Profound Alienation

Ah, the deep and profound alienation that comes from never having been young, yet living in a youth obsessed culture.

When I was nineteen, I had an argument with my friend Tim. Tim and I have always loved each other and rarely understood each other. I can't recall what he had either just done or was planning to do, but during a visit to my apartment, he said, "I'm going to be so embarrassed by this in a few years." Now, however, he was giddy about it.

You know the annoying kid who stands there yelling at all the other kids to get out of the makeshift go kart, rocket or whatever else they've built, because they'll hurt themselves? That was me. Tim was the kid who'd be building the vehicle and perching it on top of a steep hill.

"If you know it's stupid, and you know you're going to be embarrassed by it, why do it?" I wanted to know.

Tim looked at me as if the answer was obvious. "Because you have to do things; you have to experience life."

"And that means being stupid?

"At our age, yes."

That kind of thinking undid me. "That is the most ridiculous, age discriminatory thing I've ever heard!"

"Discriminatory? How do you figure?"

My turn to look as if things were self explanatory. "Because if someone older, like our parents, said that being our age meant being stupid, you'd be furious. You'd be telling them how wrong they were, and how hurtful it was to assume that we are idiots just because of our age. I know you would, because I've heard you do it."

"That's different."

"It is NO different!"

As usual, we argued for a few more minutes before we decided that it was just best to either change the subject or walk away. It was not the first, or the last, time we'd look at each other and say, "How can you think that?"

Yes, Tim is still my friend. I wasn't kidding when I said we loved each other anyway.

Meryl Streep, when asked how she felt about turning 40, once said, "Like I finally fit in my own skin. I was never young and fresh and dewy." I thought, "YEEESSSS!!!! Someone else 'gets' it."

As I finally started to fit into my own skin, my peers looked at themselves and said, "Who is this, and how did they get so old?" As 40 loomed, I wrote the following essay. I didn't say so, but I was wondering if there would come a time when people my age would understand me and vice versa. Five years later, I don't think so. I'll probably get in trouble in a few decades in my nursing home. Some man next to me will put in his teeth to say that he still feels like the high school quarterback, and in a fit of pique I'll beat him with my cane.

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I'm sure that growing up the youngest in my family affected the way I feel about age. When you're constantly told that you're too little for this and too young for that, you wish in vain for the day when nobody says such things to you. It was especially frustrating when my older sister told me I was too young for something, and I pointed out that she hadn't thought so when she was my age. Her response was, "That's because I was too young and stupid to know the difference." It was maddening. She was all of 3 ½ years older than me – which, actually, was part of why she was so contentious. I wasn't seen as competition by my much older siblings, which was nice.

Part of it, too, was my parents' ages. On the day I was born, my dad was 56 and my mom was 36. My dad retired when I was eight months old. My mom turned 50 when I was in junior high. I knew they were older than my friends' parents; especially Dad. I just didn't think much of it. When I did, I usually found it odd that my friends' parents were so young. Sometimes, someone's grandparents would be younger than my dad, and I was puzzled. As a kid, your sense of "normal" comes from what you see every day. My dad was retired, my mom went to work, and I was an aunt in fifth grade. That was normal for me.

I'm sure my mom's attitude affected me, too. Mom is immensely practical and not given to vanity. Her age did not bother her, at least that I could see. She never lied about it, never complained about it, never obsessed over lines on her face. She didn't wear makeup or dye her hair. When her mother sent her Oil of Olay moisturizer ("because of that harsh, dry climate you live in,") she rolled her eyes and hardly ever used it. Near as I could tell, she didn't think about her age much. It simply existed, like the sky or the mountains.

