Random Thoughts Occasioned by My Daughter’s 25th Birthday

I had occasion to think about a lot of things last year.

The age marking childhood’s end has been pushed back over the last 50 years, even more so if you’re familiar with stories of life as it was lived in the mid to late 19th century. There was a time, and not all that long ago, when it was expected of girls to behave as women at age 16, and stand by for marriage and child-bearing. Men, by age 18, were expected to be able to support that child-bearing woman. 

Not boys. Eighteen year-old men. By that age, to paraphrase a line from the New Testament, you had put away all childish things. You wouldn’t be caught dead with a comic book because, come on, son! Comic books? And what’s with all these toy spaceships and dolls all over your place?

I’m 57 years old and my grandfather’s generation and their predecessors would be repulsed at the sight of my bookcase. Good thing they’re dead. I don’t think it’s so bad to have artifacts of one’s childhood about in one’s personal office/study/HQ. It’s your place of peace, reflection, and creation, after all, and if you like having reminders of where you came from about, that’s your business.

Today’s milestone ages have been in place since (so far as I remember) the 1980s. You turn 18, you’re old enough to vote and join the military, to kill and/or be killed. You turn 21, now you’re a real adult because you’re finally of legal drinking age. (Yeah, we know, we know.) 

Then comes 25. I’m surprised there isn’t much more made of this, as it’s a critical landmark all its own. By this point, you’re either out of college, out of an early career in the military, something. All your Great Landmark Years are decade markers from there on out. Thirty. Forty. (It’s the new 30!) Fifty. (The new 40!) Sixty. (You’re still just middle-aged!)

I took these photos in June upon returning to Colorado Springs to have my catheter removed two weeks after my radical prostatectomy. (My daughter was kind enough to have her mother and I over for the night so we didn’t have to drive up and back in one day.) I wonder if the fact that my daughter owns a couple of bookcases makes her a generational anomaly. That she hangs on to old books she read even as a tween is a pathology she’s inherited from the old man. Some of these books, notably the Little House books and A Wrinkle in Time, were ones I’d read aloud to her and her brother when they were small.

Sixty-five used to mean something, as that was the year you could begin collecting Social Security, but that age got raised a while back. It’s been generally understood for a decade or so now that, unless you’re independently wealthy or crippled, you’ll work until you die.

That beigey-colored book in the middle of the horizontal stack is familiar.

I digress. I’m thinking of my long-grown and gone daughter. I read about “entitled Milliennials” and so on, and I don’t doubt there are lazy, stupid, entitled (etc., etc.) things galore out there, but that’s not what I’ve witnessed from my perch. In my daughter’s case, as soon as she got a handle on the concept of working for a paycheck and buying her own stuff, she got her own place so she could do her own thing. Like most of her friends, she has a main job, a side job, and an Internet art hustle.

I’m not sure she or anyone she knows is crying over his “wasted life” as one character I knew back in the 1980s did, the decade my contemporaries and I burned through our 20s. Based on the law of averages, I don’t doubt that a few have had the next best thing to a personal crisis with it. As for my daughter, as for most, though, I imagine they’re simply too busy to be that fussed about it. They’ll have some drinks to it, sure. But not so many that they can’t get up to go to work the next morning.

What do you see? A sunrise, or a sunset? (I’m sure most readers of this blog have already guessed it, but I needed a photo here, and the philosophical exercise sounded like harmless, if hackneyed fun.)

My children are not sheltered, gated-community kids. They’ve seen their share of human trainwrecks. Before my daughter was out of high school she knew at least one boy who had died from an overdose of black tar heroin. After high school, another hung himself from an old railroad trestle. She has plenty of other stories to tell, maybe not so dramatic, but just as sad for those lives that were truly wasted.

In the end, there were those people went one way, and my daughter and many more people, who took the longer road.

The weather won’t always be with you. Drive defensively, but remember, fortune favors the bold. Find that balance!

I laugh to think how my wife and I came from situations in which, “I’m the first in my family to go to college!” was a big deal. I was of the second generation of those, and that winning streak ended with me. Neither of my children have burned or plan to burn precious time and money sitting in classrooms. High school was hell enough for both of them, and as colleges and universities are in the process of rendering themselves irrelevant (for reasons better explicated on other blogs devoted to this peculiar bit of institutional decay), I’m proud they simply went on to take jobs, excel at those jobs, and move up enough to survive on their own. It’s more than dear old Dad ever did. I didn’t start doing anything I was proud of outside of raising children until my 50s.

I’ve seen my children’s friends. Some are smarter than others. A couple you worry about. All are hustling to one degree or another. To my mind, the trope of the Lazy Entitled Easily Offended Snowflake Millennial is just another thing the media promotes to make us all hate ourselves and one another. 

Sure, there are a lot of suboptimal people out there. They’ve always predominated. To my mind, that which is good is treasured because it requires effort to make happen. Good is not a by-product of laziness.

Good is still working out there. It never quit. It doesn’t seek, nor does it often get, publicity. If you’re hating on Kids Today, I’m telling you you’re hating the wrong kids. Go find a better crowd. Mine did.

Keep pushing through those mountains until you find your sunny day.