One single Thread gave our writer more emotional closure than years of therapy ever did.
The algorithm on Threads seems to be more laser focused than any other social media platform. It has nailed me as someone with teenagers who likes to read and post about food, is likely in perimenopause, and is reliably Gen X. I mean, I’m guilty. But when this particular Gen X Thread by author Rowan Coleman popped up as I scrolled in the dark waiting for sleep, I could barely peel myself away:
The replies came in fast and in full agreement: By “complicated” do you mean didn’t actually like us and treated us like crap?
“Yes,” was the single word reply from the author.
I immediately hearted the original Thread and responded with my own generationally-appropriate snark (eyeroll included): I’m sure if you asked them why they sucked, they’d tell you they’re “sorry you feel that way.” 🙄
My hair-trigger response was followed by a deep dive into other women’s replies all mirroring my relationship with my mother. It was uncanny. All of our moms seemed to have been following a script of shitty phrases that each of us heard nearly verbatim. Gen X women — a lot of them eldest daughters — were in full agreement that our relationships with our mothers sucked. I wanted to keep reading and responding, but I forced myself to lock my phone and let sleep win.
By the next morning I’d forgotten this exchange until I saw the notification badge on the app lit up in red. I was sucked right back into words that felt so familiar but that had come out of other mothers’ mouths. On my commute to work on a single morning, I was nearly absolved of any guilt I’d felt over my relationship with my mother. I’d spent a good long time in therapy discussing our relationship and hadn’t come close to this kind of clarity. It wasn’t just me! Could it really be that all of Gen X felt what I’d felt? Have we just not been talking about it and squashing it down deep inside of us all of these years?
What They Said to Us
What I could not help going back to over and over again, scrolling for more similarity, were the things they said to us throughout our lives. A lot of it wasn’t particularly mean, but the alienation and competitiveness that the words embodied made many of us feel complicated about our mothers, to put it like Coleman did.
Here’s a short list of some things they said. See if you recognize any:
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“I guess I’m just a terrible mother!”
“I don’t remember it like that.”
Boomers (and late Silent Generation parents) have been well-documented to be all about “Me.” The common self-centeredness theme I noticed shouldn’t have been surprising. It’s been studied; it’s been the subject of angry essays; and it’s been unforgettably portrayed in film. If I hadn’t stopped to overanalyze their parenting behavior, I don’t know that I would’ve seen the common thread, but it’s right there in the defensive “I statements” above. (You get bonus points if you can spot my she’s-been-to-therapy words.) If our mothers did something to hurt us, they’re not sorry for what they did. They’re sorry we feel that way.
Just this summer my own mother said almost every single one of these things to me on a phone call in which I could no longer hold back my rawest emotions. My kids were leaving for college. My father was diagnosed with cancer and having major surgery. My ex-husband and co-parent (and dear friend) was moving across the country and we’d be living in different cities for the first time in 30 years. I had a lot of emotionally taxing things happening in my life. But she asked me when I was coming to visit her. I told her I didn’t know how I could swing it, and she reacted in a guilt-laden tone that she felt like I wasn’t paying enough attention to her. This “Me Generation” statement was my last straw.
I was astonished. How could a mother who knew their child was going through so much ask for more from her? I proceeded to unleash everything I had been harboring for the past several decades, not for the first time but never with this much fervor. Tears and snot ran down my face as I sat in the grass of a public park where she happened to catch me. I had been walking my ex’s dog as a favor — another added stressor. I was loud and no doubt made people politely ignore the crying woman. The dog checked in on me and then also politely ignored me to focus on squirrels.
My stepfather was listening in on the call and interceded when he heard me wailing, “You are not listening to me! You never hear what I’m saying!” He suggested we hang up the call because we weren’t getting anywhere. But I refused this very Boomer, let’s-forget-this-and-never-speak-of-it-again suggestion. We were going to hash it out. My mother complained that she thought our relationship had been getting better with the unspoken idea being that my anger meant I was spoiling things for her.
Truth be told, I had just gotten better at pretending to be pleasant because, as she approached her 80s, I realized that things would never change. That I was the only one who could change the dynamic for the better. I gave it a shot, but it turns out, it’s not easy to accommodate self-centeredness when you have nothing extra to give.
Why Are They Like This?
