days of wine and roses

[the_siobhan]

We've had a couple of slow days at work, which means I have lots of time to think of things to post to LJ about. Occasionally even time to read it too, even if I can't follow any of the links.

I was grumpy on a mailing list the other day - not one where any of you would have seen it. It's a local list and I'm actually thinking of just dropping it. Any time there is anything resembling any kind of debate going on, the list-owners delete all the entries, saying "Feelings are running high". Whatever.

The post that got me going was just one of those dopey forwards about how idyllic life was when we were all kids. I'm sure you've all seen them, they talk about technology long gone and paint a sunny picture of how innocent we all were Back In The Day. There are dozens of them out there and there's always at least one line in every one that makes me froth at the mouth.

In this particular one? "Remember when everybody's mother was home when you got home from school?"

No I fucking don't pal, because I didn't live in the tree-lined suburbia of Leave It To Beaver. I lived in run-down apartments where the kids wore a key on a string around their neck or played with their friends until 6:00 because there was nobody home to let them in before then. The only ones who had parents who were home all the time were the ones where eveybody lived behind the family store, and they were generally stocking shelves from the time they were old enough to lift a tomato soup can.

The whole "remember when air was clean and sex was dirty" thing just annoys me in general. I'm sure the people who initially compiled those lists do have fond memories of their childhoods. But how self-involved do you have to be not to know that it wasn't like that for everybody? I know it wasn't just in my neighbourhood where kids went to school with broken arms from "falling down the stairs". Or where somebody's mother was regularily spotted in the supermarket wearing big sunglasses indoors and long sleeves in the summer.

The innocent youths I remember doled out bloody beatings on a regular basis. A girl barely old enough to have breasts who was held down and groped in the schoolyard was told "Stay away from them." or "Stop encouraging them" by her teachers. And God was the only one who would have mercy on you if somebody spread the rumour you were gay.

Then there was the kid I knew who was burned in his bed and had plastic surgery six times before he was ten. Or the one who returned to school after getting out of rehab at 13.

I'm glad the people who wrote those emails had an idyllic childhood. I wish more people had idyllic childhoods. I sure as hell wish I had an idyllic childhood. I genuinely like hearing about the idyllic childhoods of people I know.

But assuming that being young and innocent and helpless was the same experience for everybody who went through it is blithely ignoring the fact that not everybody got to have the same life they did. And sending the email around with that bubbly "remember when" 'tude as if everybody who reads it can automatically relate is an act of such profound self-involvement that it Pisses Me Off.

I say my life is good now and I have lots of reasons to really mean it. I have no reason to idealize the past.

Comments

[jeancroix.livejournal.com]

Sounds like glurge. From wikipedia:

Glurge is a neologism describing a certain kind of melodramatic, saccharine story. The defining characteristic of glurge is that, while its purpose is to make the reader happy, the feel-good aspect is so overdone that it is more likely to nauseate rather than to inspire. It often has a religious theme and is most commonly circulated via e-mail in the form of a chain letter. The term was coined in 1998 by regular Urban Legends Reference Pages forum contributor Pat Chapin as an onomatopoeia to communicate the feeling evoked by reading these missives. According to the Urban Legends Reference Pages, glurge is "the sending of inspirational (often supposedly 'true') tales that conceal much darker meanings than the uplifting moral lessons they purport to offer, and that undermine their messages by fabricating and distorting historical fact in the guise of offering a 'true story.'"

[pfrank.livejournal.com]

that is a great word.

[ravensee.livejournal.com]

I love this rant.

[mandor1971.livejournal.com]

My life, now, is good.

But fuck the people who assume everyone had a "Leave it to Beaver" life. You said it, but it's a phrase that's been used by a lot of my friends who had that life.

Fuck those people who assume that everyone had a great life. Fuck them for never dealing with guns and dead friends killed in school. Fuck them for never knowing fear when going to class. Fuck them for never consoling a raped friend. Fuck them for not trying to kill the rapist. Fuck them for never chasing someone down. Fuck them for never being terrified as someone walks down the line of students trying to hurt people. Fuck them for never having been afraid that they'd die. Fuck them for never having to save a friend, knowing that they may die trying to.

And, seriously, FUCK THEM for never standing up for anyone when their lives were on the line.

Those people only have the lives they have had. They were lucky. But fuck them for assuming everyone else had their lives.

Grr. If I knew they'd stand up for someone now, I'd be ok with it. But they wouldn't.

There is no reason to idolize the past. It wasn't that great.

[nachtisch.livejournal.com]

To me those are kind of surreal. Like not-terribly-deep fiction. Do people really have those lives? Like honestly? I bet they don't.

[panic-girl.livejournal.com]

I did.

I still have a hard time believing it, but I did.

Thank my stars every day of my life too.

[panic-girl.livejournal.com]

S'okay though, because it totally ate shit once I turned 18. ;)

[nachtisch.livejournal.com]

I kind of had the opposite. Eh, if it was good all the time we might not be as interesting? Ummm, or something?

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I think Jenn did up until a) her mother got sick and b) she got old enough to run afoul of the local thuggery. I'm well aware that I might be kidding myself, but I think at the very least she had a good start.

Then of course high school, and being the uncool kid, and parts of her story start to sound an awful lot like mine. :-p

[http://users.livejournal.com/belladonna_/]

I love people who wax nostaligic for the 50s.

"Ah, the '50s... when 75 percent of the population was totally disenfranchised."

You don't hear anyone saying that, do you? Waxing nostaligic about legal racism and women's constriction to defined gender roles?

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

No kidding. My family was not middle class, we did not fit into whatever their idea of the 50's was.

