Gen X Turns 60

Growing Up in the Most Libertarian Generation

1965

You are born. Your father is not in the delivery room. Your mother leaves the hospital weighing what she weighed before she became pregnant, partly because she smoked throughout. She feeds you cold milk from the fridge, and, when you unscrew the top of a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Aspirin and eat the whole thing, she consults Dr. Spock’s baby book, the only childcare book in existence.

1965–1975

Your brother comes along, and there might have been more kids, especially considering you popped one of the pink pills out of the plastic spinny your mother keeps on the bathroom sink. Your parents have a TV on a rolling stand, a TV you are watching one afternoon when your mother changes the channel from cartoons to a news report with images of people being cut down by firehoses and of men pointing because a man has been killed, a report that makes her stand in the bedroom doorway and weep.

Photo courtesy the author

There is always commotion on TV, people shouting, people getting shot. You understand without being told that these are important affairs and that you are not important to the picture, you are just an observer. There has been a war going on for as long as you can remember, a war that late one night comes into your home when the phone rings, a call your mother takes while pacing the kitchen in the dark. Soon you come home from school to find your uncle in Daddy’s big chair. He is 19 years old and does not have legs anymore, something about a radio being a booby trap in a place called Da Nang. You sit on the floor by the big chair in the afternoons and lightly trace your finger over what look like black threads sewn onto your uncle’s stumps as he rests his hand on your hair and says nothing.

In the summer, you go to a house in the country where there is an 8-track player. Your mother has gone to the record store and told the clerk to give her what is popular. She comes home with Carole King’s Tapestry and the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar and The Carpenters’ Close to You and Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. You and your brother and your parents’ friends’ kids thrash around the living room as you blast “War Pigs” to no complaints from the parents, who you practically never see except at dinner. No grown-up monitors your consumption of Yoo-Hoo and Hawaiian Punch and Pop-Tarts and Ring-Dings and Cheez-Whiz sprayed directly into your mouth; they are busy having cocktails and arguing and doing things that will wreck their marriages. Decades later, after you see the Ang Lee movie The Ice Storm, you tell your dad he really should see it. “I can’t, honey,” he says. “I lived it.”

1975–1985

Your parents split, like everyone else’s. Your mother goes to something once a week called group therapy. You do not know what this is, other than your dad saying it’s a place men go to get an easy lay. When you are 13, your mother tells you that she is going to the Bahamas and that there are cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli in the pantry for you and your brother. One night when she is gone, you sit by the window in the dining room, testing how far you can see into the black sky. Years later, when you mention to your mother that nowadays people tend not to leave a 13- and 11-year-old home alone for four nights, she seems puzzled. “Your dad lived three blocks away,” she says. Which was true enough.

You lose your virginity, if not before you go to Planned Parenthood and get yourself some birth control. It never occurs to you to tell anyone you do this, or that someone would take care of it for you. It also does not occur to you to tell your parents which colleges you are applying to. Your mother does quiz you on possible SAT vocabulary, including the word consanguinity, the meaning of which you do not know.

The culture shimmies. You never liked the hippie music your friends’ older siblings listen to, the Allman Brothers and Neil Young and the very worst, the Grateful Dead. You buy Never Mind the Bollocks, but don’t really love it. New Wave is better, The Jam and Elvis Costello and Blondie. Later, when you buy The Replacements’ Tim, you feel a kind of warm sadness and recognition, also with REM’s Murmur and Los Lobos’ How Will the Wolf Survive?

