Well, maybe just a little.

I want to challenge that whole trope about Gen X being raised on hose water and neglect.  It’s out there in the inter-web-verse that Gen X grew up feral.   I mean, yes, we did drink from the garden hose, but from someone who’s lived the Gen X lifestyle, let me tell you, my parents were not uninvolved in my life, and my friends’ parents were not absent.  The real difference between parenting then and parenting now is that adults had their own lives decades ago.  They didn’t micro- manage their kids’ entire existences.  There was a line of demarcation between parents’ social activities and kids’ shenanigans.  My parents had full, busy lives apart from the lives of my brothers and me.  But they supported us 100%, went to our band concerts, my mother generously prepared a full breakfast spread at our house; scrambled eggs, bacon, pastries, etc for my friends and me after our junior prom.  My mom and dad accompanied me on college tours when I was a senior in high school.  They paid for piano lessons and dance lessons. I mean maybe I had to wait for my mother to pick me up a half hour after my lesson was over, and my piano teacher and her family were starting to eat dinner while I was waiting in their foyer, BUT……  They were not absent in any way.  And believe me, when I got caught doing something stupid,  punishment was meted out in the form of serious grounding.  But my comrades in teenage foolishness and I definitely had a secret life, a social scene completely devoid of parental oversight.  And thank goddess!  

Kids and teens more often than not figured things out for themselves.  We didn’t tell our parents when we were slighted, insulted, shamed, teased or got our feelings hurt in any way.  We pretty much kept that shit to ourselves.  We mostly dealt with whatever traumatic events happened to us,  maybe only telling our closest friends.  For good or bad, that’s the way it was.  

We spent hours on our bikes – I wrote a whole thing about my adventures via my yellow bicycle, riding miles and miles away from home.  I made clandestine plans, drank and smoked, explored, experimented.  And I don’t think my parents knew half of what I was doing.  

A central aspect of a Gen X childhood was time spent on the school bus. The smell of the fumes and the vinyl seats, writing your name or messages on the frost that covered the windows in the winter, managing bullies- those things built character in ways kids today could not even fathom.  Parents never drove their kids to school.  The only exception was if you had an orthodontist appointment or doctor’s appointment for some reason during school hours, and that was rare.  The kids in my development, which was fairly new at the time, walked up to the top of the street every morning to wait for the bus.  In rain, sleet, snow, or sun.  The school bus was a no man’s land,  a free-for-all of childhood activity. If you got lucky and had a fun bus driver they might give you sticks of Big Buddy bubble gum, or they’d ignore you as you got soaked by squirt guns on the last day of school, or if you squirted passing cars out the window.  The far back seats were where teenage couples sat together so they could make out.  There was only one bus stop per neighborhood.  The bus did not stop in front of every-single-freaking house.  We were sturdy enough to walk from the top of the street to our homes.  It was no big deal. No one even gave it a second thought. In fact we preferred it that way so we could have a little more time to fool around, horse-play, flirt or make plans without the eavesdropping ears of adults.

The other thing that was different that made us more independent was that there were fewer activities and way fewer sports teams, especially if you were a girl. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing, that’s just the way it was.   We mostly had to figure out our own ways to keep ourselves busy and amused.  If you didn’t play little league or weren’t into scouting, there weren’t a whole lot of group activities.  And that was totally fine with us. Personally, I hate group activities to this day.  Give me one or two like minded friends and that’s enough for me. There was no “after school” either when I was in middle school.  Everyone went home at 2:20.  And if both parents worked, you went home to an empty home.  And that was fucking glorious!  Time to yourself. Snack time. General Hospital time. I absolutely loved time alone in my house to listen to whatever I wanted on the radio, to phone friends from the one telephone hanging on the wall in the kitchen.  To simply relax and have no one supervising me.  

I guess if we were “neglected” at all,  I’d use the term benevolent neglect to describe how our parents “parented” ( a verb that did not exist forty or fifty years ago).  Yes, there were long periods of time when we were older and  friends’ parents went out of town, either to the other side of the country, or the other side of the pond.  And we took full advantage!  But that certainly wasn’t unusual.  Adults had their own shit to do and we were happy to let them do it.

When parents were out of town, these were just some of the stupid yet amazingly fun things we did:

-Jumped off my friend’s roof into her pool.

-Skipped senior prom, sat on the roof of the house of a friend who did go to the prom, drank beer and yelled at college students walking by on the sidewalk below.

-Made our very own Delta House ( fans of Animal House will get the reference) in which some people stood out on the third story widow’s walk  and threw beer bottles onto the sidewalk, dressed in drag and rode around town on the the campus and community bus with a blow up doll, and threw elaborate dinner parties in the fancy kitchen. 

Had slumber parties where we drank and smoked to excess in a friend’s bedroom while her parents were away and an elderly aunt was in charge- and thankfully unaware.

Painted graffiti on the infamous water tower on the outskirts of town.

Walked all over the village in the wee hours, peering into the window’s of the many bars to which we were too young to gain entrance.  Rumour had it that this little village once held a Guinness Book of World Records record for having the largest number of bars per square miles.  Was that true? Who knows?  But we liked to work that into conversation proudly any time we had the chance.

Made midnight runs to go skinny dipping at the lake or to go pool hopping at the houses of other classmates whose parents were not home. 

Had multiple co-ed sleepovers- which I guess today is no big deal, but back then kind of was.   

Do all of these things point to us being neglected? Not at all.  Did they strengthen our sense of independence? Yes.  Were they fun as hell?  You bet.  Do we wish we had been our parents’ buddies and mini-me’s?  F no!  Did our parents love us? Of course.  Were we feral after all? Maybe. Did we drink hose water? Yup.  And it was warm and disgusting.