When was the first time you really felt like a grown up (if ever)?
I had to think about that if ever part, especially when you factor in my sophomoric sense of humor.
The real answer is…..it happened, and only in looking back did I realize that I (for the most part, I grew up)
I never saw it coming. I had a Wife, kids, a mortgage, and a job. After the kids moved out, I’m left with just my wife and my dog.
At my age (You got me by a few years, Bocopro), I guess it’s over. I also don’t climb ladders to do work, and I realized that the most valuable tool in your toolbox is a checkbook.
Delusions of Adequacy 
Grew up in a house full of adults . . . only kid there . . . lotta chores, but a lotta freedom. Out on the edge of town . . . chickens, hogs, milk cow, truck patch, pond, squirrel rifle, 16 gauge Remington pump for bobwhites and ringnecks . . . .
Mother remarried when I was 13. Both she and her husband went to work every weekday, leaving me to fend for myself.
Quit feelin like a kid about the time I hit junior year in high school. But . . . still wanted to act like an idiot, drivin too fast, pullin pranks on the cops, hangin out with “adventurous” girls, doin really dumbass stuff.
Then one day around 1979 or so, I’d done 9 years as enlisted Navy without having to actually adultify . . . had several years under my belt as a junior officer . . . and a hangover from a night I didn’t really remember much of.
Sitting there in Paradise (Pearl Harbor) eating really greasy pork adobo and fried rice for breakfast while my wife got ready for work and my kids for school . . . I realized my two daughters were turning into young women and my son was becoming a mama’s boy.
Like a bell rang, a timer went off, a page turned, the filter got changed, the “act like a jerk” light on the dashboard quit flashing and went off.
At that point I retired; soon afterward basically gave up drinking. Quit smoking. Stopped trying to murder the ball on par-5 tees. In my 40s, fully grown, but not quite grown up.
Kids now all out of school ‘cept my youngest, wife workin at the Navy Exchange, too freakin hot to play golf on the crowded Navy course in P’cola, so I took my G.I. Bill and set myself up to teach English and history.
Loved it! Taught two classes of adult high school (dropouts, unwed mothers, people tryin to stay qualified for unemployment bennies), then 4 classes of dual-enrollment (most fun I ever had), and then 11 years at the local university teaching freshman comp, advanced writing, technical writing, and drama.
Finally one day the smoking, the carousing, the booze, the fatty foods caught up with me and I woke up on an OR table with a nurse shaving areas of my body I’d never considered shaving (for installing stents in my blocked coronaries thru the groin arteries).
Decided 24 years of service in the USN and 16 teaching other people’s kids about langwidge and litrachurr was enuf, so I quit everything except golf and writing stories and poems nobody ever read.
So . . . reckon I grew up 3 times — once in the 50s, once in the 70s, and finally when that ominous black bird perched on my shoulder, said “Nevermore” and “Follow me.”
For a lotta years I didn’t wanna be the daddy, but somehow I got thru it with the scythe leaving just a nasty scratch on my main circ pump.
And I STILL don’t know who that guy is in my bathroom mirror. Old dude . . . mimics my movements . . . mocks me . . . kinda scares me.
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