By IN LA BY HEIDI MANTEUFFEL
Just because my taxes tell me I’m a grown-up doesn’t mean I feel like one.
While I marked myself as an independent for the 2005 tax year, my fuzzy frog flippers and pink pajama pants reveal me as otherwise.
This year, I did the horrid, unthinkable thing you don’t foist upon your worst enemy. I willingly volunteered to complete my own taxes.
I know, I’m seeing a psychologist about this (not to mention my addiction to snorting Scotch Guard without taking the cap off) later this week.
I ignored the valuable resource of my Dad being a former certified CPA, and said thank you very much I can do this on my own.
So I went right out to Best Buy and bought Turbo Tax.
I felt like a proud two-year-old who finally gained control of their bodily functions. As the old Huggies commercial commentary goes, “Mommy wow! I’m a big kid now.”
But as you find after playing years of school and office, which I was never was fond of to begin with, being a grown-up isn’t as great as I thought. For one, you have to take a good hard look at how your wages match up with your spending.
And let’s face it, the fantasy is always better than the reality when spending habits are concerned.
You also lose that warm, humanitarian feeling about yourself when you see how little your donations went outside the TCBY yogurt fund. Too bad you can’t write that off. Mmm … malted chocolate deductions, with a scoop of chocolate sprinkles, please.
I gotta tell ya, though, I was feeling beyond my years as I poured over my past bank statements, enjoying a good bowl of Lucky Charms with SpongeBob on in the background.
Then 9 a.m. turned to 10, and 10 and to 12, and I realized that this grown-up tax thing was getting old. It was sunny and 70 degrees out. The beach with its clear blue horizon was beckoning my call.
The question arose through the marsh-mallow milky remains of the cereal bowl — do I push forward with overwhelmingly boring taxes to prove I have arrived to adult society, or do I shrug off my responsibilities like a normal child and ask for some money to get a soda?
That’s when I told my Dad to keep up the good work he had been doing with my taxes all these years.
I threw in my independence, packed my rollerblades and headed for the beach.
Sure, it might be a step back for me as a free colony. But I don’t mind Britain’s reign if Britain does my taxes for me.
I’m sure one of these days I will actually complete my own tax return from start to finish. But until then I will eat my Happy Meal with the Mattel car prize at the kiddie table while the grown-ups talk about grown-up things — like good scrub-bing brushes, and the best chiropractor in town and the sale they got on forest green towels at Target when they purchased the 24-pack of toilet paper. Hmm, maybe I’ll take a rain check on that ride.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 21, 2006. Read the original PDF.