by Ada Calhoun
There was little “hunkering down” with family in the 1970s and ’80s. Back then, it was not seen as the adults’ job to help children understand and process their fears, disappointments, and sorrows. Fitness buffs did calisthenics, not yoga. Teachers in many states spanked students.²⁷
I checked in recently with some former elementary school classmates to ask if there had been an assembly or something after the Challenger disaster. They, too, remembered little but silence. One said that when the explosion happened on the TV in his classroom, his second-grade teacher started crying, turned off the TV. and distracted the class with an activity. Another remembers his teacher saying to first-grade students who hadn’t heard the news yet, “By the way, the shuttle exploded,” and then laughing nervously.
Our generation is mocked for helicopter parenting our children. We hear that we don’t let them fail enough, that our swaddling them in protective gear has left them unprepared for life. This may be true. But, if so, it may well stem from traumas like that morning of January 28, 1986.
For some of us, the message of that day became: This is what happens when you care sincerely about something. Absent parental or administrative guidance, we tried to make sense of the Challenger on our own. Within weeks, the catastrophe became fodder for sick jokes. I remember a kid on the playground flicking a lit match skyward.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I don’t know, what?” I said.
“The Challenger.”
It wasn’t funny, but at least it related to what we’d seen. Not knowing how to handle the horror, we found ways to pretend we didn’t mind so much. It would become a penchant of ours, and a style: self-soothing through dark humor. Garbage Pail Kids. Mad magazine. Gremlins. (Only now does a telling detail of that kid’s Challenger joke occur to me: he was playing with matches at school.)
We came by our defense mechanisms honestly. The murder rate reached a new nationwide high in 1974 and continued to break new records until the early 1990s.²⁸ The number of substantiated child sexual abuse claims rose steadily from 1977 through 1992. This may have had more to do with the rise in reporting thanks to the 1977 Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation Act and the expansion of Child Protective Services.²⁹ Or it may be a sign that more children were being abused. Nearly every Gen X woman I know has a story of being groped, flashed, sexually assaulted, or outright raped.³⁰
When it came to race, too, we couldn’t fail to notice a disconnect between what we were hearing and what we saw. Local Jim Crow laws were superseded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so Gen X grew up in the wake of desegregation. Black History Month was first recognized in 1976 by Gerald Ford. But, looking around, we saw racial injustice everywhere. In the 1980s and ’90s, the news was dominated by stories like those of the Central Park Five, Rodney King, and Amadou Diallo.
For members of Generation X, once again, there was a stark contrast between what we were taught (racism was defeated by the Freedom Riders) and what we witnessed (rampant racism in society, racial tension in our schools). Yet again, there was no reckoning with the distance between our parents’ ideals and our reality.
With the Berlin Wall’s breaching in 1989 and the end of the USSR in 1991, the prospect of World War III seemed to vanish overnight. Our Boomer parents, who more even than we do own the Cold War as a cultural touchstone, celebrated. My father was in Germany around this time and made a pilgrimage to chip a piece of the wall away to bring home as a souvenir.
Why didn’t Gen X rejoice, relieved of childhood fears? Maybe it’s because we didn’t fully appreciate the historical context. Maybe it’s because by then we were automatically suspicious of any supposedly good news. Or maybe it’s because we’d been made to worry for so long that anytime we were told we didn’t have to worry anymore, we didn’t know how to stop. Instead of reveling, we doubled down on world-weariness.
When we hit voting age, Gen X was labeled “the most politically disengaged in American history,” with “unprecedented levels of absenteeism” at the ballot box.³¹ Rock the Vote, fronted by stars like Queen Latifah, was meant to get Gen Xers to register, but in 1996, the youth vote hit its lowest point since eighteen-year-olds won the right in 1971.³²
There were a few Gen X–specific groups fighting for change, like Lead or Leave and its sister organization, Third Millennium. The latter, founded in 1993, fought to address the poor prospects of Generation X and future generations, a result of what they saw as Boomers’ destruction of the planet. The group circulated a manifesto that began: “Like Wile E. Coyote waiting for a twenty-ton Acme anvil to fall on his head, our generation labors in the expanding shadow of monstrous national debt.”³³ The group might be best known for its 1994 survey showing that a higher percentage of young adults believed in UFOs than that Social Security would still exist when they retired. None of the Gen X groups appear to have amassed many followers or wielded much influence. In 1996, an NPR story declared, “Lead or Leave Has Left.”³⁴
In 2000, some Gen Xers attended protests as the group of bipartisan cynics “Billionaires for Bush (or Gore).” At the Republican and Democratic conventions that year, the group dressed up in rich-people drag and chanted, “Bush … Gore … Bush … Gore … We don’t care who you vote for. We’ve already bought them.”³⁵
“The institutions that had been the foundation of middle-class democracy, from public schools and secure jobs to flourishing newspapers and functioning legislatures, were set on the course of a long decline,” wrote George Packer in his 2013 book, The Unwinding. He cited 1978—a median Gen X birth year—as the approximate turning point in America’s character.³⁶
From 1995 to 1997, the health care organization Kaiser Permanente conducted one of the largest-ever investigations into the effect of childhood abuse and neglect on health and well-being later in life: the CDC–Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. At their annual physical exams, more than 17,000 subjects filled out questionnaires asking which, if any, “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs, they had experienced—for example, physical abuse, emotional neglect, or domestic violence.³⁷
When the researchers looked at the patients’ ACE scores alongside their medical records, they discovered something shocking: the higher the ACE score, the higher the risk for physical and emotional problems in adulthood, including depression and autoimmune disorders.
