Grown-up

So my latest Facebook status update reads; "Sent out my first ever "factuur" (invoice) today. I feel so grown-up, it's disgusting."
Emphasis on feel, not am.
(Incidentally, I prefer the Dutch word for "grown-up", which is "volwassen" and literally means "fully waxed" ("waxed" as in "grown", like "the moon waxes and wanes", not as in "hairless"). If you're "grown-up", it just means that you've grown up from where you began, but it doesn't mean the process is finished yet!)

I remember the first time I felt grown-up. I must have been about 15, and I had just bought the new Bon Jovi album, Crush (yes, I used to be a Bon Jovi fan in high school. Better than having to admit you were into The Backstreet Boys). Now I had always been a shy and quiet child, chatting away at people I knew, but insecure when it came to people or stuff I didn't know. So when we got back to the car, and I wanted to play the CD, and it turned out that the wrong CD (Eminem, juch) was inside the case, my heart dropped. I had to go back to the store (there used to be a time when we bought CDs in stores, and it's less than 10 years ago, can you believe it?) and tell them they'd made a mistake. I remember my mother looking at me and saying; "Do you want me to come with you?" And at that moment I decided I should now be old enough to handle such things on my own. So I shook my head, got out of the car, went back to the store, walked over to the way-too-hip guy behind the counter, and casually said; "Hey, you gave me the wrong CD just now." He looked surprised but not offended, took back the Eminem CD, gave me the right Bon Jovi CD, said "Hey, do you like Santana?", and gave me a free copy of the new Santana album, because I had to come all the way back because of his mistake.
Wow. I can still remember the feeling, walking out of the store, that I was now fully grown-up, knew how to handle things, and could take care of myself.

That was the image I had of grown-ups when I was a child; they knew and could do everything, and knew exactly what to do or how to behave in any given situation. They could say; "Don't tilt your plate like that, your food will fall on the floor" and just know it to be true. Or, even more magically, they could say; "Don't cut off your Barbie's (or your own, in my case) hair, you'll regret it later!" and then when you didn't listen and were crying about your (Barbie's) mutilated hair, they wouldn't go "I told you so", but you still knew they had. You could make stupid comments about all sorts of things and they would just go "but in Australia it's summer when we have winter" or "red cabbages always stain purple" or "don't climb unto the thinner branches, they can't hold your weight", and it was true. They just knew everything.

My goal in life became, when I was grown-up, to know everything.

I pretty quickly discovered that that ambition may have worked somewhere in the Middle Ages, but not anymore. There was just too much to know. But still, most grown-ups knew a lot about a lot of things, right? So I could still get pretty far.
But then I brought back homework that my parents didn't understand and couldn't explain. I had to explain things to them before we could figure out the question together. On family gatherings or birthday parties, sometimes someone made a comment I knew was wrong. I didn't say so, of course, but I just knew it wasn't true. So maybe grown-ups didn't know everything, and maybe some of the stuff they knew was wrong?
And then I began to notice that a lot of grown-ups didn't know how to do everything. My uncle would ask my father about the new shed he was building, my father would as my mother about ironing a shirt, and my mother would as my grandmother if we could plant the potatoes already or still had to wait a few more days. They didn't mind asking, they were okay about not knowing stuff.
But still, when there's little children near, grown-ups tend to act as if they know everything. Just last week I was at the zoo and this guy's kid asked what kind of animal they were looking at, and he goes "must be some kind of rat", and the child read the sign and went "it says here that it's a prairie dog" and the guy went "well, clearly it isn't a dog, so they got that wrong! Haha! Let's go look at the bears now!" Seriously? You're gonna credit your authority over the zoo people's?

But then I do it too, of course.

Being a grown-up is nothing like what I thought it would be. Being able to decide on your own what you're gonna do or eat or become doesn't make things easier. Just because you have to send out your first invoice, doesn't mean that you know how to do that. What do you put on there? How do you start the e-mail to the company? What happens if you've done something wrong, will you not get any money? "Filing your taxes" sounds very mature, but I know people who are 60 years old and still aren't sure whether they're filing them correctly. (And now we can just check Wikipedia if we're unsure, but think about people 30 years ago!)
So yeah, I may have been feeling very grown-up, but that doesn't mean that I know what I'm doing, or even that I am very grown-up. And in hindsight, I think reality beats the vision I had as a child. How scary would it be if you really knew everything? No, I'll just wallow in my unknowing insecurity when I get the chance. Makes me feel young.