I woke up with a cold in the middle of September.
This really shouldn’t have caused an existential crisis, but somewhere between emailing my professors that I wouldn’t be in class and realizing I didn’t have any tea in my apartment, it did.
I wanted my mom.
Not in a dramatic, “I can’t do anything without her” kind of way. I know how to take care of myself. I can buy cold medicine. I can make soup. I can send an email explaining that I woke up sick and won’t be making it to class.
That’s almost the problem. I know how to do all of it myself now.
When I was younger, being sick meant my mom somehow already knew what I needed. Medicine would appear. There would be chicken noodle soup made exactly the way I liked it and a glass of hot lemon tea waiting for me. If I needed to miss school, that was an adult problem. Somewhere, some form was being signed, or some phone call was being made.
My only responsibility was to be sick.
Now, I wake up feeling awful and immediately start thinking about logistics. Who do I need to email? What am I missing today? Do I have medicine? Do I have soup? What am I going to have to catch up on when I feel better?
And, most importantly, why do I not own any tea? Nobody really tells you that growing up happens like this. There are the obvious milestones. You move away. You go to college. You get a job. You pay bills. But I think some of the strangest parts of growing up happen on completely ordinary days.
I Have To Know How To Do This Now
The other day, it was an oil stain. I got oil on one of my shirts, so I grabbed the stain remover spray my mom had bought me. It didn’t work.
Suddenly, I was standing in my apartment trying to figure out how to get oil out of fabric, eventually resorting to dish soap and hoping for the best. It was such a stupid problem, but I remember thinking, I have to know how to do this now?
Apparently, yes.
There are so many tiny things nobody tells you that you’ll eventually be responsible for. You have to know which medicine to buy when you’re sick. You have to remember groceries before you run out. You have to notice when you’re almost out of toilet paper. You have to make appointments, send emails, and figure things out when something in your apartment suddenly stops working.
And no matter how long your day was, eventually you have to answer the most annoying question in the world: what am I going to eat?
Sometimes I’ll have the longest day at school or work and come home completely exhausted, only to remember that dinner still has to happen. Nobody is magically making it appear. Sometimes “making dinner” is me heating up a Lean Cuisine and feeling like Judy Hopps eating her single sad carrot.
But at least after that, I can sit down. I can watch TV. I can scroll on my phone. If it’s Thursday or Friday, maybe I’ll go out with my friends. I can decide that I’m done being a person for the day.
And lately, that has made me think about my mom.
Wait, My Mom Had To Do All Of This Too?
Because if taking care of just myself feels this exhausting sometimes, what was it like taking care of all of us?
She couldn’t just come home from work and decide she was done for the day. There were kids to pick up, dinner to figure out, clothes to wash, groceries to buy, medicine to remember and places to be.
Somewhere in all of that, she was supposed to be a person too.
As a kid, I never thought about where the soup came from when I was sick. It was just there. I didn’t think about who bought the medicine or remembered we were running out of something. Those things simply happened around me.
Except now I know they didn’t “just happen.” My mom was making them happen. And she was probably tired.
She probably had days when she didn’t want to figure out dinner either. She probably wanted to come home from work, sit down, watch TV, and not have anybody need anything from her.
Maybe she was thinking about money while I was thinking about what I wanted for dinner. Maybe something happened at work, and she still had to pick us up afterward. Maybe she was exhausted when I needed help with something that felt like the most important problem in the world to me.
I’ll probably never know every version of my mom that existed while I was growing up. I only knew Mom.
The older I get, the more I can see the woman underneath that title. The woman who was tired from work. The woman who wanted five minutes alone. The woman who was figuring something out for the first time and hoping her kids didn’t realize she didn’t already know the answer.
I don’t think I could fully understand her as a person until I started becoming my own person too.
I’m Not Completely On My Own Yet
The funny thing is, I’m not even completely on my own!
I live with two other girls. I know for a fact that if I walked over to my roommate Danna’s cupboard right now and asked, “Can I have some tea?” she would probably tell me to just take it.
If she asked me for a slice of bread tomorrow, I’d do the same thing.
That’s kind of how having roommates works. Someone has medicine. Someone has a Band-Aid. Someone has the ingredient you realized you’re missing halfway through making dinner.
So being independent doesn’t mean nobody helps me anymore. My mom still helps me. My roommates help me. My friends help me. I help them too.
But there is one difference now: I have to ask.
Nobody automatically knows I haven’t eaten dinner. Nobody is keeping a mental inventory of whether I have cold medicine. Nobody knows there’s an oil stain on my shirt unless I tell them.
For most of my life, someone else knew those things without me having to ask.
Now, I’m learning to notice them for myself.
There Was Never A Last Day
Maybe what makes growing up feel so strange is that I don’t remember the last time.
I don’t remember the last time I was sick at home and my mom made me soup without me having to think about it. I don’t remember the last stain I handed her because I assumed she would know how to get it out. I don’t remember the last morning when getting where I needed to be was ultimately somebody else’s responsibility.
At the time, none of those moments felt important enough to remember.
There was never a ceremony for becoming responsible for myself. Nobody sat me down and told me that from this point forward, I would be the one keeping track of whether there was medicine in the cabinet or food in the fridge.
I just slowly became that person.
And I know I’m lucky to have the life I do. There are parts of my life right now that a younger version of me would probably think are so cool. I have independence. I have responsibilities. I have a life that belongs to me.
I can love the life I’m building and still occasionally wish somebody would make me soup.
I Used To Be The Kid Waiting For The Soup
Maybe that’s one of the strangest things about growing up.
You don’t only start seeing yourself as an adult. You start seeing your parents as people.
Maybe there will be a version of me who keeps tea in the cupboard because somebody I love gets sick every September. Maybe I’ll know exactly which stain remover works because I’ve ruined enough shirts to figure it out. Maybe somebody will ask me how I always know what medicine to buy.
Maybe all of these annoying little things I’m learning how to do are becoming part of the way I’ll take care of somebody else.
For now, though, I’m still figuring it out. I’m still the girl who wants her mom when she’s sick. I’m just also becoming the woman who knows she has to make the soup.
I always get sick early. Somehow, every year, my body decides September is the perfect time to completely give up on me. Maybe that will still be true five years from now. Maybe 10 years from now, September will roll around and I’ll wake up stuffy and sneezing and have to tell my boss I’m sick.
There won’t be professors to email anymore. There probably won’t be a college apartment. My life might look completely different.
And I’ll still have to make the soup. There is something a little sad about that, but maybe it’s something comforting too, because every little thing my mom used to do for me, taught me what being cared for feels like. Now, when she isn’t there, I get to recreate those things for myself.
Maybe growing up isn’t realizing that nobody is going to take care of you anymore. Maybe it’s learning how to take all the little ways someone loved you and carry them with you.
Every September cold. Every mysteriously clean shirt. Every dinner I never had to think about. Every cup of tea that somehow appeared next to me.
I thought those were just normal parts of being a kid. Now I know they were ways my mom loved me.