By this stage in my left, I had expected that I would feel like less of an imposter in the adult world. I'm still waiting for that to happen. That means that I often congratulate myself when I do manage the grown up stuff up well.
We hired a car when we went to Gold Coast, which was convenient. I booked it all online, and even got extra insurance in case anything happened to the car, so our excess wouldn't be, well, excessive. Go me. Then when we got to the car, we took photos of all the little bumps and scrapes it had before we drove it. And I also thought to take a photo of the number plate, mostly in case we parked it somewhere and couldn't remember which car it was.
It turned out the number plate photo was a good idea, because we had to write it on our hotel sign in sheet. And I made a remark to J about how grown up and organised we were, and we both laughed. The girl at the counter though was slightly horrified. She looked at us, and said, "Don't you feel like grown ups?" and we were all like "No, not really, not yet". She looked at the girls and said "But, you have kids. You're parents." She seemed upset. Apparently she is planning to have a baby in the next few years, and was looking forward to how that would mean that she had her life together. We were rolling about laughing by this stage, then realised she was serious, so did try for a more dignified pose, but I think it was too late by then.
I had coffee with an old uni friend and I told her, and we had a laugh, remembering how grown up we felt when we were getting married and having babies at the beginning. We thought we had life sorted out. And now, 20 years on as supposedly responsible adults, we both felt slightly out of our depth and off balance, and had to remind ourselves of how to adult. And were delighted by managing things like not losing our vehicles, and not forgetting to get our hair cut. We agreed that life was definitely not as black and white as it had seemed 20 years before. We acknowledged that we are kinder, with a degree of shame over our less charitable younger selves.
When we got back to Sydney, we had to retrieve our own car from the airport car park where we'd left it four days previously. We had intended to take a photo of the pole we parked next to, with its handy number and colour code. But we forgot. There was also a handy space on our parking ticket for the floor number and colour, but I couldn't find a pen. We did find the car after visiting one wrong floor, so that surely counts as just about having it together, right?
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