ADULTING

While I type this, my old driveway is being ripped out and prepped for concrete pouring, which happens on Tuesday. By Wednesday, Dan and his workers will be done and we will have a brand spanking new driveway with a bump-out to park cars side by side. Doing that now requires parking in the yard. It is not pretty and we certainly try to minimize the amount of time we have to do it. No one will have to park in the yard by the end of this week. We’ve been talking about doing this for a really long time and anyone I talk to about it always asks me about the current driveway. Specifically, what is my current driveway made of? The driveway is a combination of concrete, asphalt, gravel and yard. I believe it started out as concrete and then has been layered with gravel and asphalt, all of which is crumbling.

Part of Michael’s Spring Break involved contacting the contractor, getting an estimate and then figuring out a loan option to pay for it all. Thankfully, we are between car payments and any car payments we had has just been going into a savings account. We’ll have the driveway paid off by next October. The contractor called Michael on Saturday to say he’d start on Monday. This felt/feels fast. I thought I’d have a few months to say goodbye to my sad old driveway that had become impossible to clear when it snows. Michael and I had a date that afternoon and as I walked down to my car, I said “We’re getting a new driveway on Monday! Like, we’re doing this! This seems like only something that happens to people who have their shit together.”

But wait….that’s us!

Somehow, I’ve turned into an actual adult, one who puts money into a savings account and like, takes care of things. I just feel like so much of my life has been clueless happenstance. My move to Kansas City was the first time I’d ever rented a U-Hall for a move. All of my moves before that had been facilitated by a borrowed horse trailer. I don’t even know how I bought my house. One day we were renting and the next day we were telling the landlord we’d buy the place. Just like that. Chris and I didn’t even pause to discuss it. It was the craziest impulse buy I’ve ever made. While I tend to lead a very organized life, I can make very impulsive decisions. That’s one of the things he worried about before he died. At least when I made those decisions then, he was around to make things actually work. With him gone, it would be all up to my lonely ass self to deal with the repercussions of my impulse decisions.

But look! I’m still alive and unmurdered! I am also not dealing with my impulsive self all alone.

Twice last week, I had different people tell me that I’m adulting in a way that sounded like a pat on the back in both encouragement and empathy. Both times, I’ve scrunched my face up in disgust. Is replacing a driveway and finding a way to pay for it truly an act of adulting? Or is it just a chore? I’ve had chores my whole life and this honestly just feels like that. We’re doing a chore to improve the community of our home. There are forums and DYI videos on how to pour concrete. We watched enough to know that the two of us are not skilled enough or physically capable of doing this particular chore. So, we hired out. Maybe that’s the adult side of this coin, but I still don’t feel like a grown-up or anything resembling whatever corporate America told us being a grown-up was supposed to look like.

I’ve truly never felt comfortable in the skin of any age. This is not because I haven’t felt okay with my body. I feel fine about my current meat bag. It’s just that I’ve never felt the age of whatever it was people were telling me I was. Have you heard of those people who feel like they only exist on a vibrational scale? They’re neither male or female, but some vibrating tone. It’s a thing, but tends to be popular in the yoga and or cult community. I’m not a vibrating tone, but the concept applies. While my meat bag may be fifty, the me inside of that bag is neither old or young. I remain somewhere in the range of 15-35. Now some of you are probably thinking that thirty five is an adulting age. It’s true. I did a shit ton of hard things that year. I did a shit ton of hard things in the last year of my twenties too. Dealing with the loss of the most precious people in your life is a thing that can happen at any age. I don’t think of those things as adulting. Those are hard things and hard things do not make us adults.

So really, getting a new driveway is not an adulting move. It’s just a way to show off that I have all my shit together right now.