. Finally, not wanting to “adult” seems to imply there is some alternative, such as “minoring” or “childing,” and I don’t get why anyone would want to do this either.
Sure, childhood is a time of fewer responsibilities, but it is also a time fraught with emotional turmoil and lack of control. Other than being institutionalized, I can think of no other situation in life in which almost all decisions are made for you. We are having spaghetti for dinner. We are going to the movies. You are going to bed. You cannot watch TV past 10pm. Or whatever your parents’ rules were. Sure you may be given options, but they are limited and qualified. Do you want to watch this movie or that movie? No, the movie you want to watch is not a choice. Do you want to have creamy or chunky peanut butter? Almond butter is not on the table.
You are also trapped, quite literally. Without a car, where will you go, other than where you can walk or possibly ride a bike? Sesame Street was alluring to me for the simple reason that people could walk outside of their homes and see other people who cared about them. This seemed like so much more freedom than my country upbringing afforded. At best, I could go to the subdivision that abutted our property to ride my bike, but there was really no one to play with there and certainly no giant invisible mastodons.
School was a second layer of this tyranny. You had to go every day and do whatever they wanted you to do, which often seemed strange or boring. We spent an inordinate amount of time in elementary school watching reel to reel films about the dangers of drugs, drinking and driving, and smoking, that honestly only made me want to do drugs, drink, and then drive while smoking. I did, in fact, manage to do this as an adult, so I suppose their plan worked.
Some things made sense, like reading books and learning about history. Some things didn’t, like square dancing and dodgeball.
One thing I hated more than anything else was the science fair. I am not a science minded person. I do not like math and I am not curious about how things work. I will read a book and write a report for you, no problem, but I do not want to learn about rocks or stars or chemical processes.
So I wasn’t excited about the science fair. Suggestions were made, none of which appealed to me and I found myself somewhat panic stricken at the thought of having to perform science and then present it to adults and my fellow classmates. This, honestly, seemed more like “adulting” than something a sixth grader should be doing.
After my initial panic wore off, and with no conscious thought of the choice I made, I decided to do a study involving how well a sober mouse could run a maze vs a drunk mouse. My father had stopped hiding his drinking by this time and was drinking at home, and I’m not sure why my parents didn’t question my research decision, but they didn’t. My father even helped build the maze and bought the beer. I’m not sure who procured the mouse or if it even was a mouse. It’s possible it was a gerbil. At any rate, I’ve always hated rodents, so I can’t imagine this project had to do with anything except my father’s alcoholism. It certainly could not have been curiosity about the potential outcomes. Of course the mouse was not going to get through the maze better drunk than sober. This was not a science project. This was some sort of bizarre cry for help.
So it came to pass that the maze was built entirely by a friend of my father’s. Although I was excited to build it, my father did not want me near power tools. This paled in comparison to the disappointment I had felt a few years earlier, when, eager to go sell Girl Scout cookies door to door, my father asked me how much they all were, and then gave me the cash, saying there was no way in hell I was going to some house to get abducted.
The rodent was also procured, although I cannot remember how, and it did its first test run through the maze. This did not go well, as it had not occurred to me, nor to the maze builder, that the rodent would be able to simply climb over the walls and out of the maze. My father fixed this by putting a screen on top of the maze. The poor animal walked around the maze with no idea what was happening. It never did find its way to the end. We tried multiple times, but even with the lure of cheese at the end, the mouse thing would just try to chew its way through the screen rather than brave the maze. I would have a similar experience at a corn maze in my twenties and I also think there is an overarching life lesson here somewhere, but I digress.
At this time in my family’s life, my father was very into power boating. In fact, this might have been one of the last years he owned a large boat. He had started out years earlier with a 30ish foot Chris Craft and worked it way up to an almost 60 ft Hatteras. My mother and I would spend whole summers on the lake while my father came on the weekends after work. For some reason during the science fair preparation time, we went and spent a weekend or longer on the boat. This was unusual during the school year, but it must have been warm. We left the rodent and headed to the lake.
I still had work to do, though. I had gotten my mother to buy me a poster board and some markers. This was more difficult than it sounds, as either my brothers had never needed these things or my mother was honestly confused about what they were and where to purchase them. Whenever we were asked to get supplies, I always panicked, wondering if I would be able to obtain them. The other kids’ moms always seemed to know just where to find contact paper, but mine did not.
Setting to work on the poster board, I attempted to spell out the name of my project in even letters: “The Effects of Alcohol on a Mouse” or gerbil or whatever. I was doing this in the cabin of the boat while everyone else was outside swimming and having fun. My parent’s friend Norman came in at one point and said, “I think you mean ‘effects,’ not “affects.” I had been hard at work for thirty minutes by this time, and seeing my dismay, he quickly said, “Just turn it over and use the other side.” Norman was a problem solver.
