Grown Up?

I read blogs as a pleasant escape from the mundane, so I think blog-land should be mostly sunshine and rainbows and general frivolity. As such, I like to maintain a low-whine threshold here at the Woman in Training.  Today is going to be a bit of an exception.

This picture, from desiree cherisse's photostream is a great illustration of how I often feel:

like a little girl, playing dress up.

Every day I get a little more comfortable with the fact that I am a grown up.  I'm pretty proficient at going to work and paying the bills.  I'm much better than I used to be at getting regular oil changes and rotating my tires.  I'm even good at keeping my shower scrubbed and soap scum free, but every so often adult responsibilities are really lame!  Sometimes I catch my self feeling outraged or put upon because I have to do something that millions of adults do every day.
I especially dislike being a grown up with tasks that involve creepy crawlies.  Most of the time when I see a spider in our two-woman apartment, I ignore it and hope Roomy is the bigger person, who kills it.  If it's in my bedroom though, I suck it up and smoosh it, but you'd better believe that I'm grumbling to myself the whole time about how it should not be my job to kill spiders. 

A couple winters ago, when I lived by myself in the basement of a house with absentee landlords, I had a rodent problem.

Rodents have no place in my semi-adult life! 

It should DEFINITELY be someone else's job to deal with this!

First of all, it made me mad because I had a terrier at the time.  Terriers were specifically bred to kill rodents, so that stupid dog was NOT earning his keep!  Secondly, I felt like it was so not my job to deal with a rodent carcass after it got caught in the trap that was so not my job to buy or set!  I was so horrified about the whole situation that I actually called my dad crying.  He gave me advice about which traps to buy and how to set them, but he was very firm about the fact that it was most definitely very important that I, his adult daughter, deal with it myself.  I started with the no-touch/no-see traps, because they obviously have the lowest gross factor. When those didn't catch anything, I moved onto the old-fashioned snap traps, which also proved futile. Then, I tried glue traps, even though I almost passed out at the thought of a live mouse with its feet all stuck down, crazed and trying to bite my fingers off when I disposed of the gluey mess.  God must've stepped in there and protected me from myself because while I caught a lot of spiders and even a set of mousey footprints on the glue traps, I did not catch my rodent invader.  (My coworker says it must've been a Jesus-mouse because it walked on the glue like Jesus on water.)

Then, I thought maybe it was a rat (I still shudder even typing that!), so I bought some giant rat snap traps.  As I set them, I prayed hard that 1) I didn't accidentally trigger the trap and sever a finger and 2) the rat traps would not catch anything because I might actually die if faced with a dead rat, or a live one for that matter. 

Whatever this creature was, it was smart enough to avoid every trap known to man!  Finally, I was so desperate to get rid of it that I tried poison, even though my dad assured me that it meant I would probably find a dead, smelly, partially decayed rodent.  After spending approximately a billion dollars on rodent traps and countless hours obsessively bleaching every surface in my house, my little rodent genius quietly disappeared.  I'm not sure where it went, but I never again saw any evidence of rodent.  The whole situation left me feeling 1) grossed out beyond belief and 2) ready for a vacation from adulthood.  I did not sign up to deal with this kind of thing!

Sometimes general housework makes me want to stop being a grown up too.  You've all seen how hard it is for me to keep my bedroom clean, but it's also really hard to take out the trash.  In my head, I think up lots of reasons why it should be Roomy's turn to take it out, not mine, but I force myself to do it because that's the grown up thing to do.

When I was younger, I kept waiting for the magical moment when I would finally feel like a grown up.  Having a full time job and my own apartment didn't do the trick.  I still felt like a kid playing house.  I still held my own tiny pity party when I - instead of my dad - was stuck with dentist bills, or faced with a giant pile of laundry.  Now I realize that magical moment isn't coming.  I'm resigning myself to adulthood gradually. Every time I kill a spider or take out the trash, I grow up a little.  (I was super grown up the other day when I cleaned my oven!)  With any luck, by the time I'm ready for retirement, I'll have stopped looking around for whose job the yucky tasks really are.  Fingers crossed that by then I'll have a husband who kills spiders!