No studies to date compare ACEs between the generations. It’s impossible to say whether childhood trauma was more acute for Gen X.³⁸ (And frankly it feels a little creepy to engage in a competition about who was more neglected and abused.) Still, I find compelling the idea that some of our problems now may be connected with the damage we incurred back then.
When I reached out to a community of ACE experts, several said that some connection between high rates of childhood stress and high rates of midlife psychological and physical issues made sense. Kimberly Konkel, a childhood-trauma expert in the field of public health, told me that Generation X may well be the “least-parented” generation—more than other generations, left to fend for itself without clear rules, community support, or adult supervision.³⁹ She believes the stress that resulted could be connected to some of our struggles now: “Our suicide rates, liver cancer death rates, et cetera, indicate that something is significantly wrong with the generation. I think we might find that Gen X has higher rates of reactive-attachment.” Reactive attachment disorder—also known by the ironic acronym RAD—involves trouble forming loving relationships as a result of not having had basic needs for caring and affection met.
Today, suicide rates are soaring among middle-aged women.⁴⁰ For women ages forty-five to fifty-four, it is now the seventh most frequent cause of death, ahead of diabetes, influenza, and pneumonia; for white women in that age group, it’s number five.⁴¹ Again, there is no proof of a connection here, but I find it interesting that women are more likely than men to have had four or more adverse childhood experiences.⁴² With
a score of four or higher, you are 460 percent more prone to depression and 1,220 percent more likely to attempt suicide than someone with a score of zero.⁴³
In A Generation Alone, about Generation X’s spiritual life, authors William Mahedy and Janet Bernardi employ “aloneness” as “the term that best describes the emotional, attitudinal and spiritual space Generation X occupies … In aloneness, one’s life is filled with nothing but the clutter and busyness of activity and, all too often, the painful memories of one’s own past.”⁴⁴
Women in particular seem to gravitate to the clutter and the busyness. We work so hard because we have to, for money, and very likely because we’re scared.
The background static of danger in the 1970s and 1980s took its toll. We went on high alert, convinced that with enough hard work and creativity, we could keep ourselves safe from predators and diseases and other threats—could even keep the whole world safe, with the right mental effort. In midlife, we must reconcile the two primary messages of our childhood: One: “Reach for the stars.” Two: “You’re on your own.”
Marketers have taken notice. One report on selling to us features this strategic analysis: “Life has not been stable. Gen Xers were the children of divorce and dual incomes, and were latchkey kids who grew up by themselves. Selling point: Convince them that your organization is reliable and will simplify rather than complicate their lives.”⁴⁵
Perhaps the era’s insecurity is why so many Gen X girls obsessed over Little House on the Prairie. It was so unlike most 1970s childhoods, with the big, loving family uniting to cope with hardship.
That show’s father, played by Michael Landon, was a stoic, nurturing voice. In my memory, there was only one man on television more calming, more trustworthy: Mister Rogers.
When tragedy struck, Mister Rogers advised children, “look for the helpers.”⁴⁶ At the 1969 Senate hearing about public television he said his show aimed to teach children that “feelings are mentionable and manageable.”⁴⁷ He never condescended. He leveled with us but without saying too much. He didn’t frame things in the clunky, overearnest manner of ABC After-school Specials. That series ran from 1972 through 1997 and brought us such contrived, melodramatic classics as Don’t Touch, about molestation; and A Desperate Exit, about suicide.
Mister Rogers, by contrast, advised parents to have clear, honest conversations with children when bad things happened: “When children bring up something frightening, it’s helpful right away to ask them what they know about it … What children probably need to hear most from us adults is that they can talk with us about anything, and that we will do all we can to keep them safe, in any scary time.”⁴⁸
Mister Rogers was a welcome antidote to the rest of our lives back then. I wonder if that’s why we are fascinated with him now. The 2018 biography The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers hit the New York Times bestseller list. The documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was a sleeper hit in the summer of 2018, when it was announced that preproduction had begun on A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, with national treasure Tom Hanks to play Mister Rogers.
Valarie, who as a child fretted about nuclear annihilation, is now forty-four. She has been trying to do a “look for the helpers” re-examination of her life—counting her blessings, identifying her strengths. Still, she has been crying a lot. She’s not quite sure why. She likes her neighborhood in Anchorage, where she returned after completing a BA and an MFA. She recently adopted a dog that she dotes on.⁴⁹ She works as a grant writer and bought her own house in an up-and-coming historic neighborhood. She has good friends. So why is she finding it all so hard?
