Parenting & Family Quote by Wendy Wasserstein

Adulthood arrives not as a crest of freedom but as a widening circle of stewardship. Responsibility begins with the self, the daily work of earning, choosing, and owning the consequences. It expands to children, where obligation is both obvious and nonnegotiable: you become the scaffolding for another life. Then comes the curveball, the startling inversion when your parents need from you what you once needed from them. That reversal is the moment that tests the myth of independence and reveals adulthood as a practice of care across generations.

Wendy Wasserstein understood this with a mix of wit and ache. Her plays chronicle professional, ambitious women who discover that success is measured not only by titles or apartments but by how they hold together the people who made them and the people they are making. The phrase "the big curve" carries a comic lilt and a baseball jolt; it acknowledges surprise and the sense that you misread adulthood’s pitch. You plan for the expected roles of self and parenthood; you rarely plan for the meeting of pediatrician and geriatrician in the same week.

Behind the line sits the reality of longer lives, fragile social safety nets, and the modern sandwich generation. The burden is practical and intimate: sorting medications, managing money, navigating doctors, translating fear into choices. It is also moral. Responsibility here is not a loss of self, but a redefinition of it; maturity means accepting that autonomy and interdependence are not opposites. The dignity you extend to your parents becomes a measure of your own.

Wasserstein’s insight is tender and unsentimental. Growing up does not end at the border of your own needs, nor at the nursery door. It extends backward as gratitude transformed into action. The surprise is that the hardest obligations are often the ones that make you most fully a grownup, binding the story of your life to the generations before and after.