Daily writing prompt

What’s a moment when you realized you were officially an adult?

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People always told me I was a little adult…an old soul. I don’t remember a specific time where I felt like an adult though. I used to get up with my Mom in the wee hours of the morning to spend time with her when I was very young, maybe 5. She was a divorced Mom of four, in the 1960’s, who struggled financially and worked as a legal secretary in Washington, DC. She worked long hours often, so sometimes I didn’t see her at night. She drank to cope, before the days of people going to psychotherapy appointments, or swallowing anti-depressants. I didn’t like seeing her intoxicated, so I often just put myself to bed to avoid seeing her like that. But in the morning, as she sat over a steaming cup of coffee, trying to brace for another day at the office in a job she hated, I had her all to myself. She’d make me my own “cup of coffee,” which initially consisted of warm milk, but little by little, real coffee was added. Like many people of Irish-Cuban descent, drinking caffeinated drinks of tea or cafecitos starts early. It was in these early morning moments, that I became, more and more, my mother’s therapist. I knew the names of her bosses, the various office dramas she endured and, unfortunately, a litany of tales about how my Father was a deadbeat Dad, a philanderer, among other character flaws. I took all this info in, at face value. It is no surprise I never felt close to my Father. By the same token, he did little to engender closeness with his kids. Generally speaking, my Father was a yawn-fest pontificator when he rarely spoke, but I don’t ever remember having an actual conversation with the guy. He and the family in Cuba lost all their wealth to Castro’s revolution. So, I don’t think he ever got over it. He was a largely silent, depressed looking joyless individual, who did the bare minimum to be a part of his kids’ lives. But to his credit, he never once talk bad about my Mother. I didn’t recognize, until years later, that this was the honorable thing to do and my Mother’s opposite approach, demonstrated a lack of maturity on her part and a lack of understanding of the harm this caused her kids. Maybe no one is ever really an adult 100%. We all become adults too soon and too late. It just depends on the circumstance. If you adult in one area of your life, it will often take over and depress the natural growth patterns in another area. If we live to be very old and hopefully wiser, we are still the child we once were deep inside, still the one who cried out for Mama when hurt or scared. Maybe we are always growing up, in this life or the next, repeating patterns that don’t serve us, until we learn the lesson. That’s the paradox at the heart of this question.