I had two sisters growing up, but for the most part, in my mind, they were already grown up. They were 9 and 10 years older than me. I felt like an only child with siblings. I thought they were so cool! I wanted to be just like them. That’s kind of ironic in retrospect, because the older I got, the clearer they made it that they did not like me. (The oldest one was infuriated by the fact that I did not live my life by her imperious standards, and the middle one resented me because my neurodivergence (which, in fairness, none of us understood at the time) and other health issues pretty much took up all the oxygen in the room.
I mostly wanted to be them because they were born in the mid 50’s, smack dab in the middle of the baby boom generation. I grew up immersed in their world. They were the ones who taught me to say “cool”. I was actually quite thrilled to get their hand-me-downs.
My oldest sister was a full-blown hippie, or so I thought. One of my earliest memories was her pitching a royal fit when our mother would not allow her to go to Woodstock when she was 14 years old. Her first boyfriend played the drums, and of course I thought that was beyond cool. We found out decades later, though, that he grew up to become a serial rapist and is now on the sex offender’s database. Good thing she didn’t wind up with him.
After dropping out of high school a few credits short of graduation and then running away, my sister eventually popped up again with (gasp!) a Puerto Rican boyfriend. But she made him pretend to be Native American because she didn’t have the courage to shock my mother as thoroughly as she had originally planned. I wonder how he felt about that. What a cruel thing to do to him. Honestly, I don’t think it would have been a deal breaker for Ma. She could be surprised, maybe even briefly rattled by what would have been a bit unusual in that day and age, but she wasn’t one to be scandalized.
I spent one summer staying with my oldest sister in her teepee in Vermont. (Why my mother let an 8-year-old do that is beyond me.) My sister was busy doing the drugs and wearing the clothes and doing back to nature stuff. We kept our food cold in a milk crate in a nearby running stream.
While she did turn on and drop out, I don’t remember her ever taking any kind of a political or feminist stand of any kind. Unlike me, I don’t think she ever attended a protest in her life. In her later years, she joined the Air Force and made a 21-year career out of it, and got really angry when I brought up her past. She even voted Republican, to my horror. What a waste of a perfectly good Baby Boom!
I never could quite figure out my middle sister. She did smoke pot, for sure, but her rebellion was not particularly hippie-like in nature. She did go through a shoplifting phase, but got caught quickly. She was beautiful, and had several boyfriends, most of whom I never met, and a few of whom she cried over for weeks after the break-ups, as many teenage girls tend to do.
I loved to listen to her records. The Beatles, Arlo Guthrie, Bob Dylan, all things Motown, the Rolling Stones, the Doobie Brothers and later, Elton John. I still prefer the music of that era over all others to this day.
Mostly when I think of that sister, I think of how artistically talented she was, how funny she could be, and also how angry and sad she was most of the time. She had a serious car accident not long after getting her driver’s license, and it left her in intense pain for the rest of her life. It must have disfigured her quite a bit at the time, but oddly enough, I have no memory of it at all.
When she was fun, she was very fun, but I always felt underlying fear, because her anger was explosive and so often directed at me, and she could be very cruel. And I never knew when that would happen. Unlike our vagabond older sister, she stuck close to our mother, either living with us or within a block of us, until she had her first, disastrous marriage at the age of 26. Less than a year later, she came right back to live near us again, until her second marriage. I couldn’t relate to that at all, because I couldn’t wait to leave the nest, myself.
I wish I could have asked my sisters what their thoughts had been about things they experienced of the Baby Boom Era that I don’t remember or that had happened before I was born. How did they react to the struggles of the feminist movement, Vietnam and the draft, Roe V. Wade, Jack Kerouack, Che Guevara, Mao, Castro, the civil rights movement, landing on the moon, the Cold War, the Red Scare, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and the rise of environmentalism?
Unfortunately, I can’t ask them these things. Cancer took my oldest sister in 2008, at the age of 54. Too soon. Way too soon. And my middle sister is now 70 years old. She’s still angry, and I still take up most of the oxygen in the room. She no longer speaks to me.
