Age

I recently got food poisoning and, in the throes of despair, I began to wonder if I needed to go to the hospital. So I did the first thing that popped into my head: I called my mom, told her what was going on, and asked her to tell me what to do. She calmed me down, but once I recovered, the whole incident had me thinking – at 27, shouldn’t I be old enough to stop calling my mom every time I have a problem?

And I don’t even live at home, as plenty of my friends do. At our age, most of our parents were married with children, working at the same careers they have now. They were independent adults, who probably just called their parents to say hi, not to unleash a litany of life problems and ask for advice and/or money. Are we just feckless? Sometimes it sure feels that way.

On the other hand, our parents had it a lot easier in some ways. No one, for example, was asking them to do skilled work for free under the guise of an “internship.” Housing prices hadn’t yet skyrocketed. The societal pressure to get married and start a family meant it was easier to find a life partner who was willing to commit. Come to think of it, all my friends who live at home aren’t doing it for funsies, but because the current economy is terrible, jobs are few and far between, and, somehow, living at home has become the responsible adult decision, even if responsible adulthood looks very different than once it did.

Maybe our thirties will be like our parents’ twenties.

Leila Cohan-Miccio