What’s a moment when you realized you were officially an adult?
Adulthood is a series of progressions. You get your driver’s licence and discover a new freedom. You vote for the first time. You start work and begin finding your way in the world. You move out of home, get married, perhaps buy your first home.
Each step feels significant. But through most of them there is still someone backing you up. If things go badly wrong, there are parents to call. Someone older who has been there longer, who might know what to do.
Then your parents begin to get old. The direction of care slowly starts to reverse. The people who once explained the world to you can become overwhelmed by its complexity. The people you once called for help begin to need you more and more. I think that is one of the clearest markers of adulthood.
Eventually there is an even greater disjuncture. Parents die. The matriarch or patriarch who seemed to hold the family together is no longer there. Suddenly your generation has moved to the top of the family tree. The responsibility for keeping relationships alive, remembering the stories and being there when things go wrong increasingly rests with you.
Adulthood begins with freedom, but it deepens through responsibility. And eventually you realise that being the adult does not mean knowing what to do. Our parents probably did not always know either, despite how it appeared to us as children. They simply accepted the responsibility of being there. Eventually, that responsibility passes to us.
Adulthood is a journey. It begins by tasting freedom, deepens through accepting responsibility, and reaches one of its most confronting stages when the people who once carried us need to be carried by us.
The Afterword 
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