Feeling: young
Listening to: Staind - Falling Down
Reading/Watching: Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone

I am not ready. I am not ready to be a grown-up.

'Cause that's what it means, really. You finish your undergrad, are liberated from the safety net of Daddy's Money, embrace mature relationships, fight like a dog for the life you want instead of the life you have, etc etc etc.

I'm not ready for adulthood, because it means switching sides. I've played for the Kid/Student side so long, it will feel vaguely traitorous to join the Adult/Teacher line-up. And God help me the day I have to sign up for the extracurricular duty of Parenthood.

Part of this ties to my own parents, I think. They always knew how to fix things, always figured it out. I am nowhere near that, and I feel like it's all over my face.

My parents told me how to do everything. Sometimes it was fantastically annoying, but the most irritating part was that, until I reached sixteen or so, they were right about 99% of it. I'm not ready to be 99% more right than other people. I'm not ready to do any of it.

I'm also not ready for my parents to see me as a grown up, if that makes sense. My mom hugged me when Andy beat me in the fourth-grade spelling bee. My dad hugged me when CB ripped my heart out freshman year of college (the most embarrassing hug in the history of the universe, by the way- I hated nothing more than his knowing that I was a social reject). I'm not sure I'm ready to tell them I'm graduated from college, that I have a job, that I want to get married. (To be fair, I doubt they're ready for it, either.)

I'm willing to stay in school, to stay their quiet, shy, terminally undateable teen nun polygirl playing the piano and writing little teen novels on the family computer, just so that I can guarantee that they'll always be there, that they'll always be 99% right and able to solve anything. I'm terrified at the prospect of having to do it myself.

And (is it weird?) I also don't relish the prospect of making them realize I have to do it myself. They've sheltered me as well as they could from 200 miles away, and I've cultivated a habit for letting them think they're doing it all. (I may have managed to fool myself in the process.)

So here we are. It's coming, and it's all I can think about. One day I'll wake up, and be thirty, and still wondering when the first day of 9th grade starts.

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