1985–1995

You graduate from college. You watch some peers go into finance, where they plan to make several hundred thousand dollars a year within two years, and do. You take a job as a cocktail waitress (“I’m so glad,” your dad says, “I paid your tuition for four years”) and let the baby Masters of the Universe tip you lavishly. You spend too many nights at random bars and parties, doing the occasional line of coke with strangers, filching what’s left of other people’s drinks. It occurs to you that this may not, as the AIDS epidemic rises, be the safest of behaviors. You change jobs and work with a catering outfit alongside dozens of young gay models and actors and dancers, men who start coming to work looking thinner, then do not come to work at all. You learn that there are consequences that make no sense, consequences that different factions mold like plastic explosives to lob at people they see as threats, waving “GOD HATES FAGS” placards at funerals and blowing up the Branch Davidian compound and spending millions in taxpayer dollars to bring down the party in power. You personally do not care who Bill Clinton did or did not screw, and while the Congressional clown show is occasionally entertaining, you realize that, for the first time in your life, you are being actively courted as a commodity. While some find this flattering, might even look for a perch within this or that movement, you are unpersuaded by any flim-flam seduction dance, maybe because you have no institutional memory of being put first, and thus, while you are sometimes amused by the effort, you also do not trust it.

the author with her daughter

The Berlin Wall falls, and you should be paying more attention, but you just had a baby. There is nothing more important, and you build your burgeoning career around her. Though you will know him until his death 30 years later, your romantic relationship with your daughter’s father does not work out. You are not bothered by this; there’s a freedom in being the only grown-up to decide how the days will be structured, what you will cook for dinner. This time in your life coincides with the Era of the Single Mother; the media banging on about the hardships and “How did this happen?” and blah blah blah blah blah. When people learn it’s just you and your toddler, they sometimes ooze patronization, needing you to know they appreciate how hard it is for you. It’s as though they are handing you an itchy sweater, one that makes you easier to ID. You do not put on the sweater. It eludes you how eager people are to slot themselves into categories, to slot others. When you first hear the term “Generation X,” the designation might have struck you as fitting, X being the universal variable. But it does not strike you as anything more than shorthand for the convenience of others, and what does this have to do with you? And then you are driving east on Beverly Boulevard near Rossmore Avenue in Los Angeles when you hear on the radio that Kurt Cobain is dead, and it is as though you have shot through a portal and know, now, that there is a before and an after. “It was our JFK,” a friend will later say.

1995–2005

You are a full-on grown-up doing grown-up things. You get married. When your husband, a one-time skate-punk whose favorite band is the Butthole Surfers, asks what you want him to put on the stereo, you always say, “The Pixies.” You buy a house. You get yourself into and out of debt. The first of your friends gets cancer, and it seems impossible that she can die, what with all her friends in their robust 30s working to keep her alive. But no matter what you all do, including figuring out how to drain her lung so as to avoid a bumpy ride to the hospital, she dies. Friends you thought were clean overdose. A 12-year-old your daughter went to school with commits suicide. The friend who dies of cancer once insisted that middle age starts at 35. You had not believed her then, but maybe this is what she meant.

You are out for a run when you stop by your brother’s house. He opens the door, and you see that his hands are shaking so badly that he cannot get his belt done. “They flew planes into the Trade Centers,” he says. You run the six blocks to your house and find your husband in front of the television, watching the first tower come down. Nobody does anything for days but stay by the TV, and you sense that the entire country has entered a new after. The astonishment hits differently this time. Any time you want, you can call up the image of Cobain in a thrift store cardigan singing “The Man Who Sold the World,” a transubstantiation of the unendurable into an offering, but after the towers come down, people are not in the mood to receive. They want to fight, to hate those they see as a threat, to slot them into categories, to pretend that calling them “American fries” means a goddamn thing. You do not realize then that you will spend the next 20 years watching people industriously entrench various “Are you with us or against us?” positions, foxholes they ever more insistently call you into. No, thank you.

2005–2015

You realize that the conveyor belt you got on in 1965 only goes in one direction and that you’re past the halfway mark. Your sister-in-law buys a house with zero money down, which seems weird to you: How can a mortgage company afford to do that? In September 2008, you get a letter from your bank saying that the home equity line of credit your husband used to open his business is being called in due to the financial collapse. A friend visiting from Michigan waves around a bottle of tequila as he rants about how it’s total bullshit that Goldman Sachs is getting a bailout while his dad, an auto worker, is out on his ass. The news channels you watch now show ads for arthritis and erectile dysfunction pills between coverage of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, people who shout across the trenches that the opposing side is to blame for societal immiseration. Most of the shouting strikes you as masturbatory, people in love with their own voices. The pitches do not land with you, or maybe you’re not used to being the person pitched to. And while it’s likely the perimenopause, you do wind up being captivated enough to change your designation from “Libertarian” to “Democrat” so that you can vote in their primaries.

