Back In My Day…

I am not even 40 years old yet, but something about having pre-teens can certainly make you feel old. Constantly being blindsided by my kids’ innocent but obnoxious comments about things they don’t understand because they are too young has me at the point where things from “back in my day” date me.

I am an Elder Millennial, so if you aren’t, this article might not be for you. There are references to 1980s and 90s movies and pop culture you might not have committed to memory like I have, so proceed with caution. 😉

Sometimes, it’s funny when my kids and I seem like we came from different planets. Sometimes it’s just sad. But for your entertainment, here are a few of the most recent gems at my house for your laughing pleasure.

On the subject of…

Phones

We were recently watching “Dante’s Peak” during family movie night. I was excited to share one of my favorite movies with my kids, thinking they were finally old enough to handle it. During the scene when the son tries to use the phone to call his grandma to warn her about the impending doom, my kids start asking questions…

• My son: “Why doesn’t the phone work? What do they mean “the line is disconnected?”
• My daughter: “What is the cord for?”
• My husband: “Oh my gosh, are you serious? There used to be actual cables running through the air or buried in the ground to connect phone lines. Those were cut in the destruction so the phones won’t connect.”

We received a “vintage” toy phone, it was the kind with a radial dial and hand cradle. I was directing my four-year-old to pick up her toys and said, “Pick up the phone.” She wandered around aimlessly looking for it. I kept repeating, “Baby, pick up the phone. Over there.” Pointing and repeating. She kept walking past it. Finally, I got up and walked over and picked it up for her. “That’s not a phone!” she said. I guess to her, that is probably right.

Movies

We were watching Princess Bride. In the scene where the R.O.U.S. (Rodents of Unusual Size – a person in a giant rat costume crawling on the ground) starts attacking the main character, my son says, “Ah man, this CGI (computer generated imagery) is terrible. They should get fired.” I look at him and say, “When this film came out, CGI hadn’t been invented.” He said, “What’s a film”? (Face palm).

We were watching a movie on the T.V. My husband wasn’t skipping through the commercials fast enough and my son says, “Oh my gosh, it is so dumb we have to flip past the commercials.” My husband says, “Just be glad you get to flip past the commercials, we had to watch them.” Then my son says, “Then I would have just watched it on Netflix.” My husband responds, “Tommy, Netflix didn’t exist. If we wanted to watch a movie, we had to go to a store and rent it for two days and if we were late, we got charged AND you’d end up having to rewind it before you could even watch it.” My son looked him dead in the eyes and said, “What is a rewind?”

Shopping

My daughter needed new shoes for an upcoming dance. It was just a week away, but I didn’t see any shoes on Amazon in the price we were looking for, so I decided to take my daughter to a brick-and-mortar shoe store. I don’t know if it is a sign of the times or a post pandemic thing, but we went to three different stores and could not come up with a single pair of appropriate shoes. After the third failed attempt, we dragged ourselves home, she flopped down on the couch, exhausted, and proclaimed, “I can’t believe how much work it was in the ‘olden days’ just to get a pair of shoes!”

School Assignments

My daughter’s teacher has been teaching for about 30 years. She uses the same kind of worksheets I grew up filling out. About twice a month, my daughter comes up to me totally frustrated because she can’t match the picture on the worksheet to the bank of words or clues. For example, “Circle the object you would use to skate and write the underlined word below the picture.” Inevitably it takes me all of two seconds to recognize it, but she has never (or rarely) seen a roller skate, or typewriter, desktop computer, a boombox, floppy disk, etc.

My son was filling out a form to write a report and he turns to me and says, “Hey Mom, will you help me? I have to interview someone who lived in the 1900’s.” I said, “No. No I will not.”

My daughter told me she had an assignment where she had to write a letter to a pen pal. She asked me where she could get one of those “mail stickers.” I said, “Do you mean a stamp? When I was a kid, you had to lick it and stick it to the envelope.” And she said, “Then why do you call it a stamp?” I said, “Yeah, good question, I guess because originally, they used ink stamps… funny.”

Back in their Day

I am sure all of this is just my comeuppance for every comment I ever made to my parents and grandparents that made them feel old. I can clearly recall finding a mystery item and asking what it was just to learn it was an “8-track-tape.” So I am hopeful that someday my kids can look back on this article and laugh when their kids look at them with confusion on their faces and ask, “So you mean when you were young, your parents actually had to steer the car?”

What funny things do your kids say that make you feel old? Let me know in the comments.