Continuing the discussion from Were Your Parents “Cooler” Than Average?:
We need a thread of our own. It’s wonderful if you had parents cooler than average, or just average cool, but some of us had to live in a different world. My parents were embarrassingly uncool. I went to great lengths to make sure no one I knew would meet them. We need to talk about our lives too.
Let me tell you a little bit about my parents. They were stuck in a time in the past I don’t think ever existed. In that world, whatever it was, kids were supposed to do nothing go to school, help around the house, and be seen and not heard. Sure, they allowed for some play time, but it was clearly wasted, especially when it involved those neighborhood children who never properly behaved and why don’t I want to play with the children of their friends who were respectable people? Children should be preparing to go to college, earn multiple degrees, and be gainfully employed at a respectable job. As in all other things they were the arbiters of what was respectable. A relative who was a teacher with multiple degrees was not respectable because she was teaching high school. Being a teacher is not respectable. A college professor would be okay, but school teachers were hacks.
I think my parents were on some angular path diametrically perpendicular to the cool / uncool axis.
They both grew up in the convervative South to parents who raised them in the Great Depression. Parents and grandparents alike were put off by the antics of strange-behaving people starting as far back as the late 1950s. They grew up wtih obligatory religion and old fashioned sexual mores and whatnot, and believed in it.
At the same time, well, my Dad was first in his generation across several related cousin-families (they all knew each other… visualize a cross between the Ewings and the Waltons with chitlins and cornbread) to seek a college education. His own Dad had been the pioneer to come work in town instead of being a farmer. My Dad opted to get a PhD in Physics and went on to be a nuclear physicist. He gave me an early education in being a nonconformist. “You can’t be outstandingly excellent and also be like all the others. Outstandingly excellent is different. So different can’t always be bad. And being the same for the sake of sameness is not good”. I probably gave him many a reason to regret that encouragement, but he’s always been his own person, that’s for sure.
My Mom was from a less rural-dirt background family — her own Mom had gotten a degree in nursing and worked as an RN, hospital and later private-duty nursing — but she herself came through during that era when women’s aspirations were pointed towards the home. So she majored in home economics (it was a thing back then. be educated, understand the world, then come home and run a household efficiently with good nutrition and best housekeeping practices). Around the time I was in 3rd grade she got involved in Head Start, then got her teaching credentials and taught at an 85% black and 95% poor elementary school for years. She taught me about having a public political conscience. Oh, and she, too, was totally her own person, less ostentatiously than my Dad but she taught me to do what’s right and not to worry what others think, or at least not to the point of not doing what’s right.
Neither of them was boring, but cool? “Cool”, they’d say, “that’s one of those…‘trendy’ phrases the young people use. Everything nowadays must be ‘cool’. What I want to be cool is the contents of my refrigerator, so hurry up and get whatever you opened it for and close it”.
My parents were the epitome of the 1980s traditional first-generation Asian immigrant parents in many ways. Got degrees in biology and physics, came to America for grad school, father got a PhD, worked as an engineer, mother was first a computer programmer but then became a traditional stay-at-home mom, values were pretty traditional, attire was totally conventional, we went to a Baptist-ish church, etc. We were very sheltered; my mom wouldn’t even let me see Batman comics or Ninja Turtles and even Newsweek magazine was not allowed to get into our hands until my mom had first examined it to rip out any bikini advertisements or things like that.
Not that I’m complaining at all, but there was nothing that would be “cooler than average.”
My parents were decidedly uncool, especially on sexual matters. They were married in 1934 and I was born three years later, in the middle of the depression. My father changed his name to sound less Jewish when he was looking unsuccessfully for a job. It didn’t help; the job he finally got was working for my mother’s uncle, who had a factory making dental equipment.
My mother was a HS dropout. She always claimed that my father had finished HS, but I wonder since his very poor immigrant family would have wanted him to earn money as soon as he could. After my father got that job, we slowly, painfully, climbed into the lower middle class and they wanted to do everything to stay there. I was strongly encouraged to go to college although we had no money to pay for it and I got no scholarship. I went through a wonderful piece of luck.
I don’t think I belong in either thread. My parents didn’t have time to care about “cool” in any context. They both grew up in the Depression and the traumas they suffered then never left them, so they worked hard, saved hard, and tried to make things better for us kids than they had had them (and then resented us for it sometimes, but, oh well, feelings and stuff). I mostly admire them in retrospect, and the parts I don’t admire so much I have learned to understand.