There wasn’t one single moment when I suddenly realized I was an adult. There were two, and they were very different.
The first was a good one. It was Christmas, sometime around the years when Lizzie was very young, and for the first time, my in-laws came to our house for Christmas instead of us packing up and going somewhere else. We hosted. We did the meal, the gifts, the whole thing, and somehow it all worked. After everyone left, I remember sitting in a comfortable chair in the living room with a fire roaring behind me and a drink in my hand. The house was quiet again, and I had this overwhelming sense of satisfaction.
We had actually done it.
It reminded me of Clark Griswold in Christmas Vacation, standing there after somehow pulling everything together and having that little “I did it” moment. That was how I felt. For most of my life, Christmas had meant going to somebody else’s house. The adults hosted. The adults prepared the meal. The adults made everything happen. And suddenly, people were coming to my house. It was one of those strange moments when I realized the generational wheel had turned.
The second moment was not nearly as peaceful.
It happened on Thanksgiving. My little sister, Cheryl, was attending Samford University in Birmingham. She had a boyfriend who played football there, and he had gone home to spend Thanksgiving with his family. She also had a friend named Will who was on the football team and, for reasons I no longer remember clearly, had no place to go for Thanksgiving. As I remember it, his family situation was difficult, and I believe his mother was dealing with cancer. Cheryl felt terrible about the idea of him sitting alone in Birmingham while everyone else went home.
For reasons I still don’t completely understand, Mom had decided this was not going to be a year when extra guests came to Thanksgiving dinner. Cheryl respected that decision, and Will stayed behind. At least, that was the plan.
Sometime during the night, Cheryl called me. Will had gotten on a bus and come to Atlanta without telling anyone, and now he was sitting at the downtown bus station with nowhere to go. So I got out of bed, drove into Atlanta in the middle of the night, picked him up and brought him back to my house. Cheryl knew he was there and later came over, I think with a friend, so Will wouldn’t simply be sitting alone in my house.
Then somebody rang the doorbell.
It was Mom.
Somehow, she had figured out Will was there. She was a little cagey at first about why she had come over, but she was determined to get inside. Once she did, she went back toward the guest room and confronted Cheryl about what had happened. A big argument followed. Mom was angry about the situation, and it didn’t seem to matter that Cheryl hadn’t invited Will to Atlanta. The whole thing quickly became loud, uncomfortable and very much not the kind of scene I wanted happening in my home.
That was when something in me changed.
I stood up to my mother. I told her, in very direct terms, that this was my home, and she was creating a scene in my home that I wasn’t going to allow. If she was going to continue behaving that way, then she wasn’t welcome there at that moment.
That took a lot of nerve for me because I had never spoken to my mother that way before in my life. And I won’t pretend I handled it perfectly. I was too harsh. I spoke disrespectfully, and when I went to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving dinner later that day, I could definitely feel the disapproval. Eventually, Mom and I reconciled.
Looking back, I still think we were both right about different parts of it. I was wrong in the way I spoke to her, but I still don’t think I was wrong to help Will. He was a college kid who had nowhere to go on Thanksgiving. Whatever complications his presence might have created with my sister’s boyfriend or anybody else, I still believe compassion should have won that argument. If the same thing happened today, Will would have a seat at my table. That seems like the right thing to do, and frankly, the Christ-like thing to do.
Those two memories are very different, but they taught me the same thing. At Christmas, I realized that people were coming to my house now. At Thanksgiving, I realized that I had to decide what kind of house they were coming to.
Being an adult wasn’t simply about owning a home or paying bills or hosting holidays. It meant accepting responsibility for the tone of my home, the people I welcomed into it, the decisions I made there and even the mistakes I made while trying to do the right thing.
In one moment, adulthood felt like sitting beside a fire with a drink and thinking, “We did it.” In the other, it meant drawing a line and then later admitting I hadn’t drawn it very gracefully.
Both were part of growing up.
And both made one thing very clear.
It was my house now.
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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt
