Good Lord How I Must have Aged...

Hyundai has an ingenious new commercial for their Sonata featuring a sixteen year old's bedroom. The point of the commercial is that we don't live like sixteen year olds, but we do have to share the road with them so your car had better be safe.

Obviously this room is exaggerated for entertainment purposes, but I'm pretty sure my room was almost equally horrific when I was sixteen.  No wonder my dad was always on me to clean...  Anyways, there's days when I still feel like I'm sixteen and not ready for all of this real life I've got on my plate, but this ad makes me realize just how old I've become.

Being six months pregnant for my twenty-first birthday, I missed out on a lot of that late college, early twenties, roommate-sharing type of life.  There's a small sense of loss at things I've missed out on.  I've never been able to go out and party without worrying about what's going on at home, crash wherever the night takes me, and sleep in on someone's couch the next day before heading out to a late breakfast I can't keep down.  I never lived in that house in some shady part of the city with five other girls where I had some romantic vision of sleeping late and walking down the street for coffee with the last two dollars I had after paying rent. 

But now when I think of those things, I'm not feeling like I lost out on all that much. 

I still have friends living in that rented roommate-filled house in the city, but that life has lost it's sparkle for me.  I have no desire to share a bathroom with someone who isn't family and I can only think how disgusting it would be to cook on a shared stove in a kitchen I'm not all that keen on cleaning because, hey I didn't make that mess, and then eat off of a plate that some other chick has hand washed.

Ick.

I would loathe cleaning the bathroom filled with some other girl's hair and I'm not sure I could bring myself to scrub a toilet used by other people.  Sure I do that here, but at least I made fifty percent of the bladders that use this one.  I'm pumped that I never have to lug a pile of dirty laundry down to the laundromat and let the world see my bras.  I know the dude who cuts my grass and he's the same one who will be doing this until age or a gratuitous income make him stop. 

I can paint my walls without an angry letter from my landlord. 

I have a garden.

In short, it feels nice to grow up.  Nice to wake up early not because someone's yelling that I'm running late, but because I just wake up early now; things to do- always things to do.  Nice to know that the dirty dishes are there because we had a late ice-cream night, not because Mindy came home drunk again and gorged herself on all things chocolate.  Nice that the hair on the floor belongs to me, and that wet spot on Lou's bed is there in the morning because she's three and has night-time accidents that have nothing to do with drinking too much and then taking an Ambien.  And nice that I can park my car in a garage and not down the street three blocks.

Guess that's all part of growing up.

Heavens I'm getting old.