About 45 minutes later Norman came back through and gave a little laugh and stopped when he saw my face. “What?” I asked. “I hate to tell you this, but ‘l’ comes before the ‘c’ in ‘alcohol.;”
Son of a bitch. This was the second side of the poster board and now I was well and truly screwed. I begged my mother to go get me another one, as the project was due on Monday and I would barely have time to run the drunk rodent through the maze Sunday night, much less work on a poster board. She told me just to correct the l and c the best I could and it would be fine.
These people. These “adults.” They didn’t understand this was my life they were playing with. This poster board was a huge part of my science project and if it was messy, if it was wrong, then I would not get a good grade and I might not go on to middle school and all of my friends would make fun of me and I might never graduate and then I wouldn’t get a job and I would surely end up living in a van down by the river. How could they not see that? I cried and Norman assured me it would be OK and joked that maybe people would think I had been drunk when I wrote it, which was not funny, because I was never going to drink in my life, but I could see he was trying to help, so I let it go.
I guess I decided to let it go, as I had no other options, but little did I know that this would be the least of my science fair woes.
When we returned from the lake, I immediately went to check on the rodent and found him sitting stock still in his case, staring straight ahead, red eyes gleaming. At first I wondered if he was dead and then I saw his only water bottle had been left full, not of water, but of beer. Our beloved rodent type animal was fucking drunk as a skunk. I imagine if he could have talked he would have said, “The fuck you know when I’ve had enough!” but we will never know.
What I do know is that I had a number of feelings hit simultaneously: horror at what had befallen this animal, worry that he would not be able to run the maze, and fear that I would fail out of school and be homeless.
My father tried to approach the mouse thing, but it wasn’t having any of it. It turns out it was a mean drunk, making hissing rodent noises and generally looking like it wanted to kill someone. It probably did.
Based on this reaction, my dad said the only thing to do was to take the cage out in the woods by our house and let our drunk friend go free to sober up and live another day. This concerned me for a few reasons, one being the welfare of the animal, but the main one being that I had still never run the mouse through the maze drunk.
You might be asking yourself, why did you wait until the last minute to do this and the answer is that I have absolutely no idea except that I was reliant on my parents to buy the alcohol and I guess they didn’t do it until just before we left for the weekend. And I also guess one of them decided that it would be best to let the little guy get good and hammered by leaving him only beer and not a drop of water.
I was inconsolable and cried until I had nothing left in me. If you had asked me then why I was so upset, I would have said because my science fair project was ruined, but I think we all know there was a little more than that going on.
The next day at school, I took my ruined poster board and my maze and set them up on a card table.ad made up my results the night before: the mouse had not performed as well in the maze drunk. This was somewhat true, as the mouse hadn’t even been able to leave the cage when drunk. I can only imagine what Mrs. Stockton thought of this hot mess while the kids around me had homemade volcanoes and different types of seeds growing in Styrofoam cups.
My grade must have been OK, because I did go on to seventh grade and even barely graduated high school. I would go on to graduate summa cum laude with my BA and MA later, all without living in a van down by the river.
The incident horrifies and saddens me as an adult. On the one hand I feel like I should have known better than to leave that poor creature alone with nothing but Budweiser to drink. On the other hand, I understand I was not the adult and that was the “adulting” part that my parents were supposed to do.
Maybe, then, the reason “adulting” irritates me so much is that, in a lot of ways, I was trying to do it way before I was ready. If no one else was going to take the role, I would have to. I don’t think emotionally supported children worry about failing out of the sixth grade and becoming homeless, but I also don’t really know many emotionally supported children. I love my parents and I know they did the best they could, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t had to deal with some fall out. That too, is part of adulting.
Mostly what makes me sad when I think about that time is the claustrophobia I felt in that house: I was trapped in a chaotic home from which I could not escape, never knowing what would happen from hour to hour. I guess me and that damn rodent had a lot in common after all, poor little guy.
It’s also possible that claustrophobia saved my life. Getting good grades was so important to me because they were my way out. They would eventually allow me to go to college and be a real adult.
So, yes, there are days when I do not want to do the dishes or clean the house or do taxes. And guess what? I fucking don’t. I don’t have kids and my husband is as messy as I am. Being an adult, for me, means I get to have choices: I can choose what I eat, what I watch, who I spend time with, and where I go. These are all amazing things to me still.
If you hate adulting, I think what you really hate is your job or your partner, or hell, maybe even yourself. I would suggest not living your life like a drunk rodent in a cage and changing what makes you unhappy.
