You were born 50 years earlier than you actually were. Imagine your life.

In My Humble Opinion
61

Hmm, born between 1930 and 1935 - lets go with 1933 because I like the number 3.

As a child in the 1930s, I would be too young to understand the Great Depression, but my father would have been in the Navy, so perhaps he would have remained employed, and we would have been simply extremely poor, like we were anyway in my 1980s childhood. So not much different there.

1940s, I’d be just old enough to understand WW2. My father would have stayed in the Navy, along with all of his brothers, and all of my mother’s brothers. Many of them would have died, perhaps him along with them.

If so, continue reading. If not, skip one paragraph. (like choose your own adventures.)

Lets say he remained in the Navy, and died in the war. My mother would have been shattered mentally and physically. As her only child, a girl, and a young teen still in school, I would become her primary caretaker. She would recover eventually, about 10 years later, in the mid 1950s, become enamored of some man at church or in the community who could “take care of her” and I would need to find other living arrangements, or live in their basement as an old maid. By this time, women would have been strongly encouraged to NOT work, and it would be difficult for me to find a career, especially since my high school work was interrupted by my mother’s medical care. I would be in my 20s, and would have never dated, or been interested in marriage or romance. I would find and marry a young man from our church who thought I was pretty, and become an unhappy housewife. I would survive my lifelong depression with alcohol and valium. I would not have children, resorting to stealthy abortions if necessary. I would become inspired by the growing commonality of divorce in the 1970s and 1980s, and join the trend happily in my old age and become a crazy cat lady, possibly doing work for a Salvation Army or Goodwill - just enough to get by. I would live to at least 85 (good genes, other than cancer) and die in 2018 surrounded by my cats, alone, somewhat bitter, but not too unhappy, and survived only by very distant relatives far away.

If my father survived the war, he would have returned home, my mother would have her “oops” baby in 1943, and he would die of cancer fairly soon thereafter, in 1947. My mother would be shattered physically and emotionally, and I would be called upon to care for both her and a young child. I would care for them both until I finished school and she began to recover slightly, at which time I would graduate high school with the knowledge that there was no way for me to have a further education or a career with the war ending and all the menfolk returning home and needing those jobs. I would also know that my mother would never be capable of raising a child by herself, and would have a harder time finding a husband with a child than by herself. I would write an “I love you and I’m going on a mission trip to Africa with brother” note, and steal one of my father’s guns, a hunting knife, and various household chemicals. I would take my brother, aged 8, on a long bus trip, and leave him at an orphanage in a distant state. He is emotionally and intellectually delayed due to the neglect and emotional damage from my mother’s breakdown, and from the less than stellar care of (essentially) a teen mother. He would not know his home state or full address, or his mother’s full name, and I would intimate that he was a war orphan on the note when I left him. My mother would not have the inclination or the mental or emotional ability to look for either of us, would believe that we were in Africa serving Jesus, and would be free to find a husband. My family settled, I would then take a bus to a random location, leave all of my identifying papers and distinctive clothing buried in a trashcan, walk out into the woods and kill myself quite thoroughly on my 18th birthday, in 1951.
Oddly enough, if the time period were changed to 80 years, putting me born in 1903, I would come of age during the flapper period, and most likely live much more happily regardless of my personal family situation. Odd how that works, isn’t it.

62

Sticking with ‘where my family was’, I’d have been born in Central Otago in 1915.

Assuming I survived birth and infancy, I’d have probably followed the lifestyle of my two great aunts born at that time and place. Left school at puberty, worked in the family hotels, stayed single, died alone. Jolly good fun.

If I follow my mothers family; Glasgow (not the posh part) - less chance of surviving infancy, more chance of being bombed in WWII.

63

Born in 1927, from middle-class African American parents. We’d be living in Atlanta, probably on Auburn Ave. My father would be an elementary school principal at a segregated negro school–where he’d be known as a very stern disciplinarian. He would not allow his children to attend his school to prevent special treatment for his children. He would make them attend the “poorer” school further down the street, just on principle, where they would get teased for being “rich”. His wife, a social progressive who aspires to be like Ida B. Wells, would cosign this decision.

Life would be hard for me, as a negro female in the Deep South during the Depression. But I would be encouraged by the adults in my life to succeed. I would get a scholarship to Spellman–where everyone expects someone like me to go–but at the last minute I will decide to leave Atlanta and go to Howard University, just for adventure and the seductiveness of escaping racism (or so I think). My parents approve, but my father hopes I don’t get too big for my britches up there. You know, getting high-falutin’ ideas in my head. He wants me to become a teacher…maybe an assistant-principal, if I don’t marry first. This scientist thing, though, sounds pie-in-the-sky.

