My daughter is home from college (yay) and is going to be 20 this summer (oh my gosh).  She shared with me a conversation she was having with friends and wondered my opinion. “When did you feel like an adult?” she asked.  What a great question, I thought, and have been thinking about it ever since. Her question stirs up a lot for me, about what it means to be an adult and just how that happens.  

My first thought about burgeoning adulthood was that it was when I became financially independent, able to pay all my own bills.  But then I thought about when I became a parent. Having a child and being completely responsible for someone else really made me feel like an adult.  But then as I thought even more about it over the next few days, I realized that I truly, truly felt like an adult after my Father had passed away and my mother became ill.  It was not until I felt like I had no parents to turn to, and instead had to take care of my parent, that I really,really felt like an adult. But even with that, there are still days when I long to be taken care of and hardly feel like an adult at all.

And I know plenty of people who pay their bills, or have children, or who care for a parent that still don’t actually function like adults. In reality, there is no event that makes you an adult, rather it’s the accumulation of psychological growth secondary to  life events that brings maturity. In paying your own bills, you take responsibility for all of your actions and decisions. In having a child, you learn to put aside your own desires for the benefit of another and also learn to trust your own judgment. And then, in taking care of a parent you come to understand the existential paradox of being alone in the world, living our one and only unique life in connection with others.  Life events don’t make us adults, but they offer the opportunities for some kind of growth process.

So what is happening? I think the answer that best describes it is integration.  We all have many parts of ourselves, disparate feelings and needs, desires and identities.  When we can integrate these disparate parts of ourselves, we feel a sense of ownership and responsibility for all of them, finding compromises and balances.  We don’t have to shut out certain parts, or act one way in one area of our lives and a different way in another. We don’t have to blame others, but can accept our mistakes and weaknesses. If we are integrated, we can hold competing wishes, such as wanting to party with needing to get work done, and competing opinions, such as being angry with a partner and still wanting to be faithful to them. Integration is a process that happens over time, that steadily leads to a more and more coherent and comfortable sense of our self. Because we have more of a balance within ourselves, we have a more consistent sense of identity and function as more of a whole, reliable person.

Recently I have heard the term, “adulting”.  According to the Urban Dictionary, “Adulting (v):  to carry out more and more of the duties and responsibilities of fully developed individuals (paying off that credit card debt, settling beef without blasting social media, etc.) “  Both aspects seem right to me. One, that it’s a verb that describes a process, and, two, that it’s moving toward increasingly full development. In other words, we never stop adulting.