All Grown Up

When was the first time you really felt like a grown up (if ever)?

Daily Writing Prompt #2088

I had been making grown up decisions far too long.

I was ten years old when I became responsible for cooking my own meals. My mother, a victim to 1990’s diet culture, never made breakfast part of our lives. School lunches satiated the morning rumbling stomachs through elementary school, but once middle school hit there wasn’t lunch money to go around. I’d go to my mother’s change dish, a cracked and crusty clay coiled piece of pottery I had created from a kit, and shamefully stake my claim, sixty cents at a time, on her money so I could purchase a canned drink at school, distracting from my lack of sustenance. Dinner began upon my return home, when I’d open a can of ravioli, start a pot to boil water for ramen, or, if the monthly grocery store trip was recent enough, preheat the oven for a frozen pizza.

Living with my mother and sister at that time was like living with ghosts—proof of their presence could be seen when items were moved. You knew they were there, even if they wouldn’t make themselves seen. Sometimes you’d hear their voices through the walls, sometimes you’d make them angry. They’d frighten, you’d recoil, hide, and the aloneness would persist.

I learned to stay away as much as I could. I’d walk boys home from school, miles past my own dwelling, and quietly take myself back. I’d spend time with friends at their houses, but the discomfort I felt around parents was palpable. I didn’t understand authority dynamics and shrank—this anxiety led parents to assume I was a bad kid with something to hide.

Instead, I found other unsupervised kids, older kids, young adults. With them, I did whatever I wanted. I thought I was grown because I was taking part in adult activities with young adults for years.

I was a smart kid, despite my juvenile delinquency. I knew I was playing house when I’d stay at the apartment my high school boyfriend shared with his pedophile roommate for days on end. I still felt like a kid as I loaded the dishwasher at a different boyfriend’s house after spending my day in freshman college courses and nights leading people to their white tablecloth tables at a ritzy restaurant. I was play pretending I was a wife, doing wifely things, picking up someone else’s filth after their long day of selling drugs.

I was stuck in Playing House mode, even when, at nineteen, I found out I was pregnant with his baby. When my mother and I planned my shotgun wedding. When I moved in to his apartment, with his months-old dishes in the sink that he ultimately decided to throw away (?!), sleeping upon his used king-size mattress without sheets. When we found a proper townhouse to house our baby on the way, merging our furniture and our lives, and creating a room of his own.

When that boyfriend who became my husband drank an entire bottle of Don Julio tequila with a neighbor, came home and slept in his own vomit. When I woke him up to clean him up and after getting him undressed and in the bathtub, he beat me, eight months pregnant, and chased me naked through the apartment complex parking lot when I tried to run away.

Still playing house. Still navigating life amongst ghosts and shadowy figures.

When I was in labor, my mom was on the phone with my health insurance making sure they were aware that the name on my driver’s license had changed and it was critical that my infant have my new husband’s name on the band that would wrap around his ankle. As she navigated bureaucracy of both the insurance company and the hospital for a detail I cared nothing about, I-without a doubt-felt like a kid.

A few days later, my newborn son was discharged after receiving light therapy to bring his bilirubin down. They handed me a few printout sheets about basic infant care, about the jaundice he was recovering from, and said goodbye.

I had a moment of pause. I thought to myself: “They’re just going to let us take this baby home? We have a few papers and they trust that we’ll read them and that’s all we need to be responsible for this delicate creature?!”

The follow up thought was: “Of course. We’re the parents. They must.” It was then, at nineteen, with my deflated belly and a diaper filled with blood beneath my shorts, that I realized they must have seen me as something adjacent to a grown up. We made our way downstairs, placed his car seat in the back seat, and headed home.

At home that night, when I placed him in his crib in his dark room, my heart skipped in preparation for what I had done after I cut the lights for as far as my memory allows: I’d flip the switch, then run and hop into my bed, in fear that in that moment of darkness that someone under the bed would grab for me. My chest jolted forward but I slammed the brakes before my legs continued. I thought to myself: “I can’t be afraid of the dark anymore. I’m the grown up. I’m the mom.”

I shifted my shoulders back, chest up, and walked stiffly and quietly to my darkened bedroom down the hall.