Growing up, my mum used to regularly refer to the act of being an adult as "burning the candle at both ends." Of course, this isn't a new idea; the idiom has been around quite a while, but now that I'm in my thirties, I think she may have been wrong.
Adulthood isn't just about burning the candle at both ends. It's about burning all of the candles at both ends, while attempting to juggle them and simultaneously clean up any hot wax that has sprayed everywhere in the process.
When you're a kid, you don't even have the maturity to notice how much your parents do to keep the world around you standing.
You complain about how hard it is to just bring your dishes to the sink, without considering that the person asking you to do that task has the harder job of actually washing yours and everyone else's.
You tell yourself that when you're grown-up, you'll buy all the Barbies/books/action figures/whatever you want, but then reality hands you the expenses your parents had ben paying all along.
As adults ourselves, we quickly learn that the clubhouse has a 20-year mortgage, a leak in the roof, and a family of raccoons that has moved in under the deck.
Personally, I'm the latter kind of girl, which means that I fall victim to friends that have perfected the secret third option: ask for help from friends who know how to google things effectively.
I don't fall for that anymore. Instead, I give some generic advice for how to find it themselves. Because they should have to juggle some of these waxy candles too.