Is it the clinical depression she’s been battling the past twenty years? Is it that she gave up her early creative dreams? Is it that she’s approaching menopause and her hormones are all over the place? Is it the responsibility of caring for her ailing mother? The stresses of her job? The work she has to do on her house? The fact that she’ll still be paying off student loans at age sixty-five? Is it that she’s been diagnosed with a thyroid disorder? Because she’s gained weight? Is it that she envies the friends she sees on Instagram who are able to afford trips and eating out? Or is it simply that she’s older and nothing feels quite the way she’d hoped it would? These thoughts swirl in her head as she drives to and from work and as she looks out her office window on dark winter afternoons in Alaska.
“I’m forty-four,” Valarie says. “And I feel like, What did I do? Have I made any impact? I certainly haven’t done everything that I thought I was going to do when I was a kid. [Mind-over-matter advice book] The Secret aside, I don’t think that I’m going to be able to make some of those things happen before I die. I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that we can’t all make that huge impact, and of course we can’t get all the dreams that we want.”
The problem feels not so much psychological as existential. “I’ve pretty much given up on anybody, other than my friends, ever knowing my name,” she told me. She feels invisible, but she doesn’t talk about it a lot because she doesn’t want to be seen as an ingrate. “Because we’re women, we’re always going to be seen as complaining. We can’t say anything that has a negative tone to it without being told that we should just appreciate how good things are. So we do what we can. Dye our hair. Try a winged eyeliner. Try to be present, then feel that inevitable letdown when people look right past you.”
She’s trying to look on the positive side, to see her parents’ divorce and her lifelong financial struggles as something that ultimately gave her strength and resilience.
“We were raised with more uncertainty than generations now are, but at the same time we were also tasked with taking care of ourselves. So we knew what would and wouldn’t kill us. We understood consequences more than children these days, with everything in Bubble Wrap … Women in their forties now have it a lot better than women in their forties in 1903. Technology has made our lives a lot easier. We don’t quite look like the Crypt Keeper anymore when we hit forty.”
She sounds like someone trying to talk herself into feeling fine about being in her forties, when the truth is that she feels anything but fine.
There’s a phrase I can’t get out of my head. At a regular poker game I play in, whenever there’s a junky hand showing in seven-card stud, the dealer says, upon turning over the latest lousy card: “No visible means of support.”
It’s a term used in vagrancy statutes and a silly thing to say during a game. But that is exactly what’s in the cards laid out before so many Gen X women: anxiety, family and work responsibilities, and a sense that time is running out. There could be good cards on the way, but with so many bad cards showing, they might not be good enough.
Valarie bought a house with her own money. She has a job helping people. She’s a loyal daughter.
Kelly, too, has much to be proud of: she’s raised three children, including one with a brain injury. She has a successful marriage.
And yet both women—raised with unrealistic expectations and running up against countless obstacles—see only what isn’t there. They were taking care of family but didn’t have a career. Or they had a career but never found a partner. They hadn’t lost enough weight, they hadn’t saved enough for retirement, they hadn’t made a significant impact on the world.
It should be plenty to raise children or to have a career—or, frankly, just not to become a serial killer. Yet somehow for this generation of women, the belief that girls could do anything morphed into a directive that they must do everything.
One Gen X woman told me that the motto of the elite women’s college she attended was: “Educating women of promise for lives of distinction.” Ever since, she’s wondered if she was living up to the promise, if her life is sufficiently distinct.
In a TED talk on vulnerability, Brené Brown, professor of social work at the University of Houston, describes the message we were given as little girls and its effect on us: “For women, shame is: do it all. Do it perfectly. And n
ever let them see you sweat. I don’t know how much perfume that [Enjoli] commercial sold, but I guarantee you it moved a lot of antidepressants and antianxiety meds.”⁵⁰
In any era, “not-enough-ness” is a challenge for women, says Bryn Chafin,⁵¹ a therapist with Brookwood Center for Psychotherapy in Atlanta.
“‘Middle child’ is an extremely poignant metaphor,” Chafin said of Gen X. “You can get lost and don’t have a lot of support.” Chafin said many women in midlife are “worried all the time.” Gen X triggers might be family of origin, society at large, social media, politics, and aging. The result: judgment, guilt, and shame.
“When women feel shame,” said Chafin, referencing Brené Brown’s work on “shame shields,” “they often either overfunction, shrink back, or lash out.” Those who overfunction may become type A, anxious women who are always trying to fit it all in and usually “with a tinge of self-judgment that they are failing to do everything well. It becomes a vicious cycle, where they work harder to escape the shame and then they fail and feel more shame, and so on.”
Chafin has these women ask themselves questions designed to give them a sense of freedom from obligation: “Can you do anything to change this situation? Can you look at it a different way? Can you accept it for how it is? And just let it go?”
One of the goals she encourages women to pursue is what’s known as “radical acceptance”—finding a way to take life as it is, not as you thought it would be. “It’s one of the hardest things,” Chafin says, “to radically accept what’s in front of you.”
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The Doldrums