When I First Realized I Had Become a Grown-Up

It wasn’t the wedding or the hard fulfilling work of a marriage that ensued. Nor was it the purchase of our house and its mortgage. Not the escalating pressures of a demanding career, the births of either of our daughters, nor the moving of our life and belongings 600 miles south to another city. In fact, none of the usual rites of passage evoked from me anything more than a mere consciousness that the world saw me as an adult and I in turn “acted” in compliance – a boy successfully impersonating a man.

But in the last few days of 2008, while I struggled rather ineffectively to keep from drowning in a sea of exams to grade, I had my first epiphany that I could no longer “act.” It was the scariest and most expensive realization of my life, which formed in a hazy 2:00 AM confession to my wife on a Saturday and crystallized in the emergency room of Atlanta Medical Center an hour later and would continue to blind me over the next six months. For it was in that unfurling half-year that I realized that growing up for me was not the acquiring of responsibilities and trappings of adulthood. It was in the knowing that it all could be taken away from me, that I could lose, or more accurately, that I might inadvertently and carelessly discard the entire experience, joys and sorrows alike, all while “pretending” to be the adult at the center rather than being him, posing for rather than propelling the swirling world around me.

The confession that started it all is not a provocative one. It is instead that I had not been telling my wife about chest pains I was feeling for almost a week, since Christmas day. I was convinced that they were gas pains, brought on by the irregular eating schedule and diet of the holidays. But here I was, five days, and the pain seemed consistent and maybe even significant. I told her at two in the morning because I had been out until then grading exams. I am an English teacher at an academically rigorous prep school, and in my end-of-the-semester zealousness, I assigned too much work to grade over the winter break; in fact, I had 700 or so pages of writing to grade in that final week of vacation. I had been making decisions like that all semester - good for my classroom and bad for my family - and in that last week of 2008 and a few fresh days of 2009, I spent most of my waking hours grading and abandoning my family, eating poorly, not sleeping, and quietly stressing, creating the perfect loam for this persistent little seed of chest pain to take root and blossom into a flowering anxiety over possible heart attack.

I drove myself to the emergency room (another very bad decision), but when I got there, I suffered the beginning stages of something more severe than possible cardiac arrest, more life altering: a dawning panic that I might be leaving behind all that mattered most to me that night. This new consciousness descended upon me in two parts. The first part was fear: I wasn’t ready to go, I had just turned 34, and had things to do: a wife to love and partner with, children to love and nurture, a curse of paternal absenteeism to break, a creative dharma to live up to, and now all of this seemed to hang in the balance. No, I was not ready for it to be over. But the second part was overwhelming guilt; I had known for many years now that I had high cholesterol, and I never did anything to address it. And to be honest, it was this guilt that overwhelmed me in the moment, because if I left my life now, and extended the curse of a fatherless generation to my children, if I made a single mother of my wife, if I died a person of great potential who had accomplished little in his life to match that promise, then I would have done so because of my own carelessness and at the expense of the great sacrifices that were made for my very good life. My daughters, then 5 and 2, would one day realize that maybe their daddy didn’t have to die; instead he had irresponsibly defaulted on his loan to his body creditors who came to take back their temple. I couldn’t live with that, or rather I couldn't die with that. Luckily, a perfect EKG kept me from having to.

Two hours later, I left the emergency room with two things: a firm medical opinion that it was really just gas, discomfort brought on by undue stress and an understanding that I had to do things differently, that pretending to be the adult at the center of my life had not gotten the job done, a job I could too easily be fired from if I didn’t do it better. And now I would. Do it better. More important, I had realized that I had things in my life to lose, important things that while I had never really taken them for granted, I also never imagined that I could lose them, not anytime soon. And I was now determined not to lose them, not to carelessly discard them, not to deal with the threat of their loss in the talented slacker way I had dealt with most other perils.

It would be misleading to suggest that shortly after that moment I started acting like an adult. In fact, it would take me the next six months to begin figuring out what being an adult meant for me. I certainly focused on healthy living; I found a book that made sense to me and three months later I was about 20 pounds lighter and eating better than I ever had in my life; my cholesterol improved. But my wife and I were just beginning to address how my work life balance had been affecting the family and especially our relationship. I would need another three months to really hear what she was saying to me about my contribution to the custodial and managerial responsibilities of our life, to see the world in more adult terms than “at work I work, and at home I rest.” I am still working on that, but after reading select chapters from a book about the inequitable division of labor in marriages, I moved in a positive direction that has lightened the home load on my working wife and made me more of a partner in managing our home life. Not perfect, but improving. I am still figuring out how to make decisions that honor both my students and family in my classroom, but now I am ready to apply the lessons of early 2009 to 2010. I’ll know that I have learned something if in the next winter break I find myself in a different place than then.

However, it’s really not about my progress, is it? For the next 40 years or so I will get better at some things and worse at others. I’ll have blind spots and spotlights in my life until I die. But I am not merely reciting the lines anymore, no longer looking from an inner eye through an outer waiting for applause. I understand that the consequences of my decisions were never virtual. I am awake, now, and have been so for almost a year. But it took the threat of losing my life, for me to actively live for it.

That’s adulthood to me – intentionally living for the things you love, cognizant of the fact that it’s all too easy to lose them, cognizant of the fact that the things you want require your committing your life to them, cognizant of the fact that now you want to do the work even if there is no one there to make you do it. I think I’m grown now.