I don’t like Howard. I like the professors, but I find the students to be just as silly and provincial as the ones down in Atlanta. Everyone’s a goddamn snob, and there’s always some social convention that I screw up. Like, I like wearing pants. I don’t want to straighten my hair. I like drawing and painting, but these are supposedly “weird” hobbies. I start thinking that if I were white, people would give me more freedom to be me. All I know is that DC negroes are no different from Atlanta negros. They are so square.

So after finishing my first year, I decide to move to New York. I want to be an artist now, no longer committed to science. The war is over and there’s a sense of promise in the air. Maybe white folk are going to lighten up now that we’ve demonstrated our worthiness in the war, I think. After almost spending through my meager savings, I manage to get a job as a waitress in Harlem. It’s tough work, and it turns out I don’t have the physical or emotional stamina for it. My parents don’t hold back when I reveal to them I’ve been fired from my first job. My mother drives up and finds me living in a flophouse with women of “questionable” morals. Through tears, she tries to convince me to come back home and settle down. Don’t I like that Carlton boy from church? He’s always asking about me, and everyone is always talking about how cute we’d be together. I imagine our lives together–me, the light-skinned “trophy” wife of a preacher’s kid, one who only cares about having a slew of kids and driving his daddy’s Cadillac. A man who probably thinks Harlem is over in Europe somewhere, who wears white shoes because he thinks this is what a guy of his status is supposed to do.

I tell her I’d rather sleep on the floor with roaches and rats crawling over me than to have that life. Or her life. Always cosigning what some man says–too timid to be her own person.

I become estranged from the family. It becomes easy, therefore, to let a friend convince me to change my surname to something French and pass myself off as some sort of exotic creature from New Orleans, rather than your run-of-the-mill negro. It takes a while, but I manage to get a job working at NYU, in the library. It’s the perfect job for me because there my intelligence is appreciated, and the work itself is not so demanding so as to stress me out. Plus, being on campus helps me connect with some interesting people. I spend my evenings hanging out in Greenwich Village. People are taken by my curls and eccentric style. My artwork is politely ignored, but that’s okay. I know it’s pedestrian. Just being around other artists is enough for me. I teach myself how to play guitar and get really good at it. I’m a novelty, so I’m invited to a lot of parties. People seem to like me and my “hard scrabble” stories, but I keep some distance. I date a few guys, just because it seems expected of me, but I don’t attach to anyone. My aloofness adds to my mystery and attractiveness.

I’m 30-years-old in 1957. I smell something in the air. Things are changing. I get a letter from one of my sisters; Mama is sick and wants to make things better with me. Homesickness and guilt hit me hard and I catch a train down to Atlanta as soon as I can. I’m disoriented by the changes in my hometown. People, both white and colored, look at me funny when I step out of the train station. The segregated “everything” hits me like a bucket of cold water, especially since I thought the laws were changing. The Southern accents sound over-the-top to me, too. But home is strangely just like I remembered. Mama forgives me for being “willful”, and says seeing me well and happy is an answer to her prayers. Daddy breaks down in tears and tells me he doesn’t know who I am any more. I know his fears about me getting too “big” have become true, in his mind. I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t tell them how my friends still think I’m some kind of Creole from New Orleans–an orphan raised by alcoholic Catholic nuns. Creating fiction is easier than facing the guilt of leaving everyone and their expectations behind.

My sisters are all married to their own bland versions of Carlton boys, with children I don’t know well enough to even hug politely. Over dinner, we pray to God to watch over our brother, who is still MIA over in Korea and believed to be dead (but no one will say so out loud, for the sanity of my mother). But the whole time, all I can I think about is my cozy flat in the East Village, which I share with a Jewish lesbian named Marilyn who always tried to “raise my consciousness” about something and has spent some time in various mental institutions. She’s strange, but she’s cool enough to go to a James Brown concert with me. She also introduces me to LSD, before anyone even knows what that is. We make an odd couple. People mistakenly think we’re “together” for awhile.

I will eventually finish my degree at Hunter College and become a principal at a small private school in Newark, NJ. It looks like I’m going to be a spinster for the rest of my life, but my educational attainment and professionalism makes up for this in the community’s mind. During the day I keep a clean-cut image (even straightening my hair!), but occasionally I will ride the train to New York and do exciting things. I still play my guitar and I still paint. My father would be so proud, but only my sisters will see this rather conventional turn in my life.

64

I’d have been born in 1895, probably an immigrant from Eastern Europe.

