J said - Adulthood/Happy Birthday to Me....

I don't feel like I'm anywhere near being 22. I still feel like I'm 18..young dumb and innocent. I mean, what makes you grown up??? having more bills than you can pay??? I've got that one down... being totally dependent on yourself... yeah.. I'm damn near close to that.. having a job? yup got that one...I mean what is the defining point?? when do you finally become an adult?? at marriage?? at the birth of your first child?? when?

And as this birthday approaches.. I think that it is the first one where I can say.. nothing will change... I won't feel any different.. I won't BE any different..

I’ll still be the same old J. going to work and coming home and doing all that regular stuff. It’s almost like… if something really interesting happened in my life, I could see me almost totally forgetting that it was my birthday….and dealing with something else…

Then I think about where my mommy as right now….she was in school...about to take her break…. Because she had me...right before she turned 23. Dear god.. I am so unprepared to have child right now… was she?? How did she deal with it??? Did she cry?? Did she consider abortion?? *shivers* It’s really odd thinking about what might have been… If I never was….. her and my father were together…so that was some support but still…

I still fell like a child.. and I have been out of the house for about as long as she was, and I have grown up in… well in today’s world…so I’m no wide eyed innocent, but still…. I can’t imagine…me…having a baby. Yet she had me, and raised me, and loved me….through all of the changes that life had put both of us through….my mommy was always there. And even now.. as I try to strike out on my own path...my own life…my mommy is still there…in the background yes...but still a support by my side.

I have never thought of this before…I wonder how I changed her life…where she would be without me…and would she ever have thought of me...as that baby who came too soon…would she have married A. ? would she have became Muslim? Hmmm.. one simple step…the simple lack of doing something...has changed us so much… that we wouldn’t recognize ourselves without the changes.

I wonder what my grandmother thought?? Was she happy? Was she upset?? How did she react to the fact that her baby girl was having a child of her own? I know my aunt was supportive…and my uncle too.


Lives change because of the introduction of something new… I am waiting for that change…waiting for that single moment that will forcibly catapult me from adolescence to adulthood. Maybe it will be graduation...maybe it will be getting my first car…but somehow.. I don’t think that it will be a birthday.