I’ve got this hope-chest thing in the basement. A few summers ago, my mom and I started collecting pink Pyrex bakeware from the 1960’s. They’re kind of awesome. And every antique store we went to(and my mom shopped like it was her job), we would see if they had a piece that I was missing. The last thing we bought together was this rare set of four nesting mixing bowls. Usually you could only find the largest pink bowl, or the smallest, but there they all were. So we bought them.
They’re waiting for me right now, two floors down. But the plan was always that my mom and I would take those boxes with us to my first apartment, and unpack everything together, put these symbols of my life as an adult where they belonged and revel in the insanity that I was kinda-sorta grown up.
And I’m awake right now because I can’t stop thinking about what will happen if I break one of those bowls. I can’t call my mom and tell her to be on the lookout on one of her many adventures in yard-saleing.
I don’t know how to be an adult. I don’t know how to iron, or balance a checkbook, or fold a fitted sheet (and I do realize that these are things that aren’t that big of a deal, I can learn them) because my mom was supposed to teach me all this shit. How am I supposed to live my Romantic-Comedy life if all my clothes are wrinkled?
Now is seriously not the time to be worrying about this. I have work in the morning, but I cannot—cannot—sleep. I just can’t, and it’s because my mind is just babbling at me about all the shit I can’t do, and what happens is I need to make gravy and I don’t know how (because I hate the stuff, so my mom always made it for my dad and her), and what about the bottom sheets?
Is my linen closet doomed to forever be in a shambles because all my bottom sheets are just balled up and thrown in there? Which I won’t be able to fix because I don’t know how to iron, which won’t matter because I willl have overdrawn my checking account and will be living in a box—BECAUSE I CAN’T BALANCE MY CHECKBOOK.
