Why Do All My Friends Feel Like Children?

It took being next of kin to a dying man for me to finally feel like the adult in the room. I was 37, had two children, my first grey hairs and a bulging disc and still I looked around in utter disbelief that I was in charge. How do you wish to proceed? They asked me, in front of my husband’s mother, a real grown up.

Can’t you see I’m wearing a leopard print sundress, I went to say. I lost my driving license this morning. I am addicted to green fizzy cola bottles.

My breasts were heavy with the milk I made to feed my youngest child. My mother in law looked at me to answer. But Peter Pan was in a coma and Wendy had forgotten to grow up.

Like many millennials I have moved through adulthood feeling like three weasels in a trench coat. When pushing my daughter down the street in London in her pushchair for the first time, I wondered if anyone would think I was a teen mum. I was thirty five.

I asked a friend in her sixties when she felt like an adult and without a beat she said, twenty. She’d got married, bought a house and had a child and that was it. She then said, ‘but I have a thirty six year old and he is definitely not an adult. I think I’ve made his life a bit too comfortable.’

This feels like a classic refrain. Millennials have had it too easy. We’re snowflakes who use our parents as safety nets. If we’d only stand on our own two feet like we’re supposed to, we’d cope just fine. But when none of us feel like we’ve achieved real adulthood, something must have gone wrong at a structural level. I have been self-employed for most of my life and until I moved to Spain, would regularly boomerang back to my childhood bedroom between contracts. I attended family holidays, sometimes solo or with friends, well into my late twenties. I still call my parents house ‘home,’ and any Christmas not spent there feels like second best. I felt like a baby woman.

A recent viral internet trend showed young people boasting that of course someone is always coming to save them because their mum/dad/grandpa was so obsessed with them they would never really be in real trouble. It has been their great privilege to afford us an illusion of safety, but in doing so we have eroded belief in our own capability.

I will be the first to admit that I have been quite spoilt. I could call my mum at all hours of the night and be picked up from parties I didn’t want to stay at. My Dad has begrudgingly helped me pay for parking tickets I was old enough to avoid. Of course can’t blame our parents for supporting us when they’re doing it out of love. And why would those who can, not use their parents as safety nets, when the ladder we were presented to climb had such slippery rungs.