Any conversations that mentions "when women didn't work" drives me spare. The women in my family always worked. Go into a non-suburban non-white neighbourhood and try to tell them their mothers never had to work. They'll laugh at you. Then they'll set you on fire.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

That one makes me see red too. In my family women worked, but that was on the farm, which, because of all the lies we were fed in school, made me grow up thinking that it was a farming thing. It was a big deal that when we were little my mother *didn't* have to work.

One of my first jobs out of university was working for a psychiatrist to the elderly in a working-class part of Yorkshire, and I did a lot of transcriptions of patient histories. Without exception, all the women had worked in the factories all their lives, or until they shut down. That led me to do some research, so now I can rant about the middle class housewife myth at length.

[http://users.livejournal.com/belladonna_/]

I realize you are not talking about people who are focusing on the 50s. This post just reminded me of my own personal bitch. :)

[unagothae.livejournal.com]

It's strange to have grown up in small towns where the idyllic and the violent exist close enough together that I can remember the idyllic as something that happens to other people. The violent didn't happen in school.

I remember a bizaare in between place where everybody hated me because I wasn't protected enough to fit in with the kids who grew up with the idyllic and I wasn't physically harmed enough to fit in with the kids who were growing up with violence. I didn't know how to be good and I didn't have the heart to be bad.

I hate those stories because some part of me wishes life could be idyllic and those stories remind me how glad I am that it never will be because I'd never fit into a world like that.

[beaq.livejournal.com]

Word.

[siani-hedgehog.livejournal.com]

meh. i had an idyllic childhood, wearing a key on a shoelace around my neck. what pisses *me* off about that kind of glurge is the false dichotomy they set up.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Excellent point.

[xthlcm.livejournal.com]

IIRC, Jello Biafra and Mojo Nixon had a great song about that (http://www.lyricsdownload.com/jello-biafra-nostalgia-for-an-age-that-never-existed-lyrics.html).

[snickerpuss.livejournal.com]

Thanks. *nods*

[elixxir.livejournal.com]

Damn skippy! People like that wear Laura Ashley and only have sex in the missionary position on Fridays. They actually kind of scare me.

[nachtisch.livejournal.com]

I love Laura Ashley. Haha! Not that I've ever owned any. I think it comes from idolizing hot Renaissance art historians from England. (Damn that woman was smokin' in Laura Ashley.)

[50-ft-queenie.livejournal.com]

There's a older couple that love 2-3 houses away from my parents. They seemed like the ideal couple. He was very much the courteous old-world gentleman, she was a devoted wife and stay-at-home mom. Only very recently did we all find out that he's an alcoholic who always had a bottle in his desk at work, and that he'd been beating his wife for years.

Just because a situation looks ideal doesn't mean it is or was.

[caspervonb.livejournal.com]

Amen.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

Excellent post. I have to admit to being one of the people who had a very safe & sheltered childhood. We did, however, live about 3 blocks from where the 'hood starts, so I went to school with kids who didn't have it so good.

[sweetfuckall.livejournal.com]

Comparatively speaking, my childhood was downright Beaver-y. However, now that I'm out on my own and living ghetto-fab, I am experiencing childhood through a different pair of eyes.

The only ones who had parents who were home all the time

...on my block, everyone's parents are home all the time because work is a foreign concept to the denizens of the crack-belt. In fact, I'm almost certain that my sister and I are the only ones in our building who are employed.

At least once per week, the bloated piece of shit who lives next door to us tells her seven year old daughter that she's ruining her life. In response, the seven year old sobs for hours in her room about wishing she were dead. The Snowbirds were in town this week, and the youngen got a really good look at them... From her bedroom window (which is swathed in an old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sheet, btw, which she isn't even old enough to remember).

I'm rambling, now, but I obviously feel your pain/rage. Painful rage?

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

That story breaks my fucking heart. Poor kid.

I'd be tempted to sic CAS on her for emotional abuse, if only with the suggestion that she could use dome decent parenting classes.

[sweetfuckall.livejournal.com]

I'd be tempted to sic CAS on her for emotional abuse

We did :*( That and the fact that we overheard the sketchy, teenage boy who they leave her with sometimes threatening "do you want another punch in the head?" Somebody did come by to check them out, and from what we could tell they ordered her to do the months' worth of dishes stacked in the kitchen and cut the little girls' hair.

Seriously -- this kid *never* gets outside. All summer, she spends it locked in her room after being sent there as punishment for whatever. What's most upsetting is that they've recently added a puppy to their family. The dog gets out for 5 minutes per day to shit, and that's still more daylight than the kid sees!

I overheard the crazy bitch telling a guest that she bit the puppy in retaliation for him nipping at her. "He didn't think I'd do it, but I did!" I think she honestly believes that dogs and seven year olds possess the same powers of reasoning that cracked-out ghetto mommies on "disability" do.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Christ. That's seriously fucked up.

Some people don't deserve children.

[melete.livejournal.com]

I grew up in that picture and from my experience it was never as idyllic as it was in the postcards. Everything was hidden behind these facades of suburban cleanliness and niceness where people pretended problems didn't exist and seemed to believe that those who had them obviously weren't motivated enough to change their situation or merited them in some way.

It wasn't all bad, there were lots of good moments, but it was never picture perfect either.

[nachtisch.livejournal.com]

Some of the homes I lived in were like that. Like idyllic from the outside, but weird shit no one talked about going on inside.

[notmostppl.livejournal.com]

I saw that post and I didn't think you were being grumpy at all. It needed to be said. I don't know if you've noticed, but the person who posted that garbage tends to be out of touch with reality on most subjects.