Adulting is hard...

Recently I’ve seen a number of variations on this phrase. Some are funny. Some are thought provoking. And some are just good advertising.

Adulting is hard, you need a coffee

Adulting is hard - you go to bed when you don’t want to and then get up again when you don’t want to

Adulting is hard because you have to adult tomorrow too

I’ll be honest (that’s what blogs are for, right?) – this week, adulting has felt hard. Everything has felt hard. My energy has been low, my optimism has been low, my self-worth has been low. I’ve mostly wanted to shut out responsibilities and work and deadlines. Also resting and cooking good food and going to bed on time. Also spending time with God and reading the Bible and worship. Basically anything that I know is actually good for me has felt like too much effort.

I’ve wondered if this is what some of the struggling teens I know feel like. It’s not a nice place to be, even when I know it’s likely to pass in a few days and I’ll bounce back to something more like my normal cheeriness. What must it feel like to be trapped here for weeks or months or even years?

And so I’ve been thinking about adulting. And childing. And about looking after myself, and about being looked after by my Daddy. I reckon a lot of the ways I think about all this are, as usual, turned upside down in the Kingdom Jesus came to restore. And as usual I reckon the foster kids can help shine a light on just where I’m going wrong.

In some ways, my kids have done more adulting than you’d expect for their ages.

At 17, Hanh was emotionally entirely independent of anyone else. He didn’t share hopes, likes or fears. It took us several weeks before he’d even say which of the Vietnamese dishes I was trying to cook were anything like they should be – though occasionally his face would give it away when I’d produced something particularly bad. Even with a translator to help him explain, he showed no desire to seek or gain support with the enormous challenges of finding himself in foster care with a total stranger.

At 15, Harmony always had to know what her escape route was. She could access the front and back door keys. She knew the bathroom door could be unlocked from outside if needed. The child locks in the car were off. Still, she felt safer when she also had a window key on her person. Every now and then she’d use it – I’d wake up in the morning to find a ground floor window had been wide open all night – as if she had needed to check the keys worked, that she was in control of where she was and could get out at any time.

At 12, Ella wouldn’t trust any one else to arrange her social life. She’d check the weekly diary and the events coming up on the kitchen whiteboard every day, checking and double checking what we’d arranged to do, with whom, when. She’d confirm arrangements directly with her friends but get them wrong and cause endless confusion. She’d arrange other trips without checking and inevitably double or triple book herself. And whenever we did finally manage to meet up with someone, she’d say hello and immediately start trying to arrange the next visit – it was as if the diary mattered more than the actual event in front of her.

At 11, Abbie insisted on handling her friendships herself, despite getting into a fight, a detention, or both, every day since the start of term. Her teacher had realized that the racist language and offensive gestures she used were learned behaviour and that Abbie didn’t even know what they meant. But despite the school’s attempts to help, she wouldn’t use any of their strategies, wouldn’t let the TA help her talk to the other girls, wouldn’t let a teacher observe at a distance and intervene if needed. No, she had to do it her way. Even if that meant having no lunch and coming home with a grimy tearstained face -again.

And yet, in other ways, they’ve been remarkably childish.

He was 17 – but Hanh’s sense of humour sometimes baffled his classmates. He loved hiding behind corners, jumping out on them; he thought silly nicknames were hilarious; he watched little kids’ cartoons. He was tickled pink when he managed to say something funny in English, pointing at a tiger in his visual dictionary when he was learning to say what his favourite food was. He laughed and laughed at the look on his tutor’s face. When he giggled, he looked like a child too. I loved those moments.

She was 15 – but when we went for her Covid jab, Harmony insisted she couldn’t go in unless she held my hand. She screwed her face up as if death was immanent, and squeezed my fingers so hard I really thought one might break. And she really did want the ‘I was brave today’ plaster that the doctor half-apologetically offered.

She was 12 – but Ella loved playing with the kids over the road, only half her age, and when she could get me and Becky, their mum, to join in too, she was ecstatic. She’d pretend to be an adult, and to be supervising… until she forgot herself and became as enthusiastic a competitor as anyone else – taking sneaky extra steps to get closer in ‘What’s the time Mr Wolf’, dancing in a squat to try to win Musical Bumps, squealing with excitement when the music stopped and she was holding the parcel.

She was 11, but Abbie’s favourite thing to do after school was colouring. Her motor skills weren’t great, so the pictures had to be big and bold, with nice fat black lines so it was easy to stay inside them. She loved new pens – especially scented gel pens with glitter. And other crafts for much younger children worked too – pre-punched sewing kits to make a finger puppet, or sticker books, or finger paints. As long as the instructions were clear so she didn’t have to decide too much for herself – she’d be busy for hours.

Being an adult is like folding a fitted sheet

Adulting is soup and I am a fork

Adulthood is like looking both ways before you cross the street and then being hit by a plane

It’s interesting, isn’t it? They’ve been both more adult, and more child, than you’d think. This is exactly what childhood trauma does to you.

More adult – because they’ve had to be the adult. And more child – because they’ve not had the chance to be children.

The adults who should have been adulting for them, caring for them, providing for them, have not done so – and so they’ve had to stop playing and step into the breach themselves. In many cases, they’ve done so on behalf of others too. We don’t know Hanh’s story, but it’s common for traffickers to offer labour to an older brother in order to provide food or education for younger siblings. Harmony was the middle of three; when her older sister wasn’t around she’d try to keep her little sister safe – and blame herself when she didn’t manage. Ella hadn’t lived with any of her siblings for years, but she knew there were seven others out there, and she worried over each of them, imagining and fretting over what might be happening. And Abbie had got home from school each day and scooped the baby up, taking him away from needles and broken glass and days-old food scraps, doing her best to be a mother when she desperately needed her own mum.

