Time to grow up

At what point do you change from a carefree youngster, your life at your feet and endless opportunities available to you, to being an adult, with adult worries, adult dilemmas and adult decisions? Legally I suppose it's at the grand old age of eighteen or twenty-one, however I know that I certainly didn't have adult worries at this age. I was out partying most nights of the week, holidaying in Magaluf, Faliraki and Ibiza with the girls and spending my meagre wages on the latest shoes and lipstick.

I know I have been lucky, but I am even more lucky to have been able to share my entire teenage years and beyond with the same two girls by my side. The three of us have always been together, even through friendship changes that inevitably happen due to college, work, uni, but we have always just fitted in with each new group and our friendship continued to grow throughout the years and is now as strong as ever as we approach the later years of our twenties.

Today I sat with my mum and sister and we watched an episode of Desperate Housewives - not a programme I have watched much. I understand the gist of the programme, a group of women who are friends and live along the same street. In this particular episode each of the characters were dealing with their own dilemmas and issues, then at the end of the programme they got together to reveal all to each other, discuss and comfort as women typically do. I don't remember being particularly moved by the programme in any way, other than a quick consideration that the characters seemed to have a plethora of potentially awful problems to deal with between them. Similarly, I have watched - a loved every minute of - Sex in the City and both cried and laughed with Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte during the trials and tribulations of their lives. All the time however I have been clearly aware that these programmes and plots are purely fiction, and this is often much to my relief.

I am turning into one of the characters from Desperate Housewives/Sex in the City - just perhaps not so glamorous. There has been a noticeable difference over recent months in the topics of conversation and the dilemmas that my friends and I try to resolve. Perhaps, today for the first time I realised that my friends and I are in fact dealing with the potentially awful dilemmas that these gorgeous fictional women are tackling - except this, unfortunately, is real life. Gone are the days when our biggest worry is about which boy to snog at the under 18s disco or whether to go straight to the club or have a few cheap drinks at Whetherspoons first.

Today we deal with real things. Marriage. Divorce. Pregnancy. No pregnancy. Careers. Lovers. Money. Mortgages. Illness. Life and Death. It hurts as I think of my friends having to cope with these problems. I listen, knowing that I can do little other than be there. It hurts as I realised tonight that we have grown up together and are now adults confronted with the issues that we always dreaded, sitting on our beds as teenagers wearing our fluffy PJs wrapped tightly in our sleeping bags as we looked forward to our future lives, trying to predict who would get married first, have children etc.

I do know that it is hard to watch my friends work through life's inevitable difficulties but I know that together we can get through, hopefully, everything that life may throw at us. To have the support and love of another human being is invaluable during these times. I know we are lucky to have a bond that has remained strong for the past fifteen years and I know that with them by my side, everything will be ok in the end.