Am I an Adult?

As I was doing dishes this evening I was pondering what it means to be “an adult”. Does it mean that you know how to balance a check book, pay your bills, and support yourself? Or does it mean you’ve achieved a certain level of education? Or is being an adult waking up every morning before your ready, so you can take care of someone else, knowing when to help someone and when to let them make their own decisions? Can you really know what being an adult is if you’ve never experienced parenthood? Do real adults always have the dishes done, the house cleaned, have their daily exercises done, read their scriptures and get to bed on time. Do you know you’ve officially become an adult when you have a routine that works like clockwork and that routine makes you happy? Can you be an adult before your husband has graduated from college? What if you never really become an adult and even though you graduate from high school your inner child fights to lay in the grass instead of do dishes, sleep in instead of fix breakfast, love those that hurt in your life and ignore that their flawed, spend money on people instead of bills, stay up to watch a meteor shower instead of get a good nights rest, but even though your inner child is screaming you do the adult thing even though…..you don’t FEEL like an adult. Even though I look around at my life and see all the things that I think might define an adult, I don’t feel like one, and I’m starting to think…that’s ok.