In Spite of Everything Read Free

was in ‘Generation X’
anyway
?” or “I’ve never paid attention to those kinds of sociological generalizations.” But according to studies, we
do
conform to sociological generalizations in that we refuse to acknowledge them, even as we conform to them.
    First, market research shows that we all bristle at being called “Gen X” (funny: “I Am Not a Target Market” was a chapter in Douglas Coupland’s
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
, published in 1991). Indeed, we still have a jaundiced view of authority, just as we did as adolescents. We’re still self-reliant; after all, we’ve been making our own dinner since we were six years old. We never counted on gold watches or pensions; we recalibrated ourselves and our careers as often as the economy morphed. We came to the whole idea of love after we’d been battered around like middle-aged divorcées—and when we actually found it, we cleaved to it. Love meant everything. It certainly did to me. It was my vulnerable little secret. I may have seemed jaded, but I was, after all, a kid needing love, security, and attention—the very things my parents had been too distracted and overwhelmed to offer.
    So I, like many of us, made it. But I, like, I’d bet, many of us, unconsciously banked on the fuzzy logic that arrival in adulthood would somehow summon a mystical force that would seal up that gaping hole forever, like the giant boulder rolling over the cave entrance in
Aladdin
. It worked, for a while. Until we became parents.
    I t is a well-worn axiom that if you want to learn what is unhealed from your own childhood, have children. In psychological terms, this is known as a “narcissistic injury” or “narcissistic wound.” Parents have always had specific nightmares that plague them in peculiar ways. For some, it is the unquenchable fear that their child may be picked on by stronger or meaner kids; others are terrorized by drowning scenarios; still others imagine the horrors of sexual exploitation. All such nightmares, many psychologists would argue, are rooted in the parents’ own childhood fears. For Generation X, I think, it is the dread of abandonment that keeps us up at night—dread stemming from having been utterly alone ourselves as kids. It makes sense, then, that to allow our own marriages to end in divorce is to live out our worst possible childhood fear, but, more horrifying, it is to inflict the unthinkable on those we love and want to protect most: our children. We would be slashing open our own wounds and then turning the knife on our babies. To think of it is impossible.
    Nobody puts it quite like Alice Miller, the renowned psychologist who—in her seminal text on the subject,
The Drama of the Gifted Child
—describes those of us who sustained such childhood wounds: “They are driven by unconscious memories and by repressed feelings and needs that determine nearly everything they do or fail to do.” * When we become adults, marriage, with children, becomes the center of our universe. It
is
the world. Market research has shown that we won’t ask our own mothers for child-rearing advice because we feel they failed as mothers, and we’ve decided we’re going to walk the polar opposite line. Having grown up without a stable home, we pour everything we have into giving our children the homiest possible home, no matter how many sacrifices that means along the way. Our lives center around our own kids’ childhoods, around saving them from the smallest pain. Survey says: Despite our hardened exteriors, our crunchy crust, Gen-X moms are all completely, utterly attached to our children. We would rather err on the side of being too close, too involved, too loving than repeat our own parents’ sin of neglect. Scan any Gen-X mommy blog, and you’ll find them all variations on a theme: the cool, maverick mama with the giant, attachment-parenting heart. A photo of Mom’s arm tattooed graffiti-style with her kids’ names. The