At the time, I didn’t question any of it. I mean, they all seemed to know what they were doing.
Back in the Paleolithic era when I was a kid, I looked at my parents, their friends, and the other adults who drifted in and out of my early life, and they appeared to me to exist in another world. Theirs was a sophisticated, knowing milieu, a space in the atmosphere above me whose boundaries were defined by a thick, rolling fog of cigarette smoke, the inscrutable appeal of L’Air du Temps flowery musk, and conversation so alien it seemed sometimes they were actually speaking an entirely different language. Their words — so dense and impenetrable to my ear then — signified power: a commanding grasp of the world expressed in suitably commanding language. It was as if at some point — perhaps upon turning 18, perhaps a bit later on — they’d each been handed a Book Of Answers to the Book Of Questions, a zippo and a carton of Pall Malls, and reborn as new recruits assigned to fill the world’s empty suits and pantyhose, repopulate its fleet of automobiles and its monolithic office buildings, and man its burgeoning happy hours and cocktail parties.
Of course, I knew nothing.
Today, I sat in the living room of this big old house I am co-owner of and felt dwarfed by it, diminutive in my overstuffed armchair that seemed to be growing ever larger by the minute, and me, a tiny Alice whose sudden miniaturization had left her reeling in a now outsized Wonderland. Today, I felt shrunken and overwhelmed, or in any case hardly someone who should be entrusted with Important Adult Things like doing bills and remembering to put out the recycling, let alone tasked with running an entire household and caring for the menagerie of living things in it. Today, surrounded by all of these tangible indicators of earned responsibility and maturity, these concrete markers of my proper adulthood, I have never felt so inadequate to the task of being a grown up. Today, at 39 years old, my only real wisdom is knowing that I know nothing, my only real power that I’m able to find the words necessary to map out the contours of my feelings of despair and insufficiency.
How am I going to do all of this now, alone? How?
