Twenty-Something-Elses

The New York Times Magazine recently published an article about this so-called extended childhood/early adulthood that folks my age are apparently "suffering" from: a pathological unwillingness to move through some of the Big Life Steps that, I guess, serve to separate the men from the boys: graduation, leaving home, financial independence, marriage, and babies. I guess my demographic is clutching onto various holdovers from our angsty teenage days, in that we (okay, I) take a long time between enrollment and convocation, or we're unwilling to relinquish our parent's money, or pop the question, or pop out a kid. The question the NYTM raises: is this lengthy space between high school and "adulthood" a healthy new era full of self-discovery, or is it merely a chasm filled with self-indulgence?

I was chatting with a girlfriend tonight, and she mentioned that one of her colleagues is about to father a child. She felt that, at the age of twenty-eight, he was too young to making new lives happen. I pointed out that he had been married, and settled, and employed, for a while: he was right on track, life-cycle-wise, to becoming a dad. It felt like there's a long stretch of highway between his place in life and my own.

Progress has been made, however. I just moved back to Toronto, after a self-imposed exile/brain vacation in my hometown, and it feels like this is where I'm supposed to be. My parents' home is so comforting, but it's not where I live anymore. My life is in Toronto. My time in Stratford was sort of a sleepaway camp for the newly graduated: save money, reconnect with the family, work a forgettable job. But it wasn't like coming home, to the place where I feel most like myself.

It's not that I'm not grateful to my family for putting up with a summer's worth of messes and computer cords across the living room floor. I happen to like the people I'm related to: we're a smart, funny bunch of folks, and spending time with them was decided not a chore for me. But there was an odd disconnect with the town around me. The last time I had a Stratford summer was five years ago. I loved to binge drink and work crazily long hours at a busy eatery. This time, I was much more interested in sitting on my back porch and talking on the phone to people about kissing protocol, board meetings, and business ventures. Realizing that your family and your parents helped shape you into the person you are today, but that you also need to leave that household to find your own path, is step number one to Big Adult.

Most mid-twenties Toronto citizens have hit most of these markets in some way or another. The general trend among my pals is long-term relationships, often with the kind of cohabitation that makes the Catholic church fan itself like a distressed Southern belle. Not many of my friends are married, and only one of those young-person unions has worked for more than a couple years. Tripping into a full time job doesn't make someone an adult, especially not the type of entry-level jobs that are often a recent graduate's most likely option. Transferring your financial dependence from your parents to your bank is, at best, a lateral move. Having a child is often not the same as "deciding to have a child" in your late teens and early twenties. And so on.

The article uses the word "settle" freely: people settle down, essentially affixing themselves to a lifestyle. Settling down is a sign that one is stable: reliably at the same address for more than a few months, able to pay off a bill, feed a child, procure a job. Maybe the author also meant the calming-down after the headiness of adolescence. But settling also has negative connotations: settling means "accepting despite a complete lack of satisfaction." Maybe my cohort's unwillingness to march into adulthood, to hit all our markers, is the result of not wanting to settle while we settle down. Instead, we're looking for alternatives, creating new and different milestones for ourselves. Instead of "getting married," maybe we're having happier shorter-term relationships. As we move out of our parent's houses, we're moving in with self-selected families made of up friends and relatives. We're taking control of our reproductive destinies by using birth control and destigmatizing terminations, thus acknowledging that children aren't, for everyone, the ideal project to take on once we graduate at the ripe old age of twenty-two.

And we're less likely to take shit from those who poo-poo our recalcitrance about the whole process. Is this new pause after teenagerhood and before parenthood a generation balking at a culture that's raised smart, hard-working kids and then shunted them into a world that seems like a lot of drudgery for not a lot of joy? Or is this a genuinely new step in the process of becoming an adult? That remains to be seen. But the hand-wringing, the insistence that my generation is screwing it up, needs to stop. We may not be adults, but we're not idiots.