Being a grown-up: not as much fun as we thought it would be

Yesterday, Nashville woke up to a beautiful, thick, white carpet of snow.

Exact measurements differed according to where you lived, but I’d warrant to say there was anything from 1 to 5 inches in the greater Nashville area.

And it was a beautiful snow. The world just seems quieter, more at peace when it’s blanketed by snow. It’s like the birds, the trees, and even all of us simply want to speak in hushed tones so we don’t disturb the beauty.

When your world is blanketed with snow, you feel like a kid again. The excitement wells up. You want to sit and gaze at the snow, a cup of warm cocoa cradled in your hands. Snow days are the days for pajamas and TV movies and naps and playing in the snow. It doesn’t come that often—at least here anyway.

Sounds perfect, right? And maybe that happened yesterday for some people.

But not for those of us whose workplaces don’t close for anything and the instruction that we’d have to either take a vacation day or make up our time if we wanted to stay home.

As a friend of mine wrote me yesterday, snow sucks when you’re a grown up.

Because you don’t get to go back to sleep or wear your jammies all day. There’s no time for hot cocoa. TV movies are out of the question. You have to go to work and to get there, you have to dig your car out of a mountain of snow.

And then you have to brave the roads, which I’m telling you, aren’t good in the South when it snows. And then you have to watch out for all the other people who aren’t exactly driving carefully on the slick roads and try to remember the stuff you used to know about driving on slick roads from all those years ago when you lived in a place where it snowed more.

Snow isn’t fun when you’re an adult and have to be at work. It’s stressful.

It’s sad, really. When I gaze out at a snow-covered world, I breathe out a sigh I didn’t know I was holding in. I revel in the beauty and serenity, the way the whole world seems to have a chance to start over. I feel peaceful and loved.

And then I get in the car to go to work and the peace fades. A lot. Stress takes over.

All those years as a kid I longed to be grown up, and now I just wish I had recognized how special those moments were.

Being a grown-up—it’s just not as much fun as we thought it would be.