Remember when all you wanted to be was a grown-up?  People would stop telling you what to do, what to wear, and how to act and you would be in charge?  Well, I hate being a grown-up.  Some weeks I’m okay with the fact that when I’m lying in bed throwing my booger filled tissues on the floor that two days later, as the grown-up, I am going to have to pick up the remainders of my cold.  Some weeks I can deal with the fact that I can’t blame anyone else when my sweater shrinks, we run out of diet Dr Pepper, or when the back door is left unlocked.  My husband and I use grown-up as the code word to tell our kid she can’t do something she wants to, like sliding down the booth to the floor of the restaurant to enjoy a fine whine.  “Be the grown-up,” the one sitting across from her will snark at the one sitting next to her.  The grown-up will have to haul her up, lecture her, and be the bad guy for the rest of the day.

This week grown-up went a little too far.  Do I go to my friend’s dad’s funeral or go visit my brother in the hospital?  Do I keep my cat on dialysis, at the cost of $1000 per day, or do I let the 7 year old feline we adore die a slow painful death?  Do I go see our family shrink so she can shed some light on familial turmoil or do I make that critical meeting at work that will build bridges and may set me up for my next promotion?  Oh, and the damn dishwasher broke, so I have plenty of time to ponder these decisions while I scrub gross cat food bowls and egg crusted pans.  This morning while I was scrubbing I really should have been working on that $700,000 proposal for work, but whatever.  The manual labor grown-up task won.

I don’t want to be 18, or 23 or 30 again, but I want one day as not a grown-up.  I want to go lay in the hammock because it’s a nice day.  I want to go meet my girlfriends for happy hour and not worry about when I need to get home.  If I decide I want to get drunk I want to get drunk.  I want someone else to pick up my snotty tissues for me if I do the not-grown-up thing and cry about all this crap going on.

Now, I have to stop playing on my blog and go do some dishes, or write a proposal, or call my brother.  Ugh!  Grown-up sucks.