On adulting

Sunny is completing her first trip around the sun. Everyone said her first birthday would mainly be a celebration of keeping a child alive for a year and it very much is. That and an ode to the fact that Nick and I are still speaking to each other most days.

On the one hand, I’m so excited to celebrate her. She’s grown so big, she’s nearly walking, she’s getting engaged in books, she has friends. And then on the other, I’m so excited for me.

Gasp!

When these tiny kernels of human beings arrive, they are pulpy mewling beings that rely on you for everything. It feels like you’re inside a shell and there’s no thinking beyond the shell—you’re just in it, doing the needful to keep a small being alive. It’s been a bit since it felt that extreme but I’m still astonished that Sunny can drink water on her own, she can hold her own bottle and she eats her yogurt with great aplomb.

Finally, I’m seeming to find it within my grasp to think a little bit further out than the fifty foot  radius of our house, on what adventures I can dive into myself. What better person can I become that Sunny can see, and that I can see? Who can I be that I can be proud of? Podcaster, author and contemporary oracle, Rich Roll talks about the feeling of being dismantled as a great opportunity. And much of the last year of being a new mother, I felt dismantled.

Step one of this new year keeps coming back to this, the topic of my current writing project: adulting.

I’ve started out on a series of essays about it—this adulting, a word that my AP English teacher no doubt would have cringed over, and an act I often find impossible to do, or at least do gracefully.

So along with visions of a surf trip to Puerto Rico and a long-distance paddle and a family trip somewhere exotic, I have dreams of this year simply registering my car on time (an example Merriam Webster actually uses to exemplify adulting and one I wrote a whole essay draft on), of being able to knowingly switch out a bit and wield a drill, of writing thank you notes less than a year from the date of receipt.

A good friend and fellow writer Susie Seligson once quoted such a concept in an exchange from A Raisin in the Sun:

“I want to fly! I want to touch the sun!" "Finish your eggs first.”

And it’s true. Let’s make space for the grand … and let’s eat our eggs first.