Generation gaps

The heading on this post is not to suggest that I believe there ever have been anything except generation gaps. Since ancient Rome (at least, as far as documents to which I have access show - I cannot read cuneiform, but it must be there as well), each generation fears a moral collapse of the next, and cries out how dreadful things have become. The business about "our children" needing protection is much later in its current incarnation, but the sentiments must predate Alexander the Great. And now ++Rowan is saying children are forced to mature too quickly. (Well, I suppose I'm sympathetic, being his contemporary. Our generation showed little desire to mature at all, and I'm not sure we have.)

The trouble with many of my own generation, and even more so with those who are perhaps in their 30s today, is that many of them got started late with having children. Too many are so fearful of their children being corrupted or harmed that they create a magical, idyllic view of childhood, from which no one should emerge until it is time to receive one's Masters, and tremble to think that their son of 12 does not believe in Santa Claus, or that their teenaged daughter has noticed the existence of boys. I gather that many people have such paranoid fears that everyone past puberty is a paedophile that they fear having kids (including those who of the age when, in my mother's day, they may have been married) out of their sight for ten seconds.

My life has been light-years away from being wild. Yet, compared to the over protective, 'let her be a child' (at 16), standards of some parents today, one would think I was something bordering on licentious. (I am a shocking example for children, of course - especially when I do not happen to be in church or the library, where I am about 75% of the time. I smoke, drink a bit of wine, do not consider Shakespeare or Chaucer to be offensive.) Then again, many of my generation indeed were involved with much wilder pursuits than my own, and I suppose that they have mental pictures of how their mistakes (who has made none?) harmed them.

The Victorians made much of childhood innocence, of course - I suppose that the little ones, just having come from heaven, resembled a pretty version of angels or nymphs and could satisfy romantic visions. Yet I'm surprised that the Archbishop of Canterbury (who is in my age group and who, like myself, has been known to retain religious commitment and respectability) recently preached on not letting children 'grow up too fast.' I would hate to see this ever happen again, but, again in my parents' time, many a youth of 14 was already employed in the factories. Amongst lower class people, marriages before 20 were hardly unusual. My own impression, frankly, is that too many of the youth today are not 'growing up too fast' - they are not being permitted to grow up at all.

When I was very young (in fact, before I even was a teenager), I often discussed neighbourhood happenings or items in the news with friends. Unless I have lapsed into senility and my memory is totally gone, the young could converse about the less-than-pretty side of life with a realism which those who want to paint them as flower faeries would deny. I was - and am - more innocent than average (more because of my own romantic inclinations towards the ethereal than because of ignorance), yet I was not troubled by knowledge of the full scope of the human condition. In fact, those who pretended to be shocked at everything often were the ones to watch - it was calculated, to win the approval of adults.

I'm inclined to agree with Augustine - if children get into fewer messes than adults, it is more weakness of limb than purity of heart. Kids can be very cruel, deceitful, delighted with others' misfortune, etc., etc.. The childlike innocence seems more a cherished myth of adults than anything about reality.

I'm going to be silly for a moment, and recall my own fearful mother's steps to keep me from turning into what I believe at one time was called a 'flaming youth.' (It's funnier if one realises that, then as now, my pursuits were cultural and intellectual, and I spent a good deal of time in church. I later would become a nun.) I had a curvy figure - the sort which resembles a sack of cantaloupes at 50, but quite attractive in one's first youth - which I sought to flatter when I made my clothes. Chip, who (without understanding or seeing their inadequacies) occasionally dipped into the 'wisdom' of armchair psychologists, was troubled because, according to said charlatans, a young woman is supposed to be embarrassed about, and try to hide, her breasts. Though mine were hardly on display, indeed my clothes were designed to set off the curves - so I suppose that tagged me as one who was looking to bonk the neighbourhood.

I smiled, when I read Susan Howatch's "Glamorous Powers," at how well she captured how generation gaps can be huge in relation to fashion. Jonathan Darrow, hero of that novel, enters his second marriage when he is well over 60, and his new wife is slightly younger than his own children. Jonathan, prior to meeting Anne, spent 17 years in a monastery, which followed time in military service in India. He has not been in the company of women for a full generation - and styles in 1938 are drastically different from those in 1915. Anne, whom he initially takes for 45 (she is 30), is intentionally frumpy because she's had a bad time at the hands of men after her money. Ruth, Jonathan's daughter, is dressed fashionably - but Jonathan finds Anne to be elegant, where Ruth's high heels, lipstick, and curled hair he finds 'cheap.'

My own mother, though well dressed and impeccably groomed, had a fashion sense which stopped around 1940. (Her only concession to later developments was wearing trousers, which she preferred because she was always cold.) In Chip's time, women wore lipstick, but, if they wore eye makeup at all, it was only mascara, and that only for evening. Any other makeup was supposed to be undetectable, and was used solely to hide the effects of aging. If a woman coloured her hair, it was a secret on a par with the plans for the D-Day invasion. Perish the thought one actually changed one's hair colour, even if only to recapture the more flattering shades one had ten years earlier. Colour (again, a secret on a par with sneaking opium) was only for covering grey hairs.

My generation, of course, wore colourful, dramatic eye makeup - day and night. (One without it was either a plain Jane or trying to be prepubescent... with the rare exception of those who wore neither makeup nor shoes and had just changed their names to Star Glow.) We had great fun with hair colour - green mascara - and so forth. Did my mother, who wanted me to wear no makeup and have my hair chopped like a baby's, really think she was fooling me when she'd pretend to fashion magazine terminology and say, with what was supposed to be appropriate dramatic emphasis, "I like The Natural Look." In truth, she feared both that I'd be thought a tart (young men are equipped with radar, and there was no danger that I'd be any sort of blip in that department) and that I was "growing up too fast" (when my problem was that, since my full height was very short, I was often mistaken for being much younger because those of taller stock thought I was still growing.) More so, she feared that others would think she was making me grow up too fast. (My mother, herself, never did grow up - and she lived to be 84.)

Her much older sister, Mary (who first saw the light of day circa 1903), was more intelligent than the other sisters, and indeed had quite a flair for fashion in her day. As is often the case when one sibling has gumption, interests, and intelligence beyond that of the others, Mary was the family oracle. I loved Aunt Mary, but often had to stifle a giggle when she would show me how to 'sit' - the way girls were taught who went away for 'finishing.' (I never did ask her where she met any of them... I knew it was nowhere near the old neighbourhood, but I digress.) Indeed, the pose she demonstrated may have been flattering with the floor length skirts of 1915, but, in my own time (or even my mother's), it would have made one seem artificial and affected.

Mary's own daughters were quite a bit older than I. It did not occur to my mother or theirs that their not having worn eye makeup during the 1950s did not mean that they were the 'nice little girls' where I was the budding slut. Or that the awful socks women wore during and after the war were a fad prompted by silk's being unavailable, not the mark of the perpetual sweet child. But it made my mother fear criticism all the more. My cousins (to whom I was and am close, by the way) would brand me (the daughter of the 'baby sister' of the family) as the 'little cousin' in perpetuity. To this day, I still am viewed as a precocious child. Seeing me in nylons, lipstick and the like was a shocker, though most of my school chums would have thought me to be a late bloomer. (I am not sure I ever did bloom....)

My suggestion to parents of today would be to remember one's own youth - and stop expecting young adults to behave as if they were not out of the cradle. Then again, that shows my own innocence still. Probably most of those who are fretting indeed do remember their own youth...