Some thoughts on being Generation X.
What I don’t think people realize about us is that we were the first generation raised without a stay at home parent. The first generation where both parents worked.
And that’s kind of a huge deal because in one generation, the amount of parenting children got dropped by half… if you’re lucky.
Usually it was even less than that, as two working parents did not add up to one stay at home parent. What you got instead was two parents who were equally too busy, too tired, too stressed, and above all too wrapped up in their own thing to pay much attention to the kids at all.
It’s no wonder that we grew up to be sullen and resentful, and why we look upon the Fifties as a kind of wonderland of stability, security, and peace (despite all the bad stuff). I think we sense, at a cellular level, the massive amount of emotional support we lost.
We were children raised by parents who themselves had been raised in traditional ‘nuclear’ family and could not understand why we were so much less secure and much more likely to stay at or return to the family home.
The answer is obvious but the generation involved, the Boomers, are uniquely self-absorbed and resistant to the very idea that they could do anything wrong, so instead we had them shrugging and saying “I dunno. Must be that rap music. ”
We were also the first latchkey generation. In one generation, we went from Mom greeting us at the door with milk and cookies to Mom leaving a hastily dashed note and some money for ordering in… or forgetting us entirely.
I am sorry that makes it sound like I am blaming women for this whole thing. The changes involved involved all of society. Women had to escape domestic slavery, get jobs, and so on. Nothing else would have been acceptable.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t examine the consequences of this vital and absolutely necessary change and ask ourselves what impact it had on their kids.
So what happened when we grew up and had kids? We overcompensated by becoming hyper involved “helicopter parents”. We went into parenting determined that our kids would not feel neglected,. resented, and forgotten, and instead raised them to feel scrutinized. paranoid,. and like they are always in the spotlight.
Each generation overcompensates for the mistakes of the last.
I can feel those same emotions in myself. even though in order to have less chance of becoming a parent I would have to become a eunuch. I have intuitively known since my late teens that I would probably be an overprotective parent.
When I imagine myself parenting, all I can think of is how badly I would want to reassure my kids that I was there for them, that I loved and cherished them and considered them valid and important, and that they would never be abandoned to their own devices and left to cope with the cruel and callous world alone.
Now if that doesn’t sound like a formula for a helicopter parent, I don’t know what does.
Technically, that linve above represents a topic and/or mode switch this time instead of the usual time gap. but whatever.
Had therapy today. Was a pretty good session. My therapist is pushing me to deal with and express my anger, and that’s exactly what I need right now.
Because like he said, without dealing with all the rage and bitterness I have been holding inside for so long, my recovery is going to be very,very slow.
I resemble that remark.
I have so much anger inside me from all the years I spent so vastly emotionally disconnected that I never dealt with my un-fun emotions at all,. and actually went around thinking that things like jealousy, the desire for personal glory. the urge to compete hard with others, and all the rest of the reptile id emotions were the sort of thing that happened to other people, not me.
You know, all those sad, shortsighted, petty, fractious people who would be so much happier if they could fill their hearts with love, understanding, and forgiveness and understand that we are all in this together on this big mudball we call Earth.
You know…. like me.
And I think that hints at the route of the problem : I don’t want to think of myself as one of “those” kinds of people. I don’t want to face the fact that I have all those emotions I have disdained as unworthy and that to truly be that angelic version of myself, I have to engage with and deal with those emotions and finally get around to integrating them into my personality like everyone must do at some point.
I’m just doing it around thirty years later than most.
Well. there had to be some compensation for the fact that I was so far ahead of everybody else in other ways. It’s like I used the character points meant to make me a well rounded person and spent them all in one or two areas instead.
That’s another topic we covered in therapy today was the lack of challenge in my life. I dont think I had ever really explained it to my therapist before. How the fact that school was always ludicrously, even insultingly easy for me and how I have never sweated a test or worried about marks at all.
It’s like a strange frictionless world with no resistance and no push back. And my life is still like that to this very day. I found the schoolwork at both Kwantlen and VFS to be absurdly easy and I have to wonder at my ability to get good marks when I am truly half-assing the work most of the time.
I am just that brilliant and talented, I guess.
So why doesn’t that make me feel any better?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.