To ask what's an adult problem that nobody prepared you for?

[Midge1978]

For me it's keeping the bathroom clean. I don't think I ever saw my mother clean hers but it was always immaculate and rosey smelling. I can't seem to keep on top of the mould monster in mine!

Paying council tax In our first flat we paid the rent and the utilities but that came as a huge shock, never heard of it!

Meal planning, how overwhelming parenting can be and house maintenance. Oh, and car MOT, insurance etc. Such a PITA.

Not having my parents' support. One fucked off to another country and one moved up north to support another sibling. I might get the occasional text but that's about it. Even when I told them I was splitting my from my husband, all I got was a text.

That you can't spend your wages on whatever you like. It's perfectly normal to work full time and only have £10 per week fun money when all the bills and essentials are paid.

Open plan offices.

Not having any money left to spend on whatever you want for sure! I remember thinking as a child my parents earn loads of money (they didn't, pretty average salary) so why on earth did we not get to buy loads of stuff? Turns out bills and life really do take most if it 😔

Also how relentless working is....only another 40yrs left til retirement

That there isn't a roadmap.
All decisions are not clearly marked as "right versus wrong" thing to do. It's terrifying. And there's no-one to ask, because they don't know either.

How to run a household - ie meal planning, organising cleaning tasks etc in a manageable way. Eating healthily.

Also money management - DF was an accountant but didn't think to teach us about things like loans, interest rates, setting up bank accounts, saving etc. I've learnt how to deal with it but was very stressed about it in my early 20s and tended to leave bills etc to other people to sort out

Diy around the house
Cleaning the bathroom
I didnt even know how to operate a washing machine.
Relationships and boundaries.

The sheer permanence of it. You can't just go back to being a carefree teenager or young adult when you've had enough :(

That loving someone and them loving you isn't enough. Lesson learnt a long time ago but the shittiness of it still occasionally stings.

Realising how awful your parents were and how much it has affected you. Then still having to see them and talk about their holidays.

Parenting and cleaning the house when you have kids

I thought that as soon as I hit adulthood I would be able to do anything I wanted, such as go to the corner shop and buy my own weight in sweets.

I used to do this regularly. Spend about £15 a time! No wonder I am diabetic!!

That I would still be questioning myself and whether I get interactions with friends "right" in my late 30s.
Realising that my DF can be an arsehole.
Meal planning has to be done every week when you have DC.

To paraphraser Jack Dee (?!) - having to pay for 'invisible things" like electricity. And life insurance. And shit like that...

Moving house. God it's stressful. I can see why my parents were on edge when we did it.

Worrying about/caring for at weekend an elderly, frail, poorly parent - then subsequently arranging their funeral, executing the will and selling the family home - all while living 4 hours away, no car, full time job etc. It was bloody hard and was the worst two years of my life.

My biggest shock was having my first DC and could not understand why she didn't sleep all day long so that I could get on with my life. No-one had prepared me for just how much work there was to do with a tiny, small little being!

That as soon as I hit 18 I could have a credit card/finance etc! Money was free.... well so it seemed.

It's dangerous!

I longed for adulthood as a child, and I mostly think it's fantastic, but a few things caught me off-guard:

Friendship issues at university, and (only once) being bullied there. I had the idea that both would never happen again on leaving school, because we were all adults, and it was quite a shock that this isn't true at all.

Having to decide whether to believe what you hear. As a child, everything is gospel: what your parents and teachers say, what shopkeepers tell you, what you read in the paper. Then suddenly as an adult, many things are negotiable. I had to learn not to believe things like the Daily Mail.

I agree about the meal planning. I often think that eating is a chore, never mind cooking.

No longer having the childish excitement of simple things like playing in the playground. I remember those moments! As an adult I like to go down waterslides, because I hardly ever did as a child, but it just isn't the same doing it aged 37 as it was aged 7. I envy the excitement on the faces of the children around me.

Being responsible for my own health. As a family we were very lucky with health and rarely needed hospital treatment, I never needed to visit A&E, but I've had to do a few of these things in the last few years, and going to hospital seemed quite alien to me.

Everything being so relentlessly complicated!

Not feeling carefree any more. I didn’t realise I was carefree at the time of course!

The absolute relentlessness of looking after other people, maintain the house, etc., weighs on my mind.

Particularly the house actually- my DM trained me pretty well on all the cleaning, but the idea of bits of your house just breaking and needing you to pay someone else to fix them came as a massive shock!

How much I hate work has been the biggest shock for me. I completely fell for the lie that if you work hard at school, if you're clever, you can choose to do whatever you want and get a job that you enjoy, and it'll feel like you're not actually working.

Ultimately though, every job restricts your freedom, and I love being free.

I so wish I'd either gone into a job that is very highly paid e.g. something in finance/medicine, or at least stuck to the first job I got after uni (which was boring but easy and well paid - research scientist), rather than faffing about changing career, to be a teacher, where the hours are shocking and I am made to feel like shit every day by kids answering me back and arguing with me.

I also wish someone had told me that there's nothing wrong with a well-educated person being a SAHP. I regret not having more children and being a SAHP.

Also, living with regrets.

And not being able to eat what I want - I could quite happily live on cake and chocolate (actually, I have a rare treat day when I do!)

I've got a grip on all of the above including, cars, kids, exercise. No phased by cleaning etc because the joy of adulthood mean it's your choice.

However much as I love the independence no one really spelled out how much money is key to it all. People who got married ( two incomes, shared bills) live considerably better than me. It's incredibly difficult to buy a property on your own down South unless you have a really decent paying job. I wasted a lot of time travelling, working (hard) in poorly paid fun jobs.