I’d be well-past my life expectancy by this age. And if I didn’t get killed in WW1, I’d still die early from my medical problems that weren’t treatable back then.

Age 5: deaf in one ear due to infection.
Age 7: dead from scarlet fever.
Age 15: suicide due to homosexuality.
Age 23: killed in World War I.
Age 23: dead from influenza epidemic.
Age 28: dead from ruptured appendix.
Age 35: beginning of life-long excruciating knee pain.
Age 65: blinded in one eye due to cataract.
Age 68: dead from aortic stenosis and blocked arteries.
Age 70: blind in other eye due to cataract.

65

Born in 1893, I would surely have been caught up in WWI. So gas attacks and out of the trench to attack the Huns (as we referred to them back then)

If I survived the Spanish Flu, I still had bath tub gin to get past so that I could get to the great depression, and the dust bowl. At least I would have been part of the great migration out of Arkansas to California, where my skills as a farm hand would let me get a job driving tractor in the orange groves. Being too old to be drafted for WWII, I could have stayed home and been part of the civilian patrol watching out for Japanese landings on the West Coast.

But then I could have enjoyed the Golden Age of Radio, seen the development of cars and airplanes, and held the world record for oldest living human as I type this now.

66

Born in '35.

Assuming that a garden-variety strep throat didn’t kill me as a kid:

-HS graduation in 1953, right at the end of the Korean War.
-Drafted into the US Army for two years, never went overseas.
-College afterward. I’d probably still be a Mechanical Engineer, and if so, my math skills in the pre-computer era help out a lot - they still do fifty years later when I’ve often gotten calculations done before anyone can get their calculators out.

  • A 1959 graduation date means that there’s one employer that really, really stands out.

NASA.

If not that, then it’s a choice between Detroit and the West Coast airplane companies. A few letters and a few pages of sample calculations can help out here.

Surprisingly little about my life would’ve been all that different despite the vast technological and social changes in that time. The big difference is not having to peel potatoes and learn to re-track tanks in the Army. Not having computers would certainly change the way I work.

67

Born in 1907. However, I don’t think that my paternal grandparents were even in the US at that time, while my mother’s family had been in the US for some generations already. But assuming that I had somehow been conceived and born, I’d have been deaf in one or both ears from raging ear infections that needed antibiotic treatment (and, in fact, one of my uncles did go deaf from this) before I was 12 or so. I would have had even more trouble being a little lady then than I had IRL. Assuming that I got married and then pregnant at the same age as I have IRL, I’d have been probably dead during my first pregnancy, and definitely dead during the second one. So…dead before 22 or 23, then.

68

Man, a lot of these are so interesting and well-imagined. Fascinating. Thanks, guys.

69

I would have been born at the end of the Great War; it’s hard to imagine how could my parents have come to meet and marry, but leaving that aside, I would have had access to a college or equivalent education - all the women from the paternal side of my family and of that generation did. My paternal grandmother was one of the first four women in Spain to get a degree in Business; several of her cousins and my paternal grandfather’s two sisters got looser educations (no college per se, but training in languages, accounting…), others got college degrees. If tonsillitis didn’t kill me, I might have become my Great-Aunt Rosa, who, after getting a degree in Chemistry*, worked as a Plant Engineer in a foundry for over 40 years, and who never married and spent her life living how the fuck ever she wanted to. Or have married an also-educated man, most likely leaving my job to take care of household and children.

  • quite to the surprise of the board of examination, who didn’t know that particular long-distance disciple was a woman until she went for her review exam (which she passed summa cum laude); she’d been filing all her paperwork as “R.”. While Spanish women have had access to university by law since the 16th century, universities managed to avoid having female students until well into the 19th and often 20th centuries.
70

How about you describe it for those of us who live far away from that experience.

71

In 1916 my grandmother was a doctor and surgeon in France, so I’ll assume I was the result of a wartime fling with a soldier who did not survive.

With a mother who is a doctor and surgeon, my early life is good, despite having a single mother. There’s a surfeit of women and a single mother is low on the desirability scale but she can afford a nanny. My mother moves to SE England for work, but I have relatives in Scotland and I spend a lot of time with them. I would have gone to university, to study maths. I would have been pressured to study law (to follow my uncle) or medicine (to follow my mother) but everyone would have eventually realised how unsuited I was for either. Leaving university, I find Europe on the brink of war and join one of the reserves, likely artillery. When war comes, I become an officer, but do not rise to high rank, serving without distinction. After the war, I train as an actuary at Lloyds. I do not marry, but settle to the quiet life and eventually retire to a pipe and slippers. The family is long-lived so I’d see in the millennium.