Even though I envy my sisters their Baby Boom, and despite my opinion that they made an incredible waste thereof, the reason I’m including my experiences in the discussion is that I can say that I managed to sneak into that Baby Boom after all. However, I am in a unique position in that I was born at the end of the very last month of it. (Trust me to show up late to the party.)
I came so late to it that when I tell people I’m a Baby Boomer, they always argue with me. But I have boatloads of documentation on my side. This generation spans the years 1946 to 1964 according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Wikipedia, The Pew Research Center, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve Board, Gallup, and the United States Census. So anyone who doesn’t like it can lump it, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve considered myself a Baby Boomer all my life, and a Baby Boomer I will always be.
Now, having said that, I will concede that there were two cohorts (or booms, if you will) of Baby Boomers, and they had very different experiences. The first, from 1946 to 1955, epitomized the cultural change of the 1960’s. That’s the one I envied, and the one my oldest sister was at the tail end of.
The second, from 1956 to 64, came of age in the malaise years of the 1970’s. My middle sister hit the beginning of that wave (maybe that’s why she was so cranky), and I made it in just under the wire.
Because of this, my sisters and I do have some memories in common, although we probably have different perspectives about them. We all remember black and white televisions and rotary phones and phone booths. We remember Nixon resigning, although I didn’t understand why, and my memory of the Watergate hearings was being furious that it preempted all the children’s programming on TV, and I was so bored. We all experienced the oil crisis and the incredibly long lines at the gas pumps. And of course we were all there for the bicentennial and the Iran hostage crisis. And then Reagan became president when I was a junior in high school, and it felt like he was president for the rest of my young life.
I do have one strange memory about a Baby Boomer milestone. Ted Bundy’s killing spree terrified my mother, because we lived in Florida, and he seemed to be targeting girls with long brown hair that was parted in the middle, and all three of us wore our hair that way at the time. Like the rest of the country, we were relieved when he was caught.
So anyway, here I am, clinging to the very butt hairs of the Baby Boom for dear life, and it occurs to me that that puts me in a unique position. I straddle two worlds: the analog and the digital. I grew up in a world where technology was all but non-existent, and I’ve aged into a world that is changing so quickly that it is hard to say what life will be like tomorrow. I think that’s a really unique point in which to have popped into earth’s timeline, don’t you?
When I went to college, we didn’t have computers. I had to use a typewriter to write my term papers. Granted, it was an electric typewriter, but still, it was a typewriter. Thank goodness typing class was mandatory in high school.
If I needed to research something, I actually had to go to the library and hope they had the resources I needed. I confess that I miss card catalogs. I still have chronic shoulder issues from lugging 50 pounds of textbooks and library books everywhere I went.
All those old scary movies where the evil person cuts the telephone lines, leaving you unable to call for help make perfect sense to me. And when you were driving, you were out of contact with everyone, unless you stopped at a payphone, had the appropriate coins, and the necessary phone number. And your glove box was stuffed with maps, because you didn’t want to get lost and have to ask a total stranger for directions.
But look at me now, sitting here on this laptop, with my GPS and my cell phone and my Wikipedia and my freakin’ taser for the bad guys. I wish my mother had lived to see the internet. She’d have been amazed. Her curiosity knew no bounds, but her ability to quickly and easily access answers certainly did.
It’s funny, though. Most of my older friends are utterly lost technologically, while my younger friends are so far ahead of me that I’m blown away. Things are moving so fast that I can tell I won’t be able to keep up for much longer. I’m sure that in ten years I’ll be as technologically lost as my older friends.
I don’t bother to do any other social media besides Facebook, even though I can tell it would probably be helpful. But Facebook is already such a time suck, adding more makes me feel slightly queasy. I will always hate using my phone as a computer. I’d much rather switch over to my laptop, where I have room to maneuver, and where my fingers don’t feel like they’re as fat and clumsy as sausages.
I sound pathetically nostalgic when I tell people what a tragic loss it is that kids don’t spend hours a day riding bicycles in their neighborhoods anymore, staying out until the streetlights come on. Maybe that’s how we learned that the world does not revolve around us, and that it’s important to be kind and to think of others. We have lost that.
Younger generations are missing out on the slower pace, the joy of being out in nature, the excitement of finding a letter in the mailbox, the going to school on Monday morning knowing you’d be able to talk with all your friends about a scandalous, unexpected cliffhanger on a show that you knew you had all watched at the same time on the same day over the weekend.
