5 Things I Assumed I Would Get to Do More Often When I Became an Adult

It turns out adulthood is less harrowing than I expected.

As a kid, my vision of adulthood was influenced heavily by my school’s public health programming and classic films like 9 to 5, Big, and Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. The possibilities for my future seemed endless but also confusing. Would I become a seasoned criminal? Would I commute to a miserable job every day in a beige suit? Would I live in a penthouse with a giant trampoline and eat whatever I wanted?

Now that I am smack dab in the middle of “adulthood,” I can say that there have been some surprises along the way. My biggest takeaway is that being a grownup is unfortunately a lot less harrowing and a whole lot more boring than I was led to believe from the messages I soaked up as a child.

These are just a few things that really haven’t played as much of a role in adulthood as I thought they would:

1. Slamming the phone down at work

Picture an office filled with adults in an 80’s movie. If there wasn’t at least one stressed out, frazzled 30-something slamming their phone down to end a conversation then was it an actual workplace where anything got done?

My workplace still has landlines, and I can tell you the number of times I’ve gotten to slam mine down to cut a conversation short. It’s a big fat 0.

2. Turning down lots of people offering me street drugs

This is another one that really was talked up a lot by those public health programs in elementary school. I was such an eager participant in my D.A.R.E classes with Officer Friendly. He once passed around a glass case with little compartments filled with different kinds of drugs that he had confiscated over the years, and he made it sound like there was a treacherous world awaiting us in suburban Illinois.

We role played how to tell someone you wouldn’t take drugs from them. We role played standing up to peer pressure. We role played just saying no.

Flash forward 30+ years, and I’m actively trying to figure out how a mom acquires drugs in a city where many drugs are now legal. A guy I met once recommended this service where university students from a school for the deaf can deliver pot to your house, but you have to go through this website where it looks like you pretend to buy a t-shirt. And I just couldn’t figure it out.

3. Attending a masquerade ball

This is one I’m kind of bummed about. I have never been invited to a ball of any sort, let alone a masquerade ball. And I feel like I was misled by those culminating scenes in movies where a momentous thing happens at a masquerade ball. Why are adults not having more masquerade balls? Am I just not in the right social circle?

4. Extinguishing a fire that was blazing on my actual body

I apologize to anyone who has experienced the trauma of being physically lit on fire. It sounds terrifying. But I feel like we were trained so unnecessarily with the “stop, drop, and roll” method. I was forced to practice this method over and over again in elementary school — so much so that I thought the danger of having actual flames on your clothes and body would be a hazard we would have to avoid frequently. But I’ve never had to put out any sort of fire!

5. Wearing a disguise

There was Superman. There was Ms. Viola Swamp. There was Deloris from Sister Act, Miss Congeniality, Mrs. Doubtfire!

Growing up, it just seemed really common that at least one person you knew would be secretly disguising their identity. Sometimes disguises would be a last-ditch effort to forge a new life after joining the Witness Protection Program. Other times it would be to sneak around and gather information from the people you loved, or to go undercover to write a ground-breaking article in your local paper about what high school was really like. Your own teachers might even be in disguise to trick the class into improving their behavior!

Unfortunately, the closest I’ve come to hiding my identity was the fake ID I got in 2001 that was confiscated 2 months later at a bar in suburban Illinois.

6. Hiding a dead body

I’m not going to bore you with the lack of actual murder that seems to be a part of daily adult life. But I will say that in addition to not being involved in many murders, I’ve also never had to dispose of or hide a dead body. Even non-scary movies (i.e. two of the ones listed above) seemed to incorporate this theme as just a thing that happened sometimes to adults. Sure, sometimes I look around a room and think “That closet would be a great place to hide a dead body if I had one with me right now.” But so far it just hasn’t come up.

Being a grown up is definitely not what I thought it would be! I have no regrets in my life, but I can’t say it wouldn’t be nice to have a little more suspense and intrigue than I’m experiencing at the moment. Is it too much to ask to be invited to a masquerade ball every once in a while instead of spending my evenings trying to get my son to eat his grapes?