Lived Through This
That Time My Mom Sprayed Mace in a Bakery
Or, why I grew up thinking all adults are miserable
I never met any happy adults when I was a kid. My parents were miserable, my parents’ friends were miserable, my friends’ parents were miserable, and that was pretty much all the adults I knew. I didn’t know that happy adults were even a thing until I went to college and met people from Oregon.
As a kid, the only real variable I ever noticed among these various miserable adults was the degree of flamboyance they used to express their unhappiness. Some people were low-key about their misery while other people were Don Henley about it. And at the peak of that mountain, existing entirely in a world of stylized absurdity, unacceptable emotions, and screaming meltdowns in Chili’s parking lots, was my mother.
It might seem unfair to tar baby boomers as a whole with the same brush I use to paint my mother. After all, she was genuinely unstable while baby boomers overall are a group of honest, hard-working folk angry at their children for not owning houses or something.
But the various cultural crises that enveloped the boomers hid my mother and her problems in plain sight for a long time. The way boomers swapped out their love beads for business suits suited my…