MTV came along in my senior year, but I didn’t have cable, so I didn’t know what the fuss was about until years later. I went from all my music being on vinyl records to having to replace it all with 8 track tapes to replacing it all again with cassette tapes, and by the time CDs came along, I couldn’t afford to replace all my music a third time, so I threw up my hands in despair, which turned out to be a good thing, because now I can listen to it all on line, and that certainly takes up a lot less space.
I couldn’t wait to go to college. I had every intention of diving headlong into an intellectual pool of free love, because you have to remember, my head had always been in a baby boom first wave cloud, and that what I thought college would be like. Lots of post-coital, deep conversations while staring at various ceilings. But AIDS came along just in time to spoil my fun. I was both scared and extremely annoyed. (And besides, it turns out that the average college boy is far from deep. Go figure.)
And I actually miss the sound of my clunky computer getting online with dial up internet. Its tinny beeps, sharpened into a metallic screech, then sinking into a steady hum while hissed static crawled across the line. You can hear it on YouTube here, if you are feeling curious or nostalgic.) And once it was online, I remember staring at the lime green letters on the black screen and not knowing what to do next. Had I known how much that screen would change my life, I probably would have been even more intimidated.
So there are experiences that I’ve had that the generations behind me will never know, but there are also ones that the early boomers aren’t quite comfortable with, either. My sisters did envy me my Sesame Street and Judy Blume. And while things may have been financially harder for me than they were for them, at least I never knew a time when I couldn’t get a credit card in my own name.
A lot of Baby Boomers in the second wave seem to be ashamed of being Baby Boomers, and insist on calling themselves Generation Jones these days. And many in the second wave feel that the first wave depleted all the resources, leaving nothing for the rest of us. But statistically, our wave is just as gigantic as theirs, and those in the first wave were just kids when we came along, so it isn’t exactly their fault, is it? , The first wave in America consisted of roughly 38 million people. The second wave was 37.8 million people, so honestly, who are we to talk?
Just imagine how the generations behind both waves feel. There’s no denying that we have all pretty much mucked it up for everyone coming behind us. But like it or not, we are the largest and most powerful generation in US history.
Yes, there were named generations before us, but we were the generation that actually popularized generational thinking. Never trust anyone over 30! How stupid was that? As if we’d never turn 30. That was just one of many short-sighted ideas that we had. Having various named generations is just another way of separating us into us’s and them’s. I’ve never known a generation that hasn’t disparaged the other ones.
It really rankles when I hear other generations use the term Boomer like it’s an epithet when it was something I longed to be my whole life. Despite all the shit this generation has rained down on the world, it has also done a lot of amazing things as well that subsequent generations completely take for granted (don’t get me started) and they do so even while disparaging us. And that, dear reader, makes me think rather less of them.
In fact, T-shirts as a form of self-expression were first created by Boomers, so consider that next time one of you wears a T-shirt that says, “Okay, Boomer.” (And wouldn’t it be easier to just put “I Belittle the Elderly” on a T-shirt so you can be sure it will never go out of style? Come on, man, don’t be so short-sighted. If that’s the type of person you are, just go ahead and own your desire to be shitty and rude in perpetuity. Like, really lean into it. I have faith in your ability.)
Because I am so close to the bitter end of the Baby Boom, it is quite likely that I’ll be one of the last living witnesses to a world that no longer exists. And yet there will be a time when I’m moving so slowly and am so out of touch with the present that the working adults around me will become impatient with me. I’ll be getting in their way on the street and on the sidewalks, and my questions will annoy them. My need for care will irritate them, and my frustration with that will seem dramatic.
They won’t want to stop and talk to me. They won’t have the time or the patience. And then one day I will be gone, along with all my contemporaries, and they’ll begin to have questions about what things were like before computers and they’ll regret that there’s no longer anyone around to ask. I suppose that’s the case with every generation, but I would be shocked if there were ever another generation that experiences such an extreme shift from its beginning to its end.
But then, what the hell do I know, right? I’m just some old lady who is easy to overlook, in an age when elders no longer have respect. Cool.
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