Yesterday I hosted a play date. Not exactly a play date, it was more of a goodbye party for our friend moving out of state. I met these four women 10 years ago at work. Since then, the company downsized but we all stayed friends.

We worked together during several life events, including our pregnancies which was such a fun and exciting time and of course very bonding when you are asking all the questions like, “Did your feet swell up like this?” So between us, there were nine kids under age seven running around while we ate our take out Café Rio (we didn’t even attempt to eat at a restaurant!), and talked about what we were doing now and what we were watching, or not watching, on TV.

Our get together was very bittersweet. On one hand, it was so great to see everyone and have the kids be old enough that they were playing together so well that we could have an actual conversation. But on the other hand, the reason we were getting together was that our friend who is moving has to because her husband is dying of colon cancer and she needs to be by her family for support. Her story is so sad not only because her girls are only five and three and he is only in his mid-thirties, but also because she is watching him suffer and there isn’t a way to help him with the pain.

While she is dealing with the actual everyday reality of his illness, she is also dealing with her future and how she will be able to support her children as well as the emotional things like what to tell the girls. To top it off, another one of the group’s father is very sick and likely dying too and we have all experienced the loss of a parent in the past few years. So our conversation about who was watching “The Bachelorette,” turned to talking about chemo and life insurance policies instead.

At the end of the play date we wanted our picture and three of the kids were able to snap photos of us like an adorable paparazzi. We marveled at having kids old enough to take our pictures (and took pictures of them taking pictures of us) and then starting saying our goodbyes.

After all but one friend had left and I was helping her to gather her things together, she looked at me and said,

“You know? I don’t know if it’s our age or the time we met, but we sure have more grown up problems than we used to.”

I thought she summed it up exactly. We used to complain about our bosses or wonder where to go for lunch. We sure do have more grown up problems than we used to!

How about you? Does adulting sometimes feel much more heavy than you expected it to be?