Sometimes you become adult when you’d rather not

You know how you didn’t wake up one morning, on your 18th birthday, or your 21st, and suddenly you were an adult? How it seemed to happen in steps over time?

That first paycheck.

Buying renter’s insurance.

The first time something went wrong with your car — and you didn’t call your dad for help.

They are the kinds of moments that nudge us a little more firmly into adulthood.

Some are hard shoves. Getting fired. A car accident.

Some are punches in the face. Going to war. Losing a loved one.

At an Academy of Medical Sciences meeting in Oxford, experts pinpointed an age as the entry point to being an adult. It’s 30. Until then, our brains still are developing.

Adulthood, one expert said, is “a much more nuanced transition that takes place over three decades.”

I didn’t feel like an adult until I was 33. It happened in a moment.

Clearly I was an adult. I had two college degrees and a job. I owned a house. I was eight months pregnant.

I felt like an adult a lot of the time, but it sometimes felt like I was trying on the costume.

That changed in a night as I sat at my dad’s hospice bed in 1999. My dad struggled to breathe.

I struggled, too. Between wanting him to stay and letting him go.

I went into the bathroom and while I was in there, I prayed. “If you are going to take him anyway,” I said aloud, “take him quickly.”

It was there on my knees on the cold tile floor, hugely pregnant, praying to a god I wasn’t sure I believed in, that I realized I was ready to let go of the person I cared about most.

It felt completely grown up. Maybe the best measure of whether you’re an adult is wishing you didn’t have to be one.