It feels right that there are differences between generations. I like the gap. It’s enjoyable being with younger people and then it’s sometimes a relief being with people who begin sentences with “I remember when.”
When I was in my teens, we didn’t call the progression from child to adult anything at all. We weren’t “teenagers” or “adolescents.” We were sometimes “youth” (how’s that for an impersonal label?) but mostly we were somebody’s kid. Since our generation didn’t have its own name, we didn’t call the spaces between generations anything special either. We had no “gap” as such. That term began to be tossed around more during the blooming season of flower children when we cautioned the world not to trust anyone over 30.
By then it was too late to distrust my elders. I was already looking forward to being older. I admired women in their 30’s – thought they had all the answers. I couldn’t wait to look like them, dress like them, and somehow achieve their mysterious sophistication. It seemed to me then that they owned something I needed.
Now adolescence is prolonged so that sometimes a new generation doesn’t get started at all. We’re chipping away at what I always considered a natural distance between kids and parents. Terms like “re-juvenile” and “boomerang babies” describe some in their 30’s and 40’s who either never quite launched from the nest, or because of various factors end up living back with their parents for a time.
The sticky part is that while these grown children were away, some of their parents were taking good care of themselves, eating right, exercising, developing new interests, trying on different things and closing the gap even more, making it tough to tell who’s who in a household.
I embrace the concept of generations helping each other, and during these tough times, we see some families deciding to stay together, returning to an earlier model of more than one generation living in the same house.
But I’d hate to see the differences between generations obliterated completely. Nature acknowledges distinct seasons, and it feels natural that we should too. It is a comfort, especially during trying times, to check in with the generations that came before us and realize that this too shall pass.
Ó By Anita Garner