Koslow - Slouching toward adulthood: how to let go so your kids can grow up

A Plume Book

Interviews for Slouching Toward Adulthood were conducted during 2010 and 2011. Since then, some people have moved, quit jobs, started jobs or graduate school or businesses, married, had babies, given up yoga, and so on. Also, in a few cases an interviewee has requested that the author not reveal his or her real name, surname, or identifying details, and the author has honored those requests. An asterisk (*) indicates a changed name.

To Jed and Rory, who always make me proud,
and Rob, a wise partner in parenthood

Everyone is kneaded out of the same dough but not baked in the same oven.

Yiddish proverb

T he clock struck noon. It was a weekday, bright and shiny. I gently knocked. Its latesweetie, shouldnt you be getting up?

A few minutes later, Sweetie staggered out of his childhood bedroom in boxers, stubble, and a Beastie Boys T-shirt cherished since tenth grade. Five months before, Jed had moved back home after a two-year postcollege spin working at a San Francisco record label. A few months earlier the plans for my son to open an East Coast branch of the company had fizzlednot that this development appeared to have cramped his style. A weekly unemployment check was financing more late-night eating and drinking than my husband and I had done in the last two decades.

Hows the job hunt? I asked as he leisurely munched his bagel and paged through a magazine.

Mumble, mumble.

No, really, hows it going?

Fine.

What does that mean?

This time I got the same look I received years before when Id heard our son had his first girlfriend. Who is she? Id asked, stoked with motherly glee.

I release that information on a need-to-know basis, Jed answered, and you have no need to know.

As Sweetie sat across from me at the breakfast table, I realized that You Cant Go Home Again wasnt on my sons English major syllabus.

All around us, sometimes in our own homes, we see young, well-educated Americans postponing full maturity and its attendant responsibilities. The beloved offspring to which I refer is most likely well over a decade into deodorant, partnered sex, and, depending on gender, tampons or even Rogaine. He or she is way past having earned the legal right to vote, defend our country, drive, maintain private medical records, enter into a contract, marry, smoke, go to jail, andif he or she has hit twenty-fiverent a car or be elected to Congress. If a parent of such a person tweaks the hair and clothes, when her loving eyes gaze upon this child she may see some version of herself or her partner at the same age. This 2.0 reflection may look down on the reader, literally, from a greater height or have boobs that are a cup or two biggeror perhaps it just seems that way, with her dcolletage so often on display. There might be tattoos and tongue studs, but given Brazilians, landing strips, and manscaping, theres possibly not much pubic hair, although the parent prefers not to think about that.

Who are these people sandwiching a chunky stage between adolescence and adulthood, these individuals who resemble adults but arent, exactly? The Margaret Mead who lurks within every parent cant help but notice curious discrepancies between the boy or girl under consideration and the grown-up we swear we were at the same age. Weve come to think of adults as people who settle down. Adults are financially independent and fiscally solvent, albeit usually with debt and a mortgage, usually tethered to a steady job or its reasonable facsimile. Trust fund kids never have seemed very adult, evenlike Brooke Astors greedy old babywhen theyre eighty.

An adult isnt in a state of constant improvisation. An adult isnt shackled to his or her mother or father by cell phone or purse strings or both in a three-legged race toward an undecided destination. An adult doesnt crave constant stroking from Mom and Dad.

In the eyes of most real grown-ups, a random five- or ten-year slice of adulthood does not include going to school, taking a break, going to school againpossibly again and againstarting a job, starting another job, moving in with Mom and Dad, traveling here and traveling there, taking out loans, borrowing from the parents, and imbibing their grandparents cocktails while accumulating credit card debt and purchasing cunning yet quickly replaced electronics.

Adults tend not to post their romantic status online, pulling back the curtains on their private life and publicizing intimate secrets. They dont fall in and out of love so many times they need Excel to track the relationships before they start to serially cohabitate, postponing marriage, kids, and getting fully established at jobs, much less careers. Adults may have sucked up the fizzy best seller Eat, Pray, Love, but they dont see Elizabeth Gilbert, its author, as their north star as they wing off for extended stays in Italy, India, and Indonesia. These young adventurers may also be unaware that Gilbert followed Eat, Pray, Love with Committed, where the author defends matrimony in pointillist detail. Adults feel that usually by the mid-thirties, they need to stopand here I use the technical termfarting around.

WHERE WANDERING BEGINS

The road separating todays adult from yesterdays starts to diverge when parents drop off Jenny or Josh at college. For most of todays parents this is uncharted territory and not only because of Adderall replacing LSD, the unisex dorms and bathrooms, and the comfortably out same-sex relationships and transgender students. After visiting well over a dozen campuses during high schoolHogwarts, if the parents could afford ittaking thousands of dollars worth of Sisyphean test prep courses, and perhaps enjoying a jolly gap year in a faraway land, most American kids from solidly middle-class and upper-middle-class families enroll in an institution of higher learning. Every September, you can hear a transcontinental sigh as moms and dads among the privileged, anxious classes articulate immense relief, glad to be exorcised of their itchy need to deliver a droning loop about safety schools and U.S. News & World Report rankings, boring even themselves.

Mom and Dad accompany their newly minted first-years (freshman is 1969 pre-feminist Neanderthal argot and even frosh has landed in the linguistic compost heap) to a campus. There, they unload many, many boxes, perhaps ordered with the help of Bed, Bath & Beyonds Shop for College service, where millions of college students quiz themselves to determine their decorating style and scrutinize a list of recommended products so they can mesh purchases with their roommates. Eventually families depart, perhaps after attending a misty ceremony designed to encourage Mom and Dad to bid their chickadee good-bye. Parents may delude themselves into thinking they are leaving kids to learn to fight their own battlescollege is a growth experience!and bushwhack through administrative obfuscation in order to land a coveted spot in Kick-Ass Poets 101. With that, Mom and Dad take their first deep, cleansing breath in eighteen years, and generally celebrate by having sex.

Some students major in something solid, graduate, and hop onto the hamster wheel to high-powered jobs, destination weddings, early parenthood, and homes furnished from Design Within Reach, West Elm, and CB2. Thats the sunny side of todays America.