It is November 2008, and you watch the presidential election results with your daughter. It’s the first election she’s been old enough to vote in, and when Obama wins, she cries. A month later, she moves out, after which your husband finds you crying in weird parts of the house, including crouched by the water heater. When he suggests that you turn your daughter’s bedroom into a gym, you scream as loudly as you ever have, and in any case, it’s a good idea you do not because her father gets cancer and you move him in with you. You learn what it is like to have someone who feels like a part of your body be helpless not to leave. But he doesn’t leave, he gets a reprieve, one you know, as you hit 50, not to trust but are grateful for, nonetheless.

2015–2025

If the nation shares a figurative reservoir, now is when a virus drips in. What seems like the whole country develops a sickness whose first symptom is to have people digging more trenches—the BLM trench and the #MeToo trench, the Trump derangement trench and the MAGA trench. People cannot cram into these holes fast enough; they veritably dive in. Quickly (or maybe not so quickly, you think, recalling 9/11), speaking freely creates a complementary sniper alley from which the people in the foxholes can take aim, and they do, oh boy do they. We warned you, they say; it’s STFU or get shot. Denouncing others, it turns out, is intoxicating, and how the unbothered generation got so caught up in this you cannot say. You think to tell them that it’s a rigged fight, that no one answer is right, but they’re not listening because listening feels threatening and also because they’re succumbing to the next symptom of the national virus, in that they now smell blood in the water.

Your blood, in fact: little cuts every time you refuse to post the black square, to denounce a friend. Not toeing whatever line is deemed unimpeachable today can result in people being roped to the social media machine and dragged, missions you find ghastly and juvenile, and also, you have other things to do. Your daughter’s dad’s cancer comes back, and he dies in your guest room while the two of you are watching Wimbledon. Your father dies with blessed quickness. Your mother starts a decline into dementia that is all the more precipitous for its slowness, for the things that can slip into the cracks, the scams, the thieving relatives, Richard Gere on her landline pledging his love, love that will only grow if she sends him her banking information. You learn that every one of your friends is going through the same thing with their aging parents, that contra the invisibility of your childhood, you have become the most important thing in their world, who knew?

the author with her mother

The global pandemic hits, and the feverish decade goes into overdrive. Were it not for sequestration you suspect people would be killing one another in the streets, which also happens. The murder rate triples in some cities. While every social metric—of income, of equality, of opportunity—had been going up, many do not want to believe it; they want to put on their masks and point their guns. This purview is not exclusive to the old or the young or the in-between; it is to people who are looking to be seen as important, as fighting the right fights, and you think, in this instance, that you may have an advantage to having grown up the center of no one’s attention, that the variability of X came with no expectation of the spotlight. You said and did as you wanted, damn the torpedoes.

2025

You turn 60. The pandemic ending unleashes a lot of optional body modifications. Your fat friends get skinny. The middle-aged have been doing weird things to their faces, and now the kids are doing them too, dermal-filling and microneedling and spending three hours on skincare regimens. What the young are not doing is getting married and having babies, a zillion podcasts and opinion pieces inform us; it’s the Era of the Single Mother in reverse, and you trust the handwringing just about as much.

And then your daughter calls to say that her best friend is having a baby, a friend who is a second daughter to you. No one told you to have faith in the future, but you always did, perhaps because the culture never saw you as the anything-special generation (thankfully; it sounds awful), making you free, even at this late date, to dream.

Nancy Rommelmann is a journalist and author and co-host of the podcast Smoke ’Em If You Got ’Em. She lives in New York City.