by Carisa Peterson

I am a woman in my late 30s in the year 2018. I am a young Gen-Xer. I am an old Millennial. I am what many have come to call, a Xennial: a small group of people born during just the few years that span the hump between the 1970s and 1980s. We have characteristics of both of the generations which we are sandwiched in-between, plus a few of our own—like that it is difficult to identify with either, and so sometimes we may not even know what to think about ourselves. We were the ones largely responsible for the rise of New Kids on the Block and we continue to be the reason they sell out their annual themed cruise.

We experienced the first half of our lives in “analog” and the second half “digitally,” as though we’d put on a pair of permanent 3-D movie theater glasses to rarely glimpse genuine classically-instructed cursive handwriting on a real piece of stationery. But, we know it was there on our parents’ kitchen table. When I am really old and losing my marbles, those kinds of analog-y things will be the stuff of what I will think are just dreams. I got my first email address on the computer kiosks in my high school’s library. I chatted with people in chat rooms before people learned that they could they could be creepy or mean without having to consider the actual human-ness absorbing the blow on the other side of the screen.

I went to college and got a degree in something that I “liked,” because the well-intended advice I’d received from my folks went something along the lines of, “Just get the degree because few end up working in the field they get it in, anyway.”  It became a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as I took a job out of college having nothing to do with my degree in Mass Media Communications. The country was on an upswing, and the company I’d started with in 2002 was soon paying me well enough that I could foresee a sustainable future. So I stayed, married a local (this was a mountain resort community), and my husband briefly got a job working for my same company before he was laid off and my salary was cut, both in 2009. I was no longer so confident in the future of my company whose industry was heavily economy-dependent. All of my real-world experience was laced into the rise and fall of everyone else’s disposable income.

My friends whose degrees came with a title like nurse, teacher or attorney rode the current through the downturn in 2009, while I looked for something else to do. The market had changed. It wanted portfolios: tangible, measurable and unique accomplishments and a marketable identity, not just time put in performing successfully. I’ve ended up in a field related to banking—where a lot of us go without professional identities, but with need for hours that fall within those of our children’s daycare and that offer some semblance of benefits. There are a lot of us. Many of us are women, as men are fading from view in the middle tiers of white-collar commerce.

I am haunted by the memory of having a stay-at-home mom during a time when stay-at-home moms weren’t yet hiding in clusters of other stay-at-home mothers. Today’s stay-at-home moms are culturally savvy enough to feel like they have to shield from others and disguise that they at least married well enough that they were afforded a choice: a choice to do everything all at once, or to carry one role at a time and carry it well.  The “order of the day” for deciding to get married for Gen-Xers was the extremely nondescript concept of “love.” So, many of us still flounder in a sea of overwhelm as we deal with the many impracticalities of dually-working-parent family life—a life which has yet to be supported by a societal and political system that refuses to catch up. Offering living wages or public financial support for social and early childhood educational programs would be a good place to start to build a strong, healthy society. I feel like many of us are struggling to maintain the strength and health (physical, emotional and mental) of ourselves and our families at every turn.

My parents are dying. I recently lost my dad to kidney failure, which was merely a byproduct of a grim combination of medication and sedentariness, which seemed like an unavoidable part of his decades-long fight with Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia. My mother is fading from this life as dementia erases her very being away, right in front of my eyes. I am not alone, although I am on the young end of a sweepingly large number of women being tugged at from both sides as we come to fully bear the weight of being the first generation for whom working full-time and multi-generational caregiving is more of the rule than the exception. We are feeling the significance and finality of being the next ones to drop off of the existential conveyor belt, and yet we are too busy “having it all” to do much about it except develop an obsession with lifestyle trends rooted in simplicity and meaning, before life itself slips grievously between our fingers as we tightly grip the torch of indisputably hard-won progress. But we still wonder if it will have all been worth it as we search for affordable, quality care for our aged mothers, and worry about whether there will be a place for us when we need it (or if we’ll be working through it), And, we think about many of our daughters who are opting out of having children of their own altogether, having deemed the price that we paid too high and believing kids can be added to their cart like an Amazon add-on item later, if they change their mind.

We won’t have malls to walk laps in as “mall walkers” as we age because they all will have closed. But, that just means we’ll have to walk outside in the fresh air and sunshine. Maybe the music piped into old folks’ homes will finally transition to Madonna and Nirvana from Lawrence Welk. We’ll laugh as we call each other “slacker,” hobbling at various speeds through the hallway of our assisted living facility, but we’ll have earned the right to finally slack a bit. There are good things still coming to us. I think we’re kind of looking forward to them.

Carisa Peterson is a mother of two, a worker bee, a published writer, and a produced playwright who writes in the wee hours from her home in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

Her work can be seen in Summit County Home magazine, on The Wisdom Daily, Real Mom Daily, the Good Men Project, Elephant Journal, and in the successful 4 week-run of Curves Ahead at Breckenridge, Colorado’s Backstage Theatre (2015).

She enjoys doodling topiary trees in her spare time. Follow Carisa on Twitter @LynnoType or visit www.carisapeterson.com.