When I put on a journalistic cap instead of a wounded daughter one, I can see how this self-centeredness came to be for the generation that was conceived with great joy at the end of World War II. Their existence heralded better times to come — it’s hard not to get an ego when you make an entry like that. They lived through the strain of the ’60s and Vietnam. They felt they or their friends could be sent off to die at any moment for a pointless war. Becoming wildly hedonistic and shrugging off the austere nature of their parents who lived through The Great Depression was their rebellion; their embrace of life.
As my best friend said the other day when discussing our mothers, “If she were a character in a book, I’d be on her side. But I’m not.” Our mothers suffered, no doubt. They weren’t allowed to have bank accounts without their husbands’ permission until the ’60s, or get a mortgage or their own credit cards until the ’70s. Being an independent woman was a remarkably hard-fought status to achieve, if you ever even got there. It’s no surprise then that many of them encouraged our independence.
One of my mother’s most long-standing compliment-slash-complaints is, “I made you kids independent and darn it, you are.” For many of us in Gen X, that independence feels like being out there on your own, from far too young an age. We feral children drinking out of hoses until the street lights came on brag about our autonomy from age 6, but radically shifted how we parented our own kids.
Gen X Is Breaking the Cycle
I copied parts of a list a woman had written in response to the initial Thread that noted the ways she was parenting differently in direct response to the way her parents raised her. I was tempted to send it to my children to make them understand how much more thoughtful I was being and how they were getting what I wished I had gotten. Then I quickly scrapped the idea. It was good enough to know that this is what I try to do without ever needing them to know what I missed out on. I didn’t have to make their better-dealt hand about me.
While my own mother speaks kindly, kisses and hugs me and my siblings, and frequently tells me she’s proud of me, these were the parts of the list that lit up a tingly bit in my brain: “treating my child as a whole, autonomous human being,” and “allow thoughts and feelings without making it all about me.” I know that my own mother is not a bad person or even a bad mother. Plenty of people have far, far worse childhoods and I’m guessing they would readily swap their mother for my sweet-spoken mom most days. But the facade of sweetness and passivity in this generation of women didn’t always feel nice.
I remember telling my therapist once that everyone else would say my mother was the nicest woman in the world. Then I went on to describe some events like being a wildly allergic child with asthma who was regularly brought to relatives houses with pets at the holidays. I’d often struggle to breathe or need to sit outside in frigid but fresh Christmastime air; a miserable experience for any child.
My therapist very gently inserted, “That doesn’t sound very nice.” I tentatively concurred with the caveat that there probably weren’t a lot of other options. She followed up, “Would you do that to your child?” When my answer came fast and hot, “No way! I would never,” she gave me a look and a gentle nod that said, “There’s your answer.”
I certainly am not going to be handing myself any medals for being the world’s most conscientious mother. I’ve screamed and lost my temper and surely, as I joke to my friends, messed my kids up in ways that I cannot yet predict. One thing we’ve done well, however, is listen to our children as independent human beings — actually separate from us and not a reflection of our parent/child relationship.
Gen X is present in a way our parents were not. Some complain we’re too present, and that’s probably true in a lot of cases. I don’t think I missed one class performance while my children were in school. We shepherded costumed children through the neighborhood at Halloween, watching from an appropriate distance, but still sharing in the joy of a good candy haul.
We combatted the terror we felt as kids when we were left alone for a night with “plans” to lie so still under the covers that home invaders wouldn’t know we were there. As adults, we didn’t want our kids to feel the fear of being left to fend for themselves. So we made sure they didn’t. When you cannot trust that your parent will be there for you, it creates irreparable cracks in the relationship with them.
We’re desperately and thoughtfully trying to fill in the cracks our mothers left in us, making sure they don’t appear in our own kids. Give Gen Z a few more years, or even decades, and surely we’ll know what we missed. But hopefully because we’ve done the work of building trusting relationships, they’ll tell us themselves, give us a chance to apologize and change our behavior, and we’ll hug it out in the end.
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Lili Zarghami lives with her teenagers in Brooklyn. She’s been writing for and providing editorial direction at women’s websites like Redbook, HGTV, Better Homes & Gardens and more since the turn of the century. She can remember the addresses of all the places she was a latchkey kid but has no idea what her email password is.
