37 is the New 37

Recently, I received a terrifying invitation.

It was a facebook invitation to join a page dedicated to my as yet unplanned but still upcoming 20th high school reunion.

Everyone on the site is all, oh shit, has it been 20 years? But we aren’t that old! We look so young! Hey remember when…

And I’m thinking to myself, yeah, I remember. I mean, I had a great time in high school. I’ve never wanted to go back, and I’m a little bitter that I’m experiencing puberty NOW when I was already done with it before I even entered the 9th grade, but I’ll get a kick out of the reunion. In general, though, I’ve always been one to be happy to move on to the next stage.

So I think to myself…yeah, I can believe it’s been 20 years. A whole lot of shit has happened. If it hadn’t been 20 years, I would have to wonder how I would have had time to go to college, build a career for myself, put myself through grad school while working full time, engage in a bunch of real estate transactions, fall deeply in love and break up and have a variety of relationships, eventually get married, bring a few human beings into the world, build friendships that lasted through life changes and long distances, fight cancer, reinvent myself for the umpteenth time, and etc. and on and on.

I mean, if that had all happened in, say, five years—then I would be impressed.

So it seems like 20. It especially seems like 20 since things are so different now than they were when I was a teenager. I’ve written a post about the nostalgia that we all seem to feel for our pre-digital youth with the snail mail and the non-virtual sex and the carbs and everything. What I think about now, with my new-found perspective, is how parenting has changed.

For most of high school, it was just my mom and me at our house. My parents split up when I was 15 and my brother was already away at college. My mom worked and was going to college, since she didn’t go when she was 18 like everyone seems to assume everyone does even though of course that’s just one of those upper middle class assumptions. And maybe some of my notions of what it means to parent a teenager are just distorted through the lens of how it was for us, but here are a few examples of things that seem unlikely to happen today or be accepted today. The fact that I’m writing this should hopefully cement me as a cranky old lady way beyond my years. It’s what I’ve always wanted, after all. There’s just this old lady inside of me, going crazy for the chance to come out. I might not make it to an age where she gets to do her thing, so I’m going to get a jumpstart right here.

Here’s what I learned about being a parent of a teenager from my upbringing as one in the late 80s and early 90s. May I have the strength to bring some of this wisdom back into the rotation:

1. The generation gap was real. It was an actual THING. I was not friends with my mother. That was something that happened earlier than it might have if we hadn’t been on our own together, but in general, that friendship was an understood privilege of adulthood, not childhood. She was still the dictator of my universe. I got away with some stuff, for sure, and I know that I tried her patience and probably gave her a few mini-strokes along the way, but the bottom line is she wasn’t trying to be my peer. I understood that this was a great thing about growing up—not being embarrassed, not giving a shit what people thought of you. Teenagers are supposed to care about that, not adults. My mom would tell any kid off, no matter where or what was happening, give me shit in front of my friends, refuse to let me do things that I thought were totally reasonable, and demand that I respect people older than me. I never sat down around older people, including her, and she was only 42 when I moved out of the house. I never joked with friends about how hopelessly old and uncool people’s parents were, because we never expected nor wanted our parents to be cool. They were, you know, PARENTS. If they asked “lame” questions about school or friends you didn’t really consider it lame at all, because those were the kinds of things they were supposed to ask you. They weren’t supposed to be RELEVANT, they were supposed to be above caring about being relevant. They were supposed to be those older people who loved you even when they weren’t required to through any familial bond. And so today, when I talk to teenagers, I talk about whatever the hell I want and I don’t care how lame it sounds, because I literally DO NOT CARE. I am 37 and I can say and do what I want because I EARNED it, kids. And there’s a reason I married a man just two months older than I am. I LIKE people my age and I’m not trying to be younger, or older, anymore.

2. Your parents might not have your back. And the reason might be because you didn't deserve for them to have your back. I am always amazed when I read these articles about parents who make excuses when their kids get caught doing some stupid hijinks. In my house? Please. I went to parties where kids’ parents knew what was going on, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t terrified of being busted. Because I knew people in my neighborhood who went to JAIL for possession or being underage or what have you. Now I see 15 year olds openly wandering around in the daylight in my neighborhood drinking and they don’t even fear getting caught. My mom would have been all, ok, good luck with that. That’s your ass. So that’s how I came to be that 22 year old girl who got all vigilante on the white suburban kids who would go buy drugs on the west side and then shoot up in their cars in MY alley because they didn’t want to be too conspicuous in an all-black neighborhood. There I was, managing an apartment building as my second job, a building that happened to be next door to a Catholic school whose population consisted entirely of kids from west side neighborhoods with horrible schools, and I would see these teenagers bringing their heroin into that scene. And I would get right up in their faces, banging on the car doors, telling them if they needed to do that shit they weren’t going to do it in MY neighborhood, they were going to have to bring that back to their daddy’s basement where they belonged. I didn’t look any older than them, but something had shifted in those few intervening years. I had to learn to be that girl somehow.

