Do Not Grow Up

The other day, the Son of Never Stops Eating and I were having a conversation in my car about school.  It went like this:

Son: I wish I was done with school.
Me: Well, when you grow up, no more school. You can get a job.
Son: I don't want to grow up.
Me:  Oh, so you want it both ways.  You want to be a kid forever but you don't want to go to school.
Son: Yes. That's what I want.

I have to admit, I can sympathize with him. Sometimes being an adult sucks.  It's definitely not the life of paradise I imagined when I was a kid.   He's already figured it out and he's only 13.  When I was his age, I couldn't wait to grow up and not have to follow stupid rules.  I could do what I wanted when I wanted to do it and no one was going to stop me.

Then I actually grew up and I found out that it didn't really work like I had envisioned in my youth.  Instead of my parents telling me what to do, I acquired a job and a boss, who also told me what to do. Instead of getting all summer off,  I got two weeks off.  Instead of spending my money on fun stuff like clothes and music, I had to spend it on boring, stupid stuff like rent, electricity and car insurance.  When I came home at night, dinner did not miraculously appear on the table.  I even had to make my own dentist appointments. When I got sick, I had to be miserable all by myself in my lonely apartment.

To make matters even worse, the Grandpa of No was decidedly unsympathetic when I called him to complain that after paying all my bills and fixing the brakes on my aging 1983 Honda Accord, I had almost no money left.  Not even enough money to go see a movie.  The world's smallest violin was playing a sad, sad song.

The other night, my son was out riding his scooter while I was on the computer, trying to set up a new account for TV and internet service.  One company had been sold to another company and the entire process was not going well.  I was getting mad and saying bad words at inanimate objects in the insane hope that the computer would produce a wizard with a magic wand to fix the malfunctioning technology.  See how that works?  Kid gets to go outside and have fun, adult gets to yell at computer in frustration. 

I suppose that being an adult isn't all bad. You can vote, although sometimes your choice of candidates isn't that great. Once you're over 21, you can legally have a glass of wine or a beer with your BFF's.  After you have children, you can make stupid rules that they have to follow, like "The hamster is not allowed, under any circumstances, to roam freely around the house", or "If you are the one who clogged the toilet, you are the one who needs to plunge it", and when they complain you can offer to help them move out, because your house, your rules.  But it's definitely not all my adolescent self had envisioned.

My son, however, he's got it all figured out.  Stay a kid forever.  Good plan.

If only it worked like that in real life.