The ways they rejected the adulting they needed – the parenting they needed – the care, provision, security, love – made total sense. Because they’d had to survive without it. They’d needed it, and it wasn’t there. The wounds from that kind of rejection go deep. They’d learned to manage. But they weren’t going to open themselves back up to being hurt like that again. No way.

And I reckon I can see the echoes in my own life pretty clearly. Faint echoes for sure – I haven’t faced the same neglect. No, my parents were great – they are great – and I am so grateful that I grew up knowing I was loved. But only the perfect Daddy can ever parent us exactly as we need; and life has added plenty more scars and bruises and tender places on my soul. As a child, as an adult, I have needed care, provision, security, love, and there were times when it wasn’t there. And you will be the same.

Like me, you might be tempted to dismiss these struggles. Unless we’ve been trafficked, or abused, or seriously neglected, we feel we don’t have the right to be hurt. But that’s just not true. It’s not how the human heart works. Squashing our hurt down, ignoring it, saying it’s not valid – none of those approaches make it go away.

And how does God feel when we try to bully ourselves into feeling fine?

As parents, we don’t tell our kids to stop whinging unless they’ve actually broken their leg. Our Daddy doesn’t dismiss our pain either. And if it’s important to him, maybe we should stop pushing it away – and face up to how we really feel.

The wounds from rejection – from our emotional needs going unmet – go deep. Whether the causes were at child-protection level, or just the everyday bumps and bruises of an imperfect world, we end up wounded. All of us. Sure, we learn to manage. But so often, part of that learning is becoming hard. We’re not going to open ourselves back up to being hurt like that again. No way.

And so we, too, compensate. We over-adult.

Adulting is wanting to be invited but not wanting to go

Adulting is putting back a pack of chicken for £6.45 because you see one for £6.23

Adulting is having the ‘we have food at home’ talk with yourself

Let me speak for myself. I look at the foster kids and think their over-adulting is obvious – and obviously misplaced. But then is mine really so different?

Sometimes, like Hanh, I choose to be emotionally independent. When things are tough, I tend to pull up the drawbridge, go quiet, see family and friends less. Sometimes I don’t even admit the sadness, anger or pain to myself, as if I can will it out of existence by just looking the other way.

Sometimes, like Harmony, I need to know where my escape routes are. When do I get to rest, to sleep, to put the challenges down for a while? When there isn’t a weekend lie-in on the horizon, how can I manufacture an escape to another world? – and then I realise I’ve whiled away an hour on social media scrolling.

Sometimes, like Ella, I can search for control through a crazy social life. Filling my calendar, looking busy, keeping sadness at bay with high-octane hurry. In these times I can’t say no, try to do too much on a single day and wind up exhausted, only partially present, thinking more about the diary than the friend.

Sometimes, like Abbie, I resist being helped. I know things aren’t going great, that I’m in over my head, but when friends try to support I pull away. I’ll manage, I tell myself, ignoring the fact that I’ve not managed too well to date. As if stubbornness by itself can address the underlying problems.

The world recommends all of these approaches. We may even dish out this advice to others. Be independent – You deserve a break – Live life to the max – Don’t be a burden.

And then… along comes my Daddy and tears up the rulebook.

It turns out being adult is mostly just googling how to do stuff

It’s so much easier to blame the grownups than to be one

I want to pause adulting and lower the difficulty level

It’s true, the Bible does occasionally tell us we need to grow up.

For example, the church in Corinth are rebuked for still needing infant milk when they should be onto solid food by now. It sounds like Paul’s wanting them to adult-up, right? But actually he is honing in on their worldliness, not their childlikeness; the transformation he is looking for is spiritual maturity, not adult behaviour. There are quite a few similar passages where we’re urged to grow into spiritual maturity, which is spelled out as growing up into Christ. How striking is that? Growing up is about greater connection with Jesus. Not being independent, or self sufficient, or hard, or controlling. Maturity in the Bible isn’t much like my idea of adulting.

And think about Jesus himself. Sure, when he needed to, he could hold his own with the adults of his day – he could debate with the religious leaders, stand with silent dignity before Pilate, even knowingly take up the sin of the world on his shoulders and bear it into the grave. But look at what he loves to do. Throwing surprise parties for thousands. Going for a midnight walk on a lake. Hanging out with children. Strolling in the cornfields, picking off the grain heads with his fingers. Getting up early, sneaking off on his own and watching the sunrise with his daddy. Hanging out with his friends. Laughing. Sleeping out under the stars. Cooking fish over an open fire on the beach. Living life one day at a time, in wonder and joy and communion with his daddy and his friends and anyone who was also willing to drop their worries, their self-importance, their endless, ridiculous adulting.

And then there’s this: Jesus came into the world not as an adult, but as a baby. His incarnation included more time as a child, a teen, a youth, than as an adult.

You can be pretty sure that if that’s the way God chose to do it, it wasn’t a waste of time.

I need to think some more about what it means to be a child. But one thing I am pretty sure of. Being an adult – at least the way I often mean it – is not just hard. It’s a really bad idea.

Being an adult is the dumbest thing I have ever done