3. Parents, mothers especially, really did have eyes in the backs of their heads. I just assumed that my mom would know things she could not possibly know and therefore I was kind of a Pavlovian dog about certain behaviors. My mom decreed that I could not be alone in my room with a boy if the door was closed, for example. And then, when she was a single woman with a busy life and even dating, she would just…leave. I would be home alone in the house. Sometimes, she would say ok bye I’ll be back in a few hours, and my boyfriend at the time would look at me like a terrified Lottery winner, wondering, wait, what did she say? And then we would go to my bedroom and CLOSE THE DOOR even though we had the whole house to ourselves because I had been TRAINED about what that meant. And when I was 13 and didn’t go to the pool with my girlfriend but wandered around the neighborhood late at night instead? And had a run-in with some older guys that I never told my mom about? Well, she somehow found out I wasn’t where I said I would be, and then, as I said, IT WAS MY ASS. That doesn’t mean I didn’t say I was going to do one thing and then do another when I was a teenager, but I had to learn to do it RIGHT. Those ditching skills were earned, baby.

4. You might have to go elsewhere for sympathy. When a boy I had been dating for a month or something broke up with me in the middle of the hallway in the 9th grade, I was just devastated and convinced the world was ending for about an hour that night. I cried and my mom told me it was all right. Then I got deeper into my angst and said I would never have another boyfriend ever again and do you know what she did? She pointed at me and laughed. The woman POINTED. She was doing this knee-slapping thing , cracking up, telling me I was ridiculous. I was so stunned I forgot to keep crying. Then a week later some other kid asked me out.

5. You had to get around on your own. We did not grow up with car pools or play dates. If our friends lived too far away, we just didn’t see them until we were old enough to get there ourselves, via el, bus, car, or our own two feet. Here’s an example. That kid I referenced in #4 who asked me out eventually became my boyfriend. On that first date, when I was 14 and he was 15, we were both too young to drive. Well, he had a cast on his leg from his hip to his foot due to a football injury. And yet he walked the mile and a half to my house, came in, and nervously began talking to my mother. She asked when he would have me home and made other obligatory small talk with that murderous look in her eyes that parents of teenage girls are required to have in such situations. Then, we walked the mile and a half to the movie theater, he walked me home, and then he walked back to his house. Our crappy family car was sitting plainly in the driveway in back of our house, but it never even occurred to my mom to offer us a ride…and HE ONLY HAD ONE WORKING LEG.

6. You didn’t over-share. Correction—I didn’t really tell my mom ANYTHING. I knew that I COULD tell her things, but I chose not to do it. Hell, I didn’t tell my best friend a lot of things. That’s why we kept journals. It was fun to have secrets, or to do things that only those people you did them with knew about, or to have several separate lives all at once. In fact, your mom (and your friends, for that matter) didn’t find out much about what was going on in your teen life until 20 years later when you found out you had breast cancer and you started writing a blog and sharing a bunch of personal stories. By then, neither of you cared nor judged the other.

7. Your interests did not coincide with your parents’ interests, and theirs’ always trumped. So I wanted to learn to ride a horse, or go to summer camp. My mom wasn’t feeling it, so it didn’t happen. I had to go to the park with other families because my parents thought the park was boring. We went to see a movie as a family maybe once or twice a year, at the most, and it was usually something like The Empire Strikes Back, because they would enjoy it. Afterwards we went to the bookstore because that’s what they wanted to do. We watched the Muppet Show because they thought it was funny. Our parents had hobbies and habits and we didn’t interrupt them, unless there was bodily injury involved. Even then, we might be ignored. When I was 19, I burned my arm with an iron so badly it was just shy of third-degree. Always stoic, I simply gritted my teeth through the excruciating pain, walked into the kitchen of my mom’s apartment, and told her I had burned myself. She kind of ignored me. Then I said, no really. I REALLY burned myself. And she said… “I am baking a pie.” Even she doesn’t understand that one, not to this day (see her comment here). But my brother drove me to the ER. He’s also the one who went with me for my practice drives when I was on my learner’s permit. Both of us went on errands the second our 16th birthday hit and we could relieve my mom of her driving duties. I was involved in a crazy amount of extracurricular activities in high school, and I was in charge of figuring out how to balance all of them and how to get there.

8. You would have to fix it yourself. In a way, we were all much more on our own than kids are today. In another way, I suppose we weren’t. But I remember feeling that my problems were MY problems, and I never wanted to burden others with them. I didn’t ask for help. I looked out for myself. I know I could have told my mom anything, and she would have helped me. But if that was the case, what was the point of growing up? I was eager to do it, and to do it my way.

9. You had no idea what you wanted to be when you grew up, and no one really expected you to know. So you changed majors, had shitty jobs, built a career in a field you didn’t know existed when you were in high school. You wanted to be a judge, until you realized you would have to be a lawyer first. You wanted to be a writer, but you weren’t ambitious enough. You didn’t know if you wanted to be married or have children or where you would live or how you would support yourself. You didn’t know, because you weren’t grown up yet. So you bounced around, and somehow it all came together.

10. And, of course, the music was better. Wait, no, maybe it wasn’t. I had those parents who loved contemporary music, and yeah we had mixtapes and those were the BOMB, (even my mom was jealous of that), but I won’t lie: my kids would know nothing of Ke$ha if it weren’t for me. Life’s too short not to dance in your living room when you think no one’s watching.

A lot has changed in 20 years, but a lot has stayed the same. There are still adults wondering how in the hell kids today are going to turn out normal, and kids who turn out just fine no matter how it was when they were young. Here’s to hoping we’re all still around when our kids have their 20 year high school reunions, so we can say I told you so.

(These photos are of three generations of young women from my family: me at age 15, in a photobooth at Rock N Roll McDonald’s with a random sailor, my mom posing for her high school graduation picture, and my grandmother when she was in her early twenties).