I’m not sure when my childhood ended but I’d say my adulthood began the day I bought my first lawn mower

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Work, home, marriage, children. Having a real sense of responsibility.

“Excuse me sir, could you tell me what time it is?” 🧒->👴

When I realised I can’t go crying to my parents anymore and started crying into my pillow instead.

When you are more excited to go to sleep than to wake up.

People say that everything before becoming a parent yourself is just extended childhood. Can partially confirm. If the kid is with someone else, you can also be a child again.

When one of your parents dies when you’re only 6 years old.

When the aliens who secretly physically resemble demons show up to help your entire species reach their next phase of evolution, ascension to a higher plane of existence.

Christmas becomes a deadline.

At one point when I was in my mid to late-twenties, my workplace’s neighbor had their sprinkler system fail and flood their business. It was so bad that a bunch of water seeped under the adjoining wall and we had about a half an inch of water across a third of our fairly large store. There were maybe a dozen or so of us working there at the time, and we all got called in to rapidly move merchandise out into a big truck so that it wouldn’t get spoiled by the damp air before the remediation guys could do their thing.

So there’s all of these people, most of them younger than me, but not by a lot, running back and forth with crates of merchandise, and I looked around and immediately saw how chaotic and inefficient it was.

So I said, “Okay, you stand by the truck. You stand by the front door, you stand just inside. You stand a little further in than that. The first person just picks up a crate, and we bucket brigade it all out to the truck.”

It was an obvious solution, and it made the work go by so much faster and easier, but apparently I was the only one who thought to do it. I realized that in that moment, in a moderately large group, I was the most responsible adult in the room.

And I’m pretty sure that was when my childhood ended.

I left for college at 18, but that wasn’t it for me. It was one month later when my parents announced a divorce and I realized my home life would never be the same. College still felt big and scary, but I couldn’t even go back to the comforts of my childhood ever again.

When children in our apartment building started saying formal hellos while passing by. I still feel old when they do that…

Work

My parents always worked, my older siblings always worked … every adult around me always seemed to be doing something. As a kid it was just normal that everyone everywhere was working at something all the time.

I played and had fun on my own and with my friends but somewhere around the age of ten, I started joining my dad and brothers in all the work they were doing. As soon as I did that, I played less and stopped acting like a kid … I started canceling play time because I was working.

It was sad or disappointing for me … I loved doing all that work and learning so much from my dad and brothers, it was fun in its own way. But when I think about it, the day I started doing adult work, or adult type work, my childhood basically ended.

I think I can even think of the actual moment. Dad and my brothers were renovating the garage and I spent the day just watching them and I really wanted to be part of it all. I picked up a wheel barrow and started moving gravel because dad had asked for material to be moved but everyone was too busy with other work. No one asked me, no one ordered me, I just started shoveling gravel into the wheel barrow. I lifted the barrow and it was too heavy for me, so I unloaded some until I could lift it and move it. As soon as I figured out how much I could carry, I started moving gravel. Then did that about a dozen times until I had moved several yards of gravel.

I was 11 and a big kid for my age. I haven’t really stopped doing things since then.

My parents being dead.