I'm 31 years old, married, and (finally) no longer a student. I've lived more than 500 miles away from my parents for 9 years. I have a mortgage, 2 cars and a life insurance policy. Odd, then, that nothing has made me feel more like an adult than having a repairman in to fix the oven. In fact, I think I got a bigger dose of "I'm an adult now" from having the guy in than I would have just fixing it myself. (Which, it turns out, I probably could have done, saving myself a big chunk of the $215 the repairman cost.) Maybe it's a money thing: I subconsciously equate adulthood with the ability to spend $215, and not have to worry about there not being money to cover it. Maybe in my head adulthood is the (financial) freedom to not have to be a jack-of-all-trades: to use my expertise to get money so that I don't have to have expertise in fixing ovens, or steam-cleaning carpet, or changing the oil in a car. When the repairman (who, btw, was more than just a bit creepy) showed up, I was working on a sewing project. After using my bathroom, cooling himself in the AC vent, telling me how to keep the drain in the back of my freezer open with boiling water, checking if the handle on my dishwasher worked, attempting to pull my contact-paper memo board off the wall and, oh yeah, fixing the oven, he told me that the part that broke (igniter) only lasts about 5 years, and in the future I could probably replace the part myself, or at least instruct a friend or coworker (I don't think he picked up on the fact that I'm married) how to do it. "You're handy," he said, "not a lot of people can do stuff like sewing these days." I think it was meant as a compliment (or maybe even a lame come-on) but it felt like what he was saying was, "you clearly can't afford to pay this kind of money for a routine repair, so maybe you should think about fixing it yourself." Most of what I was hearing was from guilt over having spent so much money on what turned out to be a relatively simple task. Part of me was upset that he could generalize being skilled at sewing (which he actually had no evidence of) to being handy with appliances. Part of me was mad at the implication that I couldn't afford his services. He thought he was being kind: showing me how to do the fix myself, telling me there was a $10 coupon in the yellow pages that he'd take even though it was expired. I read it as a judgement that there's something wrong with me that would prevent me from making good money. I don't want to waste my money; nobody does. However, the ability to contract out tasks that I could conceivably do is a large part of what I have always wanted in my life. I love my parents and everything they've done for me, but we didn't have money, and that meant holey umbrellas, washing out ziplock bags, and servicing our own appliances. I guess that for me, not having to live like that means success. At being an adult. Having my oven repaired means I'm successfully being an adult.