At some point, I became an adult. But I have zero clue of when this happened. I did not feel like an adult in my first job after grad school. I clearly was an adult in the eyes of my students, but I didn’t feel like an adult. But during the first year of my marriage, I felt like an adult. So I assume the transformation happened some time between Year A and Year B.

It’s such an odd question because it happens separate from any collective trigger, individualized to every person. For instance, someone may feel like an adult at 18, while another feels like an adult at 30. And unlike other life events (graduation, marriage, etc), nothing triggers the moment. You either feel it or you don’t, and that feeling could be tied to any number of reasons from big, life changing events to the fact that you successfully navigated a raise at work. It’s different for each person.

The Atlantic tried to pinpoint “what is it that makes people grown up?” It’s a fascinating article that will make you trace the paths in your own life, trying to decide the first time you thought to yourself, “Oh, I’m the grownup.”

So? When did it happen? When did you become an adult?

I have already completed my arc from excited (a puzzle game!) to not excited (oh… this is feeling like work), so we’re not joining along. But in case YOU were looking for something to do because there are only so many Wordle spinoffs one can play daily, A.J. Jacobs has released a puzzle hunt.

Tell me if you try it. We got stuck on the passphrase and then distracted by more library holds coming in.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Telling an Infertile Person You’re Pregnant” (Finding a Different Path)
• “How To Tell Someone You’re Pregnant” (Stirrup Queens) — thanks, Mali!

Okay, now my choices this week.

This brings up one of my favorite things that happened once upon a time on blogs. One person would post something, and then response posts would pop up on other people’s blogs. And you could jump around the internet, reading different points of view. So on that note…

Finding a Different Path has a post about how to tell someone infertile you’re pregnant. She has examples of the best way and the worst way, pulling from the various ways she has been given news over the years. The “worst way” is… awful. Plus I love this advice: “Have a hypothetical conversation — ‘how would you want me to tell you my news?’ — ahead of time.”

Aaaaaand… No Kidding in NZ riffed on the same topic, but covering slightly different ground: the feelings that bubble up after the fact. She writes, “People who should know better judge us, even if we react perfectly decently. (See Jess’s post for an example of this.) We judge ourselves too, sometimes even more harshly.” And ooooof, her worst one is awful, too.

Kveller has a piece about how the mikveh fits in with infertility. This may be too niche a topic, but it resonated a lot with me. Infertility wasn’t my first time going to the mikveh, but it was definitely a point of return. And she describes it perfectly: it’s a resetting.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled reminds us in a roundup of news that it’s National Infertility Awareness Week (NIAW). Which I had forgotten, even though I clearly haven’t forgotten infertility. This is the only mention I’ve seen of it this week. Which feels odd.

The roundup to the Roundup: Go hunt some puzzles. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between April 22 – April 29) and not the blog’s main URL. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week? Read the original open thread post here.

When the kids were little, I had a hard time reading Where the Wild Things Are aloud because my throat would catch. I’ve written about this before — how much I identify with Tzippy. She is the wild thing who cries out to Max, “Oh please don’t go – we’ll eat you up – we love you so!” when he leaves the wild rumpus.

The wild things, after all, are terribly misunderstood. They don’t gnash their teeth and roll their eyes out of hate. They do this out of love. Out of a love that comes from an enormous well of pain because life–as well as our love–is so deeply out of our control. If the wild things actually had the power to stop Max, they would have. But like too many of us know, we can shake our fist at the world all we want, and it can’t bring back what is missing; what has never come.

I’ve been thinking about the book a lot because the twins are looking at colleges, trying each one on inside their head and wondering if it would be a good place to live and learn for four years. They are lucky that they like a lot of schools and will make themselves happy in multiple places.

I have been trying to give them the space to try on the colleges in their heads even though my inner Tzippy is roaring. She does not want them to go. She wants to eat them up because she loves them so. She cannot imagine how she will get her feet to move out the door when she drops them off for college. How she will make it through those first days. Those first weeks. Those first months until they come home for a visit. I feel very lonely, out of step with other parents who talk about big plans for their upcoming empty nest.

When I wrote those posts in 2009 and 2012, I knew that we would one day be at this point. That I would feel this way when I reached this point. But it is very different living this point; feeling my inner Tzippy reaching out and roaring every single day.

Okay, so Carolyn Hax actually starts her advice with: “You don’t have to tell people to mind their own business … You don’t have to respond to people, period. You have so much power here, and always do. You get to choose what you say.”

The advice is for a person who doesn’t want to say why they’re not drinking, but it’s applicable to any nosy questioner. I am terrible at using silence, but it’s a skill worth perfecting because there is so much power in simply not answering what you don’t feel comfortable answering.

As Carolyn says, all you need to do is “either ignore the comments as if they never happened or, other end of the scale, make silent eye contact with an eyebrow-raise.”

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I just found out about the coolest museum downtown, a word museum focusing on how we learn words and use words and invent words.

LOOK AT THIS!

And they have a restaurant and a gift shop for word nerds. I feel so lucky that I live near such a cool place.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.