When I was a kid, 25 was that age
that I decided constituted being a real adult. When I thought about being 25, I
thought I would have a job. I thought my job might be living among and studying
a pack of lions, inspired by my hero
Jane Goodall. I thought I would have traveled the whole world. I thought I
would at least have my own horse. But I
thought, in the very basic way that an eight year old can fully interpret their
vision of the future, that this would be the age where I was done with the
mystifying kid question: What will I be
when I grow up? and know in which direction my life was headed, and it
would be headed somewhere fantastic. Tomorrow, I will be twenty five. I do not
have a real job. I do not own a horse. The
closest I have ever come to infiltrating and gaining the trust of a lion pride was
last year when I lived with three housecats. I still have to call my dad to ask
how to do things like make a dentist appointment or ask if my house has a pilot
light. I am not the twenty five year old that eight year old Lucy imagined, and
sometimes I wonder if somewhere she’s watching me, licking the purple Fun Dip
stains off her fingers, and shaking her head in disappointment.
There’s a wildness that we all have
in childhood that we think we will never lose. We imagine ourselves as adults
with this same wildness, because we can’t imagine that it will ever fade. We
think that if only we weren’t bonded by bedtime, held hostage by our miniature
stature and our limited allowance, that we would be doing better than the
adults that we know. We wouldn’t be wasting our time raising families or having
jobs or doing anything other than booking plane tickets to Africa to crouch in
the grasses of the Serengeti and watch the lionesses lick clean their kill. The
worse part about being in our twenties, when we finally get there, is that we
remember this feeling with such sharpness. We haven’t forgotten how it feels to
not know that this improbable. That we need to pay bills and we need to fill out
job applications and the money in our bank accounts is barely enough for a
ticket to visit our long distance boyfriends in Michigan, much less a transcontinental
plane ride. We feel a constant disappointment that we got the gift of adulthood
we always wanted, but we are using our freedom of bedtime to go to bed at ten
to wake up for our job at nine. We are using our money to buy gym memberships
to melt away the Halloween candy we now feel guilty about consuming. And this
side of me, now at 25, the age at which I should be ready to be an adult, is
not ready to let go of being wild.
But there’s another side that eight year old
Lucy could not have comprehended. Every day, I work. I work on my writing, my
teaching, my lesson planning. I go to dinner with my friends. I tell my
boyfriend that I love him and he tells me back. I make a pot of turkey chili. I
keep my cat alive. These things are not wild. But as much as eight year old
Lucy might roll her eyes, I think it’s actually okay. At 25, I can see the
satisfaction adults get in working hard, no matter what it is that they are
working towards. I can see why someone might want to get married and have a
house and job instead of a pet lion. I don’t know how to change my oil, but I’m
willing to learn.
I still hope that one day I’ll
travel the world or see a lion somewhere outside of a zoo, or do a million
things I couldn’t even imagine when I was eight. But I guess that’s the difference
between being eight and thinking about being 25 and actually being 25, I can
know that it’s not a milestone, just an age, the same way I turned nine, the
same way I will turn 45. Nothing is beginning or ending, there are no requirements.
Nobody is welcoming me into adulthood with a beer and a husband and a sudden understanding
about why Doonesbury is a funny comic strip. I may not have done everything
yet, but I have time. And for now, no matter what eight year old Lucy has to
say about it, finishing an essay and taking a nap with a purring housecat is
just as satisfying as tracking a lion.
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