Families, cont'd.

Let’s think about the women of the "Greatest Generation" for a minute. During the war, these gals were asked to man the assembly lines, manage  busy offices, ride the range, weld cars, build airplanes…to basically hold down the economic fort while their male counterparts were overseas, or serving the military in some capacity. For a few shining years, gender bias in the workplace was put on hold, and the women were given as much responsibility (though surely not as much pay!) as they could shoulder. And then came 1945, and victory. No more war. The girls were admonished to lay down their welders, their microscopes, their typewriters, their independence , and go back to doing what girls were supposed to do. Unless you were rich, brilliant, very talented, and/or had a hide as tough as a rhinoceros, your "career path" was now going to consist of landing a husband and shortly thereafter, producing offspring. And for the most part, that’s what they did. They got married, had kids, made homes, and raised their families because that was what was expected of them.

My mother was particularly fertile, and managed to crank out quite a brood in short order. Imagine creating five children in eight years. This would put at least one, often two, perhaps three of them in diapers at once, during a span of about ten years. Consider getting over that hump, and having no time to catch your breath before the first one hit puberty. Imagine having multiple teenagers in the house for another decade. Wouldn’t that be enough to drive you crazy?.

I’m sure there are thirty-something super-moms out there that are saying, "Well, of course it wouldn’t drive me crazy. My best and highest calling is to be a mother, and in becoming one, I have dedicated my life to the ultimate good of my children… and blah, blah, blah." Trouble is, I don’t think the couples of my parents’ generation ever invested that much science into having a family. They didn’t even consider that they might have a choice in the matter. Or that parenthood was a calling to which they might not be particularly well suited. They did what society expected of them.

Think about it. All over the country, young women got a taste of what it was like to be independent, self-sufficient, competent in the big, bad, world…and then were told to go home now like good girls and go back to playing house. It’s not too hard toimagine that they might have felt cheated. That they couldn’t exactly concentrate on being super-moms, because they felt like society had sold them out…used them when it needed them, and then threw them back into domestic obscurity. These were the mothers of the "Baby Boom"--- the mothers of one of the most amazing population explosions in our history. And THEIR history had turned them into something irreconcilably different from their own mothers. What they needed was a double dose of domestic genius…what they GOT was the distraction of the siren song of "career." And WE, the members of this gigantic blip on the population scale…we gave them the hardest time we possibly could.

I offer the above as partial explanation for why the "perfect" families of the fifties and early sixties degraded into the generation that coined the word "dysfunctional." Why we boomers chose to shake off the anonymity of being part of the faceless horde into which we had been born, and burst forth behind the banner of "Do Your Own Thing." And why my mom started to drink, just as I, the last in the line, started off to high school…

To be continued….