At what age did you feel like an adult?

Or has that time not come yet?

As I approach the big 4-0, I’m beginning to realize that maybe the grown-ups were telling the truth: time does fly. I’m also realizing that they were my age or younger when they warned me of this, and I thought they were so old.

It’s difficult enough for me to accept that we are in the year of 2024, somehow even harder to understand that 2019 wasn’t just last year, and even more impossible that there are legal adults who have never lived a life without the internet. They can’t tell us where they were on 9/11, didn’t wonder if computers would crash during Y2K, and oh my gosh it just occurred to me that they have never had a Jell-O pudding pop. That’s really wild.

My niece, who was one year old when I first moved to NYC, just graduated from high school. She came by to pick me up in her car—that she drives!!!—and I couldn’t stop thinking about how weird it is that she’s legally considered an adult. And just a couple weeks ago, I visited my 21-year-old nephew in his new apartment in another state. Yet here I am, just a baby at a mere 39 years of age.

Does anyone else feel like they’re cosplaying as an adult?

Don’t get me wrong: there are times when I’m reminded of how old I really am. When my sciatica flares up, when taxes are due, when I make the mistake of looking in the mirror without perfect lighting, when I see that I’ve lived long enough for trends to come back again more than once, it’s undeniable. But most days, I still have a hard time visualizing my friends and myself as anything other than girls in their twenties who all of a sudden have full-grown adult responsibilities. Like they were just thrown at us overnight. We went to bed as carefree twenty-something youths and woke up in the unknown territory of adulthood with little warning. Is this what 13 Going on 30 was really based on?

Here’s the thing: I don’t think I look younger than I am, I don’t feel pressed to keep up with what’s “in” and I’m certainly not shy about sharing my age. I didn’t even feel like a kid when I was actually a kid, but I also still don’t feel like a “real” adult and I’m starting to wonder if I ever will. I’m what you might consider very responsible, financially stable, and fairly mature. I plan for the future, have lived like a senior citizen since I was a child, and am a play-by-the-rules, stick-in-the-mud Virgo. I am not living the life of someone younger than me; I just have a hard time grasping how quickly the last twenty or so years have flown by.

I am a near-40-year-old homeowner with a steady income, and yet I find myself Googling my way through adulthood.

I thought that living a less hectic life in the burbs would make the days pass a little slower, but it hasn’t. I thought that buying a house would be that landmark thing to make me feel like I’ve evolved into a true adult who does adult things, but just the other day I said my sisters and I are more mature than “the grown-ups” in our family as if we’re not already middle-aged. As if we’re still sitting at the kids’ table. If buying and maintaining a home, being an aunt to full-on adults, and getting mammograms twice a year doesn’t make me feel grown up, what will?

Doctors tell my friends they’re in a geriatric pregnancy; I tell them they’re a literal teen mom. “Babies having babies,” I say to my 40-year-old friend in her second trimester, as I turn my heating pad to its highest setting and rub some Tiger Balm on my temples. My sciatica is flaring up again, my head is pounding, and I’m pretty sure my uterus is trying to kill me.

Hopefully, I’ll grow out of all this when I’m a real adult. Whenever that is.