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Daily writing prompt: Adult Visions

I grew up knowing some things about my future. I was told/heard them often enough.

“Oh Abbie, she’s a good girl. She’s so bright. She’ll go to university.”

I mean I was your typical oldest child – reliable and conscientious. God blessed me with a good brain and I liked to get involved in life.

Hearing so often that I would go to University, I honestly didn’t think of anything else. I went to University. I didn’t think beyond that, what I might like to do or be. I didn’t even really have a plan for what I would study. But I knew that University was my ticket out of our town and at 17 I was ready. So I enrolled for a Bachelor of Arts and off I went.

Things didn’t quite go according to plan from there, but given that I didn’t really have a ‘plan’ as such, maybe they did!

I always pretty much counted on travelling a bit at some point (tick), and on marrying a nice man (tick), and being a mum (tick, tick, tick, tick). So yes those things have come to be. Nobody, and I do say NOBODY can prepare you for marriage and parenthood. But so far, I think it’s going mostly how I expected … or how I didn’t expect given that aside from hoping to have a family, as a child I put very little other thought into it!

A little me with the world at my feet

There’s this though: I’m not sure that at the grand old age of 36 (for another week) I can consider myself ‘grown up’. Really, who says, that at an arbitrary  age, whether it be 18, 21, 25 or whatever, that this is it, that we are grown. Sure we are physically and mentally done but emotionally, intellectually and spiritually, I always want to grow – life is a journey, growth is what makes it good amazing.

Here’s the clincher.

I also want to hang on to a little of my childlike view of the future – it’s so easy to get bogged down in planning this, that, and the other things, but maybe as a kid I was actually on the right track. Go with it and see where it takes you. I’ll add a grown up perspective though: don’t just accept someone else’s reality for you, create your own reality, do what you love, what makes you happy, what sits best with who you are.

This post is in response to The Daily Post’s Daily Prompt: As a kid, you must have imagined what it was like to be an adult. Now that you’re a grownup (or becoming one), how far off was your idea of adult life?

 Written since this post, another daily prompt, age-old questions. Is age just a number … does it matter?