Dad, on the other hand – Dad was terrified of aging. Part of that was fear of death. The thought of death absolutely undid him. He believed that your existence ended at death; no heaven, no pearly gates, no hell, no reincarnation – just nothing. That was unsettling in itself, but I don't think it wasn't the real issue. He'd been a coal miner, a railroad engineer, a police officer and a fireman – not exactly low risk occupations. When he talked about his years in law enforcement (which he seldom did in front of the kids, deeming the subject matter way over our heads), he would say that the two most dangerous calls were domestic disputes and bar brawls, with traffic stops being a very close second. Officers died all the time on those routine kinds of calls. He himself had had to face down men holding weapons on him. I learned about breaking bottles and using them as a makeshift knife from him. As a fire fighter, he'd been one of only two men willing to run into the burning jail and unlock the inmates so they could get out. I don't think risk or fear of dying was a really huge issue for most of his life. Of course, the older he got, the more it was, and I only knew him as a senior citizen.

The really big issue in aging for him was being helpless or irrelevant. He'd been a high school jock, a big man on campus. As an adult, he took on testosterone soaked jobs; jobs where he was physically strong and relied upon, jobs where he was often armed, jobs in which he alone was often the difference between life and death. Then, in his view very suddenly, he was no longer employed, overweight, slow, much weaker than he used to be. It scared him. Now instead of the rescuer, he fit the roll of victim. He began to fear that younger men could and would beat him up. He feared mugging and assault. He feared that someone would break into his home. He feared being seen as a target. He also feared that now he was just another old man, with no contribution to make. He felt invisible and unwanted. The depth of that feeling leads me to believe that as a young man he had been scornful and dismissive of weak old men, because he now thought that everyone saw him that way. He was angry and afraid.

In my mind, which always distills things down to their simplest (sometimes oversimplified) form, the equation looked like this: Mom + comfortable with aging = happy; Dad + fear of aging = sad. Now which, I internally asked, do I want to be? Simple.

On the other hand, being bright and analytical, I knew that getting older didn't mean that all my worries and problems would disappear. I knew that advancing grades meant harder work and more responsibility and that being an adult meant work, taxes and lots of bills. I was puzzled by kids who would say, "When I'm an adult, nobody can tell me what to do anymore! It's total freedom!" Oh, sure, I'd think; nobody can tell you what to do except for employers, lawmakers, law enforcement, the DMV, your landlord, your doctor, the city council, your bank… plus, you'll have to buy your own food and place to sleep." That sort of thinking made my adjustment to adulthood easy, but alienated me from my peers. I was accused of being "a downer," a pessimist, and raining on the parade. However much they like me, my peers have usually felt that I don't "get it."

I never felt invincible, either. I was convinced death was just waiting for me around the next corner, from the age of about four onward. A lot of that is my dad's influence, I'm sure. He feared that we'd die every time we so much as had the sniffles or stubbed a toe. Being rather sickly had an impact, too. Many of my childhood memories involve being home from school, swaddled in blankets and clutching a tissue box, watching game shows on TV. Strep throat was reliable companion that never gave up on me for too long. I also remember having garbage cans next to the couch and next to my bed, because we knew if I had to throw up, I wouldn't make it to the bathroom. I remember getting food stuck in my throat and being unable to breathe. Once, I started to lose consciousness. I actually prepared a will when I was about 16. I suppose if I'd been robust, and Dad would have been more relaxed, I'd have felt immortal. Maybe not. Anyway, I'd hear adults talk about how kids felt they'd never die, that they could never be hurt, and I'd think, Ha! Fat lot you know! Then I'd meet kids who felt like that, and wonder what the heck was wrong with them.

I formed most of my opinions about life by listening to what everyone around me had to say, sorting and sifting it by the number of people I heard it from and how reliable the source was. I hear that most people need to experience things. I'm a vicarious learner, I suppose. It's actually served me very well. I could look at other people – say, my older siblings – and decide what to do based on what worked for them. I rarely had to make their mistakes. Plenty of my own, sure, but not the same ones I'd watched someone else make. I was never an "it'll be different for me" person.