72

I was born in 1942 in Western Australia. My mother was a nurse, and my father … well, in this timeline he’s a computer programmer, so I don’t know what kind of career he would have had fifty years ago. Maybe an economist? He studied economics for a while before switching to IT. Or maybe he’d have worked with radios, he does that as a hobby now. Anyway, he would have had to fight in the war, so I was probably conceived while he was on leave. He and my mother were in their early 30s, and he’d been putting off having children for most of their marriage, but the war made him suddenly aware of his mortality and he decided he wanted a child before it was too late. Australia was attacked by Japanese subs two months after I was born, but my family was out of the way of that, being on the other side of the country. One of my earliest memories was people celebrating the end of the war.

If Dad died in the war, Mum and I would have gone to live with her parents, mostly so that her mother could help with childcare. Mum had years of experience working as a nurse and could support us that way, but she couldn’t take care of a baby and work full time. I was a little lonely, since I was a shy child and I didn’t have any siblings in this timeline, but I loved my mother and my grandparents and was mostly quite happy.

If Dad survived, my brother was born in 1944 and my sister in 1946. Mum stayed at home to raise us, and Dad went back to whatever career he had before the war. We were slightly less well off than in the previous scenario, since Grandpa was a doctor, but Australia had a good economic situation all over and we did all right. I left school at 16 in 1958 and became a nurse, and loved it. My brother left school that same year and got went to work stacking shelves and a family friend’s business. My sister became a teacher. She was less happy about her career than my brother and I, but she hated the sight of blood and the thought of secretarial work bored her to death, and there weren’t many other careers available for women.

I got involved in campaigning for Aboriginal rights shortly after I left school, signing petitions and attending protests with the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement. I also protested against the Vietnam war a few years later. Conscription started up in Australia in 1964, the year my brother turned 20, and while I’d already been opposed to the war, that made it personal. I got to know a lot of hippies this way, but while I agreed with them on many social issues and loved their clothes, I was a good Christian girl at heart and was scared of aspects of that culture like drugs, Eastern spiritual philosophy and sexual liberation. I probably didn’t realise I was bisexual, or at least not until much later in life than I did this time around.

Right now, it would be 1962, and I’d be 20. Working as a nurse, campaigning for important social issues, loving the music and eating up the science fiction. I’d be pretty happy.

73

Born in 1930 to a teenage waitress and a reform school kid in Northern California. Dad didn’t stick around long, and the depression was hard on us. Mom lucked out, though, in World War II. As more jobs opened to women stateside, she got a job with the state government and was able to support her family. She bought a modest suburban house outside of Sacramento and lived in modest comfort.

In 1948, I went down to Hollywood to try to break into the film industry- not as an actress, but to be behind the camera. My youthful dreams seemed to crash down around me as Hollywood didn’t have much room for female directors, and I spent years struggling as a waitress in LA. It was over Christmas that I met my husband, who was visiting home from his post in South Africa with the US Foreign Service. We courted quickly, and soon married and moved abroad. We spent four years abroad, where I taught at the American schools while he was at the embassy, before his job sent him to Washington DC.

It was 1960 when I arrived in DC, and things seemed to be changing. Education opportunities had opened up for women, and I was able to get my undergraduate degree. My marriage unfortunately fell apart, but I was childless and able to support myself with a job in international education. I had a good job, a degree, and an interest in the newly emerging field of international development. Amazing things were happening. Our globe had dozens of brand new countries as Africa gained its independence. It was a time of great hope and we figured Africa would be fully developed in the next decade. JFK had just started a new agency, one that promised to send young people abroad to teach and share their skills in the developing world. The humanitarian organizations that cut their teeth staving off famine in Europe after WWII were redefining themselves in a changing world.

To be continued…

74

I would have been born in 1943. Eighteen years after that I would probably be goin to Vietnam…'Merica!!!

75

Had I been born in 1921, the places I was raised in would never even exist yet. I would have been born on a wine farm and died on that same wine farm, one drink-sozzled, indentured, hard-worked short life later. If I were a farm worker, the farmer would own my house, and he’d keep me docile with a ration of liquor every day.

Or I might be a fisherman in some shit-scrabble coastal town, again dying an early death of overwork and dangerous living.

My life would be absolutely nothing like it is today - I doubt I would have started high school, never mind gone to college. And even if I did, teacher would be the only thing I’d be expected to be educated as, only Whites get to be scientists. I doubt I’d be an atheist, either, that took reading and education too. I know I wouldn’t be married to anyone like my wife, because she’s White.

