When I Was Your Age...

“When I was your age…” is just not something I heard much as a kid, so I never thought I’d be guilty of doling it out to my own kids.  But I am.  Guilty. 

The dreaded “When I Was Your Age…” (WIWYA) rolls effortlessly off my tongue weekly – if not daily – in one way or another.  So far, my girls have been kind enough to not roll their eyes at me.  At least I haven’t caught them mid-eye-roll yet.  Yet.  I’m sure it’s coming.

I suppose the reason I didn’t hear it much was that things weren’t all that different.  There were the obvious differences, of course.  I’ve had indoor plumbing all my life, which is something that was new to my mother at some point.  Television has always been present in my home and that wasn’t the case for her.  I never experienced an air raid drill in school and I’ve never known life without the polio vaccine.  The rest of the really huge changes, however, we experienced together.

In our life together, our home phone went from rotary to push-button, from wired to the wall to easy to use phone jacks, from tethered in a room to cordless, from either home and available or away and not to a phone in your pocket wherever you are!  I’ve found myself trying to explain the concept of a payphone to my eight year old and the look on her face is the way I imagine she’d look if I suddenly began speaking Russian.  She is simply not able to understand.

Recently, she’s been discovering “Yo Mama” jokes which led to discussion of prank calls.  I was telling her some of the silly jokes that we used: Prince Albert In A Can, Is Your Refrigerator Running, etc. and realized she’ll never truly know the joy of a dumb prank call or of a bunch of girls calling a boy just to hear his voice, giggle and hang up and that makes me a little sad.  In her world, Caller ID has always been there to announce a prankster’s identity.  She’s never had the experience of a phone that rings and rings because there has always been voicemail to take a message.

I remember learning to type on a manual typewriter and the thrill of upgrading to an electric model.  Much later, the excitement came from going to the house of a friend who got one of those new-fangled Radio Shack TRS80 things!  Imagine!  A computer!  In your home!  It would be years before I ever had one of those things myself, and the idea of such a thing being small enough to sit on my lap was unthinkable.  Yet my children were born into a world where tiny little computers announced their presence all over the planet.

The idea that there was a time when a person took a picture, waited to finish a roll of film and then had to bide time for weeks to see that the subject’s eyes were closed is something they just can’t accept.  Imagining a time when cartoons were only available on Saturday, that TV had 4 channels (more if you had enough aluminum foil to bring in the UHF channels) and that there was no rewind and no fast forward through commercials is beyond their grasp.

When you sit and think about the development of these now every day things that we take for granted, it can induce a kind of mental whiplash.  So it’s natural, once I’ve scooped my chin up from the floor, to release a When I Was Your Age on my children, right?

I don’t deliver a WIWYA in a “walked six miles through the snow, uphill both ways” kind of way.  My intention is always to demonstrate how amazing it is that human beings can DO these things and that we get to watch the world evolve all around us.  My aim is to encourage appreciation for the wonders that we have.  I can only hope that at least a little bit of that comes through to bored children who just want to get back to their Minion Rush game on their handheld tablet computer.

 

When I think about the warp speed progress we’ve made as a people, I wish I could ask my grandmother what she thinks.  What would she say about the medical miracles our family experienced?  Kidney transplants certainly existed in her time, but in much more gruesome and unpleasant ways.  When the girls video chat with their uncle on the other side of the country, would she be amazed?  Would she be on facebook, looking at pictures of her grand and great-grandchildren or discussing the art of beekeeping with apiculturists from around the world?  OK, probably not.  But I do think she’d appreciate the ability to do so if she wished.

That’s what I want from a WIWYA.  I want my kids to understand the power (and responsibility) that is in their hands and view it with appreciation instead of expectation.  If I achieve even some measure of that, I’ll be content.

Admittedly, their world is not entirely improved from When I Was Their Age and so many of the changes are just not tangible.  They’ll never know the freedoms that I had to aimlessly wander, to experiment and to just generally goof off.  They’ll never know what it felt like to travel with few restrictions or that a person could get through an airport without ever taking their shoes off.  They’ll never be completely anonymous and that’s kind of a bummer.

Still, I think the tradeoff is worth it.  Their time is just beginning.  So far, it’s beginning with understanding that all human beings are equal and deserve the same rights.  They see the world with no apparent prejudices, with no borders and no ceilings.  They know they can do or be whatever they want because their society has never told them otherwise. 

I didn’t have their technology, but they don’t have much of the close-minded beliefs that weighed my generation (and many generations before that) down.  Their time is far from perfect, but it’s definitely progressing and to me, THAT is evolution.

I’m not going to promise to limit my WIWYA stories.  They’re going to keep coming.  I hope at least a small percentage of them will be digested enough to nurture gratitude and understanding of those who have walked before them.  If the rest of the stories are cast aside and I just get to use them as a torture device, I’m fine with that because I know a day will come when they are telling their own kids that When They Were Their Age, they didn’t have a cool teleportation apparatus, they had to depend on their solar powered flying cars!  And their kids are going to roll their eyes, too.