Am I A Grown Up Yet???

Next month I'm turning 27. Now that I'm on the downward spiral to 30, I don't feel at all freaked out about it. At some point I'm sure I will feel a strange sense of mortality lurking at my biological door but that hasn't kicked in yet. I find my age almost surreal. As the years tick off on the calendar I find myself asking more and more, "When am I supposed to start feeling like a grown up?"

My friend Tiffany recently wrote a blog about a similar subject. If you aren't on her readers list, CLICK! don't c-l-i-c-k to get to her subscription page (MySpace). (If you didn't get that, I mean don't waste time in not reading what the girl writes.) Anyhow, she and I had a conversation about getting older in which I made the observation that my current age doesn't feel old, I just always thought that my life would be so different than what it is by now.

On paper, I am an adult. I've lived out from under my parent's roof for ten years. I'm a mother of 2 beautiful kids. I've been married once and I have a comfortable job where I feel needed and most days appreciated. I've owned two houses, more cars than I can count, ran up credit cards, paid down credit cards and I even have a retirement account. But let's wad up the fact sheet for a moment and let me tell you how I really feel.

I feel sixteen with waaayyy too much responsibility.

I love my job (most of the time). I've been there for (gasp!) 8 years. I have a cozy office with a window and a nice cluttered desk with a filing cabinet hiding away toys for my kids. I have two computers that ding all day long with countless emails and reminders and a phone with more buttons on it than the NASA launch console. This has been my 8 to 5 reality for a long long time and yet I still have to remind myself that there is no summer break to look forward to, followed by a promotion in the fall.

My oldest child is turning five this year so I'm not brand new at the mom thing. However, some days I actually look at my kids and think, "When is someone going to realize that I am not mature enough to be a mother and take you away from me?" I think back now to when I was five and wonder if my mom felt the same way. She certainly seemed to have it all together and always know all the right answers. I'm just not even close to being there yet. Maybe my kids won't catch on.

And then there's the subject of boys. While over the years, they have lost some of the luster that they had when I was a teenager, I still get giddy, yes – giddy, over boys from time to time. Johnny Depp, Vin Diesel, David Beckham… yep, they all do it for me. And while it's been a while since I've encircled Johnny's name in a white-out "love heart" on the top of my stereo, I still watch "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" when I'm having a bad day and I instantly feel all butterfly-ish.

I discussed this with my mom over my last visit to see her in North Carolina. She said that even at 60 she still doesn't feel quite like an adult all the time.

I've concluded that maybe it's because we simply are who we are. We are the same person at six that we are at sixty. Everything in time will change: love, appearance, dreams, expectations, likes, dislikes… but at the core I'm still just a crazy kid that likes to dye her hair and eat too much peanut butter out of the jar.

And you know what? That's OK with me.