Last Friday I was in Southwest Baptist Church in Bolivar, Mo., watching a friend from high school get married. At some point between the cliché reading of 1 Corinthians 13 and the well-intentioned destruction of the wedding cake, the shock of seeing Mandy in a wedding dress started to wear off.
During my drive down to the wedding, winding through the beautiful, bovine-flecked fields along Kansas Highway 68, I couldn’t get over the idea of this girl getting married. I last remembered her sitting at a faux-wood desk scribbling her daily journal entry at the start of newspaper class. This was not someone who ought to be getting married. Weddings are supposed to be for adults and D-list celebrities on reality television, not my former classmates.
But as she made her bride-bound rounds during the reception, she started to belong in that dress. And it wasn’t because of some outside force exerted upon her 20-year-old frame; it was because she had decided to wear it. She chose to belong in that dress. And that’s when I realized that the steps we take into adulthood happen when we choose.
I’m realizing that adulthood isn’t in some locked room into which I’m not permitted. It’s a door waiting for me to walk through.
Growing up, I always felt like adults just appeared. I assumed that some mystical sequence worthy of a smoke generator and strobe lights gave them some otherwise forbidden knowledge that I, as a child, could simply not comprehend.
Every now and then I’d doubt this concept of bestowed wisdom, particularly during my youth of sports and crazed parents in the stands. For the most part, however, I assumed this rite of passage would happen eventually and completely independent of anything I did.
As I’ve gone through college, I’ve developed and grown as a person but still felt like a kid inside. And when I’ve come up short, I’ve played off my mistakes as those of an undergrad. Society seems to give me a free pass as a student, so I fall back on that excuse.
I always worried that when I finally became an “adult” I’d lose another part of me, but watching Mandy smear wedding cake across her husband’s lips made me realize that adulthood’s not the death of my youth. I’m not going to change because of a label. I’m going to change because I’ll choose to change.
The transformation into adulthood won’t come from some outside source; it’ll come from within me. Maybe everyone assumes there must be something extra to being an adult, that at some point it’ll happen and forever change you. But that something extra is in calling myself an adult. It’s how I think of myself. No one can force it on me.
Mandy wasn’t any more mature than I was a few weeks ago. And she may not be now. But she’s taken a deliberate step into adulthood.
Now, having watched her leave her first footprints, I’m not worried about making mine. I’m not concerned about when the label “adult” will fall onto me and how I’ll have to act. I’ve already made a long path, and my footprints and stride have been full-grown for several years. And while I’d appreciate the smoke generator and strobe light, I’m fine making the transition by myself.