The Trials of Semi-Adulthood

I "left" home over ten years ago. Let's define "left" loosely as the majority of my earthly belongings would from that point on be held in suitcases, trunks, and boxes flying from various points in the world, with Florida as their final destination.

This all changed about eighteen months ago when I really left home. This time not only did everything come with me but I left behind the bittersweet implication that I would not live there again. This was most likely harder for me to accept than my parents given my raging and seemingly incurable Peter Pan syndrome. I could blame this fear of growing up on my father, whose own mortality was tragically stung to the core when his father passed away before his twentieth birthday, but I'll try to be an adult about it and blame it on myself. Not surprisingly I have chosen a career path, or rather have paid for a career path, where I can push adulthood and true responsibility further back. Being a professional graduate student is a drawn-out exercise in immortality and vanity. We revel in the limits our mind can reach at the end of a semester as we print out an obscure twenty-page paper that only a few people will ever read but that we know will live on forever.

As much as this seems like a perfect union, my syndrome and a profession that celebrates it, there is something missing. I am at the Diane Keaton-point in my film where I am juggling a baby and my career. And I feel myself leaning towards moving to Vermont, so to speak. There is no question in my mind that the most important thing for me is my family. Which is why living the way I do is so difficult. Peter Pan did not have a family. And nor do the grad students you see on any college campus. It's as if we all just appeared one day, autonomous and ready to lend our minds to the greater good of research. But I have a family. And they are living their lives without me. And even though there are occasional guest appearances, that isn't enough for me. I thought this feeling would go away but it hasn't. I've been told this feeling never goes away.

Am I coward if I duck out? Is it time to finally face the question I've been dodging since the spring of 2003 when I was supposed to get a job? Has seven years been enough time to put off true adulthood?

Am I ready to leave my Neverland?