Growing up, growing old

We were at Buddhi and Ishi's place having coffee after dinner. Buddhi and Ef sat on the couch chatting about work and rugby, while I joined Ishi at the table to look through her wedding album. As I watched Ishi serve the guys tea, I couldn't shake a nagging feeling of deja vu that this was a scene I was so familiar with when I was a kid: My dad sitting at one side with his friends talking about work whilst my mom lounged in another corner of hall with the ladies chit chatting about their children. Though the scene was comforting in some ways, it was rather disconcerting to realise that I was no longer seeing it through the eyes of a child.
I wasn't the only one feeling that the whole gathering was somewhat surreal, for when Ef and me left the house for his car, he turned to me and asked, " Was it just me, or did that feel really weird?"


I still feel like a teenager at times, bemused and uncertain of where I'm heading to. And yet the whole world seems to have failed to wait for me to stop and ponder.
As I filled in the copious number of forms for my PR application here, I looked back at the years i've spent away from home and it amazed me how time had flown by. Six years ago, i was the spoilt girl who'd never been away from her family before. Six years on,, I am now a medical doctor, staying by myself, supporting myself independently, planning holidays and ploughing through the alien world of PR application and tax returns. Once where conversation topics revolved around friends, boys and exams, these conversations now turn to finance and work politics, marriage and kids. Friends were getting married, buying houses and starting families.
I feel as though I've just been trust from the role of a kid into the role of an adult, a role which I'm not sure I'm ready to fill. ALthough I know that my experiences have changed me and moulded me somewhat into a hopefully more mature individual, I still feel like the teenager who left home for the first time in 2003 in more ways then one.