In all sincerity, the title is a little misleading--I am not legally an adult, nor will I be for another nine months. I’m not going to be able to vote like most of the other students on campus, I won’t be able to get a flu shot by myself and I’m still not supposed to visit the Disney Channel website without a parent’s permission. (Side note: I find it funny that I’m not mature enough to vote for a president who is going to affect nearly my entire college career, but the government is totally fine with my maturity level when I want to borrow money from them. Not that I’m complaining about the last part.)
In more ways than one, I don’t feel different from other kids. I have braces, acne, wild hair, unrivaled social awkwardness and a soft spot for fart jokes. The only difference between me and most teenagers my age is a high school diploma and the occasional nightmare about student debt. Despite the fact that I haven’t reached the age in which I am no longer a minor, it’s recently hit me that I only have a couple more weeks of being a kid.
By “recently,” I mean when I had to pay my first student bill and realized almost my entire last paycheck went to a big stack of textbooks. Nothing kills innocence quite like bills.
In that moment, I realized that even though I wasn’t an adult, I’m about to be treated like one. Children don’t move two and a half hours away, they don’t strike deals with the government, they don’t talk to new roommates and they surely don’t pay for textbooks. Although I am definitely looking forward to college and all the new adventures it brings, saying goodbye to the life I’ve come to know with my family is difficult. In less than a month, I’ll set my own curfews, eat at my own times, do homework wherever I’d like and be able to get up in the middle of the night without worrying about if I’ll step on a plastic rhinoceros or a Lego.
At the same time, I have to worry about money. I have to know about basic medicines well enough that I can solve most late-night illnesses. My GPA will no longer be something I keep up to appease my parents and my perfectionist tendencies; it’ll be something I have to maintain to be able to afford school. I’ll come “home” to a dorm with a friend instead of a home with a mother, and in some ways, I think that is what I will miss the most.
The time we spend with our families is short enough already. Through a series of events, I ended up choosing to leave mine a year early. This day was going to come eventually, but I didn’t associate the end of my childhood with the end of a predictable life with my family until I started writing this article. Actually, I didn’t think about it until I wrote that sentence. They will always be there for me, and I for them, but instead of telling my mom about some crazy news in person, I’ll have to do it over the phone. Every time I come home, my brothers will all be a little taller, their voices a little deeper, and their faces a little more happy to see me. My dogs will sniff me all over as they try to sort out the scents of Aggieville, the dorm, marching uniforms and ice cream. My life is about to become independent of my family rather than dependent on them, and I think that is what makes a person an adult.
And to tell you the truth… that makes me more than a little sad to say goodbye to my childhood.