When I was a kid, most adults seemed genuinely startled by how old they were, and how old other people were. I'd wonder if they thought aging just happened to other people. It was like being surprised by the sunrise to me. It happened all the time. It looked predictable to me. Some of that was youthful arrogance, I'm sure, and some was simple math. Two years was a fifth of my life, but adults tended to own socks older than I was. Two years is no big deal when you're 50.

I have a harder time understanding it now that I'm the adult. I'll be 40 soon. My friends are now the ones being surprised by how old they are, and how old other people are. I still don't get it, and it's alienating. I never know who's going to bite my head off if I introduce them as "an old friend." (Yes, it's happened. "I'm not old!" they'll snap. What is the politically correct term, "friend of long standing?" I met most of the most vocal "not old" friends when I was a teen, so "childhood friend" isn't accurate. And I'm now old enough to have friends of two decades or so that I met as an adult. If I can't have "old friends," what can I have?)

No, actually, that's not the whole picture. People started being surprised by how old my kids were when I was barely out of my teens. Again, it made sense to me. I hadn't been a teenage mother or anything. I was twenty years old and married when my first child was born. I was twenty-one when my second was born. I had a husband, a mortgage, and a new mini-van we were making payments on. This was what I expected out of adulthood. Hadn't the older generation kept telling us when we were in our teens how we had to grow up and be responsible? Well, I was! Why did everyone find it so startling? Why did people, old and young, think I should be partying until I puked with other people my age? For crying out loud, kids are told all their lives to grow up, and now I was a grown up, and I was acting like it. For years, I didn't even wear jeans or T-shirts anymore. I dressed like a middle aged woman, wearing those ridiculous "housedresses" and elastic waist pants. Not together, at least.

I understood older people looking at me and my kids and being surprised. These were the same people who'd told me all my life how I was getting so BIG, it was just amazing, and could never remember if I was in second or fifth grade. I was unprepared for people my own age to find my life so foreign.

When we moved back to the town we'd grown up in, I went back to the theater company I'd worked with before. They were university based, but the company was open to the public, so there were people of a variety of ages. One day in a rehearsal or a meeting one woman kept bemoaning her twenty-fifth birthday. She felt so OLD, she howled repeatedly. "It's awful!" "A quarter of a century!" After a bit of this, I said, "Oh, knock it off. I have no patience with people who feel old any younger than seventy."

She was not fazed. "You're just mad because you're a lot older than me," she said smugly. I gave her a look I hope in hindsight wasn't too withering and said, truthfully, "I'm twenty-five years old." She paled.

"But, I thought you had, like, kids and everything," she stammered.

"I do," I told her.

"But I thought they were like, older and everything." She was looking more distraught all the time.

"My oldest is five." She looked even paler. It had not occurred to her that I could be her age AND have kids – especially ones who were "like, older and everything."

I could not understand why people my age were still being largely financially dependent on their mom and dad. Or why they were still moving from rental to rental, with roommates. Or still debating what they wanted to be when they grew up. When would they realize that they were grown up, and get with the program, I wondered. The older adults, the ones who'd wanted us all to grow up, seemed to be fine with this extended adolescence. Worse, they viewed my life with worry. It was maddening. They feared that any day, I'd decide that my youth had been wasted, dump the husband and kids, and backpack through Europe. OK, stranger things have happened, but anyone who's known me for longer than a few hours should know that the likelihood was slim to none. I hoped that getting older would fix this incessant worrying by others about my life.

It has, in a few small ways. Nobody tells me I'm too young to be having kids anymore. In larger ways, though, I'm still out of the loop. I snapped at a friend not too long ago, someone I've been close to since childhood. She was discussing the teenage tendency to drink too much, drive too fast, take too many drugs and the like. She made the mistake of saying, "Well, we all went through that stage." Had she not known me as a teen, I wouldn't have been offended, but she had. She'd known me since I was 12. I barked at her, "NO, we ALL did NOT." She did something else that maddens me, and sighed, saying, "Well, not you, but most of us did." I hate that. But I guess that anybody who started reading AARP literature at 25 can't quite expect to be the norm.