76

Thank you for the OP- it was an interesting exercise. My first thought was how hard it was to make even the basics of my life (educated, travels) seem at all plausible for someone of my background during that time period. In reality, I’d have almost certainly been married at 18 and would never have had any of the opportunities I’ve had.

My second thought was “OMG, that’s what my grandmother faced!”

77

Dead in infancy - if the Spanish flu didn’t get me*, pneumonia would have.

*I know the Spanish flu hit young adults predominantly rather than the usual infants and elderly, but my immune system is a mess.

78

Born in semi-rural Western PA to an airman and a down on her luck woman of questionable morals (my father met my mother hitchhiking, if I recall), they probably would have stayed married rather than divorcing, which would have been a HUGE change in my life.

Of course, being born in 1924 would have done it as well.

Short with bad eyesight as a kid, I would have had some of the same social issues as I had in Timeline Prime. However, having a father who was more of a disciplinarian in my childhood would have been nothing but good.

I was bright… like, skip 2nd grade bright, so I would have done very well in school as my father worked as a mechanic on aircraft for the Army Air Force (in Prime, my father was an electrician on Bombers in the USAF). My mother would have kept house, though not well, and done her best to avoid my grandmother.

We make it through the depression, and assuming I am still 4F for some interesting physical anomolies, I probably enter academia after high school (graduating in 1940).

At this point, my life is so radically different from what it was, I have no idea what direction it would go. No sexual abuse, no practically failing out of high school, no criminal tendencies that are associated with growing up white trash… My life would have been, I suppose, markedly better. I like to think I would have probably gone on to teach history or Social Studies. I probably would have been a very boring white picket fence sort of guy, though I also would have probably married a strong willed woman to kind of bully me, much like I have now. :smiley:

M

79

I would have been born in 1913, the same as my grandfather, who delighted in telling me all through my life that he was exactly 50 years older than I. Which means he would have been 100 if he’d lived (he died at age 90) and of course I will be 50!

Anyway, I like to think I’d have had a life a little like Scout Finch — born in a small, rural, county-seat town in the South to an attorney father. Luckily I would have still had my mother, who did not die bearing me, so no Calpunica-upbrining for Ellen.

As the daughter of an educated parent, I would like to think I would have excelled. I’d have attended parochial school and probably married the son of similarly middle-class parents. Probably high school would have been as much educator as I’d have gotten; my grandmother often spoke of high school as I would of college; many got a much stricter classical education than is given today back then.

Because I’m a writer today, I’m assuming I would have been a writer back then, too; though I started as a journalist I’m not sure if small-town Kentucky would have been open to them in the early Depression years. Alternatively, perhaps I would have studied law at my father’s feet and wowed the town by being its first female lawyer!

Probably my youngest sisters and my own children would have grown up more or less side by side; I’m 17 years older than them and I probably would have begun reproducing by at least 22 or 23. I was an experienced Junior Mother by virtue of my mom having twins late in life would have seen having my own as a natural progression. How that would have fit into my journalism career, I have no idea.

80

I would have been born in 1919 and would come of age just before WWII. As I thought this through, I realized I probably would have lived my grandmother’s life, pretty much, barring infant/childhood death and assuming both of my parents lived to my adulthood. My grandmother lost her dad when she was 8, so her family (8 children!) were plunged into poverty. Her father was an advertising salesman and died in a car wreck because cars didn’t have seatbelts back then.

So I would either be married or engaged to some boy would would surely have been drafted and would have had to be a Rosie the Riveter to keep up with the small children. My grandma had two children while my grandfather was off fighting the war. In fact, he was at Normandy, so it’s likely I’d have ended up a war widow, either working at some local factory to pay the bills, or perhaps I’d have tried to pursue teaching or nursing. Given where I’m from (small-town Ohio), it’s likely I’d have been a farmer’s wife and probably would have had to go into teaching or nursing. Although I might have grown up on a farm and been able to keep a younger brother or two as farm hands and as a security force, what with being a single mom running the farm in rural Ohio.

At my age now (43), I’d be well into the early 60s and would be concerned with trying to send the children off to college or get them some other vocational training. My own mother graduated high school in 1962 and went into nursing school. My grandmother had worked as a seamstress in a clothing factory while my grandfather was in France, but when he came home, they had a couple more kids, so she spent the rest of her 20s and 30s being a farm mom, basically. Grampa had a small business repairing watches and jewelry and eventually went into wholesale/bulk food sales to schools, hotels, and restaurants.

I would not be college educated, most likely, and I would probably be thinking about my driver’s license, but I’d probably not have the courage to go for it. My own grandmother got hers in her 50s, and drove the car maybe a dozen times until her 70s, when she just couldn’t be bothered to worry about it.