When you live in your hometown you have this funny dynamic with the people who are your parents’ peers. On the one hand, you’re a fully formed adult and so are they, so to an extent you’re now peers. You might find yourself teaching their children or having them on a volunteer team with you. The previous boundaries get mixed up.
But on the other hand, you feel a strong sense of generational boundaries – or at least, I do. I grew up with a very strong value of “respect your elders.” We NEVER called our parents’ friends by their first names and we certainly weren’t their pals.
So what happens when you grow up and the boundaries blur?
When we moved back to Cleveland in 2000, I became a teacher at the then Mosdos School. My fellow teacher was a woman who ran an organization that I had volunteered for when I was a high school senior. She was my mother’s generation, not mine, so of course I called her formally “Mrs. X.” But she came over to me at the first teacher’s meeting and said, “You know, we are peers now. Please feel free to call me Sara.”
“Oh no!” I impulsively answered. “I could never do that.” (Mind you, I was only 25, so while technically an adult, I was really still playing house.)
But time goes on and you grow into your adulthood. You start to establish your own identity in your community apart from being this one’s daughter and that one’s daughter-in-law.
Then you realize that you and your peers, indeed, are the parents of your community. And you feel funny calling your fellow adults Mr. this and Mrs. that. But something about it still feels good and right and respectful. And safe, because maybe you don’t have to adult all the time.
Then you notice something else: 25-year-olds are calling you Mrs. this and that and you’re like WHAT? I’m just me. And the desire to bring those boundaries down is strong, but you’re facing resistance on their end because you’re, you know, old. You’re their parents’ friends. And something about it feels weird and strange, and also somehow right and respectful and safe.
In David Litt’s memoir Thanks, Obama he recounts his years as a speechwriter for the White House from the age of 21 to 26. He writes profoundly about emerging from this five-year bubble aged in a number of ways – but specifically, he says, “Once you reach a certain age, the world has no more parents. But it contains a truly shocking number of children. These children come in all ages, in all sizes, from every walk of life and every corner of the political map.”
Realizing that YOU ARE THE GROWNUP is sobering, whether it happens at 26, 43, or perhaps even older when you realize, as one friend recently shared with me, that you are the oldest living member of your family. But when it happens within your own home community, it’s like a virtual reality game. Am I really older than my parents were when I got married? Am I really older than my sixth grade teacher was when she taught me? Did the kid I babysat for when her baby brother was born just have a baby of her own? The comparisons become skewed, like a funhouse mirror.
And that is what we call in 2018… “adulting.”
Yes. I remember my father telling my ex-high school girlfriend to call him by his first name. She was thirty at the time. And I recently passed the milestone ‘first person I remember being born becoming a grandfather.’
It is nice to hear from you again!
I guess at a certain age or stage it’s actually feels ‘weird’ when someone your daughters age (even if she is 38 already) calls you by your first name. I, too, grew up in a home where respect for your elders meant addressing them Mr or Mrs so and so. I feel those boundaries taught me something about how to speak to elders (not necessarily oldies).
Hello tante 🙂
It took me a long time to internalize the fact that some of my doctors were younger than me. You’d think it wouldn’t have come as such a surprise considering that a lot of the people I went to college with became doctors. But no, they must be just starting out professionally (over 30 years after college graduation).
My mom had one single brother who lived out of town and my dad had one brother, and no other extended family from their same generation on either side. So, major dearth of true uncles and aunts.
So, I grew up calling all of my parents friends ‘Uncle’ (Kenny) and ‘Aunt’ (Joanie). There was a warmth and familiarity that did not seem to ever cross into casualness or lack of respect.
Despite my preference in being addressed as ‘Uncle Steve’ by my kids’ closer friends, there is definitely a community sense (well at least these kids’ parents!) that its not appropriate. And no one is interested in even splitting the difference- ‘Uncle Belkin’ or ‘Mr. Steve’!!!!!
But it goes beyond an inter-generational scenario, even women who are essentially my peers are not keen to refer me by my first name and also go down the ‘Mr Belkin’ path. So, when I’m called ‘Mr Belkin’, I just tell them that MY Dad isn’t in the room, but I’m happy to give them his cell phone or email! And now that my oldest son is married, I can refer folks who call me ‘Mr Belkin’ to HIS cell and email.
Haha that’s a good trick. My maiden name is Indich and when I moved back to Cleveland as an adult many people called me Mrs Indich…
In our very casual area, NO KIDS call their parents’ friends “Mr./Ms/Mrs.” (Adults also never use these honorifics, and as I get older I would like to see them return.) It’s all first names or awkward attempts not to use any direct form of address. I made some attempts to train my kids to use the “Mr….” titles, but honestly it makes me and them look weird and uptight. Fortunately my kids have some international/cross-cultural family, so they do entirely understand that there are different levels of formality in different contexts (my in-laws all shake hands and give double-check kisses at every hello and goodbye, even if we see them a few different times in a day).
When kids were little the honorifics were based on relationship to their friends, for instance “Cindy’s mom”, as in “Cindy’s mom, can Cindy come to my house tomorrow?” Recently a high-school friend of my daughter’s yelled out to me across a field, “Hi, Cindy’s mom!” Made me smile.
Reminds me of when my mother in law grew up in Israel. There was a neighbor with no kids. Just a dog. The dogs name was Noga so they just called the neighbor “Abba shel Noga” – Noga’s father.