your own financial and family situation to decide for yourself if you’re ready to have a child. You might decide to have a baby outside the “norm” of love-marriage-babies by age thirty. You could have a baby before getting married, as a single parent, or even in your forties. You don’t have to have all the pieces perfectly in place to get started—you just have to be ready enough. There’s also no guarantee it will happen right away, and obviously there are age and health factors that impact fertility, so keep that in mind when you’re waiting for the perfect moment to arise.
Be independent. As soon as you can, extricate yourself from your parents’ purse strings. When they’re supporting you financially, they tend to have lots of opinions about how to run your life. When you can establish a boundary in this area, life changes drastically for the better. They’ll still have the same opinions, but you’ll feel less obliged to try their opinions on for size. You are the expert on your life.
Chapter 2
Millennials Are Killing Basic Respect
“Why Millennials Annoy Their Elders”
—Forbes, February 2014
“Millennials: A Progressive Generation with a General Lack of Respect”
—Odyssey, February 2017
The working title of this chapter is “Millennials are Killing Family Values,” but I’m not sure it will stay that way. I’ll cover a lot of “value”-related ideas in the chapters about relationships and parenting, but “family values” encompasses so much. What it boils down to is that this chapter is all about the way Millennials make their families (usually parents) shake their heads and mutter about what disrespectful kids they raised. Because, of course, the idea that Millennials are entitled and disrespectful jerks needs a foothold, and parents thinking it about their own children locks it in for the rest of society to whine about.
Here’s the thing about Millennials. If something or someone treats us badly or makes us feel like crap, we say a hearty “No thanks.” This means changing the landscape of the workplace when managers treat us like machines instead of people. This means making a ton of noise about sexual assault and sexism, even though it gets us labeled problematic and routinely told that we’re making something out of nothing. This means we’ll cut off family members who treat us poorly, and we are unapologetic about it.
From #MeToo, which I’ll discuss in more depth later, to the general willingness and empowerment of young people to call out racism, sexism, economic injustice, and other societal issues, we’re making a big fuss. And it’s changing society for the better, from large-scale protests to tiny battles across the Thanksgiving dinner table. We have no time or space for people who treat other people poorly.
In the last two years of my life, I have made the decision to cease contact with both of my biological parents. When I stopped talking to my mother, she threw all my stuff away and wrote me out of her will. When I stopped talking to my father, he accused me of being the problematic common denominator. And yet, I’m the healthiest and happiest I’ve ever been, now that I no longer feel responsible for being their version of a good daughter.
Remember this: It’s not your job to be what someone else expects of you. You are not obligated to “respect” someone who does not treat you well.
A Little Bit Screwed-Up
If you are anything like me, you got to adulthood a little bit screwed-up by your childhood. I know that no one had a perfect childhood, but it’s important to understand that the way your parents speak to you as a child is the way you learn to speak to yourself as an adult.
I believe that the majority of parents love and support their children—but they can still make mistakes in parenting. This is why it’s so important to apologize to your kids when you mess up. Acting like you’re the authority of all authorities and expecting your children to blindly respect you even when you’ve hurt them is a recipe for you getting pissed-off when they finally stop talking to you in their thirties. Ungrateful brats.
No matter what issues you have as an adult, they are probably buried somewhere in your childhood. The way we experience life as adults is framed and experienced through the scripts we learned as children. When we are kids, we are absorbing and assimilating new information so fast. There is so much being learned, so constantly, it’s a wonder our heads don’t explode.
Unfortunately, we also learn coping skills through childhood traumas, and those things tend to stick with you well into adulthood. Sometimes they are beneficial, and sometimes they leave you wondering what is wrong with your damn brain. We grow up with the example of our parents as our barometer of normal, even when outsiders can see that our family is definitely not normal, for better or worse.
Here’s a delightful example: Georgia Moffett, daughter of actor Peter Davison (who played the fifth iteration of the Doctor in the British TV show Doctor Who), said in an interview, “My father, Peter Davison, played the fifth Doctor. I went to school with the daughter of Colin Baker [the sixth Doctor], so I was sort of under the impression that everyone’s dad was Doctor Who.”
This is a prime example of how children use their families as the measure of normal against other families. For this same reason, children of abusive parents may continue the cycle of abuse against their own children because they assume that it was normal behavior. Children of healthy families tend to be healthy and respectful in their own parenting practices.
In my case, I never remember seeing or hearing my parents argue, but I felt tension. Then they divorced when I was seven. In my marriages, I never wanted to argue or fight because I had never seen how that was done in a healthy way. I expected that you just lived with the tension until your breaking point, because that was how I witnessed the dissolution of a marriage as a child.
After our parents’ divorce, my sister and I moved to Texas to live with our father for a brief stint. I was around twelve years old. I remember telling my dad that I loved him, and he said, “You say that so much that it seems like you are trying to convince yourself of it.” I remember feeling like my stomach had been filled with ice, and I had an uncomfortable tightness in my chest. I felt slapped. And with that one offhand statement from a man who was under a lot of emotional strain and vented it at his daughter, I learned that my love cannot be trusted, it must be proven.
Before I figured this childhood issue out, I practically gave myself to death in romantic relationships, never wanting to give the other party reason to doubt my love or think I had to convince myself to love them. I became very easily taken advantage of and taken for granted because of how hard and deep I threw myself into making sure my partner knew I loved them. I never even stopped to notice if that love and attention was being reciprocated.
By the age of twelve, I discovered through constant reminders from my mother that I was fat, lazy, and worthless. My sister and I were put on diets from a young age and were shamed for being hungry, wanting sweets, or going up a pants size. I internalized the message that fat people don’t get loved, and I would never find a man to love me because I was fat and lazy: nobody wanted to be with someone like that. The objective of my life became to become pretty and find a man, because I equated that with happiness. So, as an adult, I often went along with whatever a man wanted to do because I didn’t want to be rejected.
Moral of the story: I am just as screwed-up as you are.
The bad news is that your childhood is over, and it happened, and you can’t go back in time and actually change it. The good news is that you can still work on healing your childhood wounds in order to become a healthier adult. For many, a therapist is helpful in these endeavors,
