Sunday, August 19, 2012

I Want My Cool Back

by Amy Ruhlin

                             

My daughter and I sit in a coffee shop near her college campus. She has just turned twenty and I watch her drink a mocha latte topped with whipped cream while I sip herbal tea infused with antioxidants. She wears skinny jeans and a lace tank top, her blond hair swept back into a smooth ponytail. I have on Bermuda shorts, but I am sporting my new denim jacket ,and I have remembered to flat iron my hair so it is only medium frizzy.
I am surrounded by 20-somethings. They order complicated coffee drinks with ease and carry heavy backpacks with confidence. Some of them wear knit caps made of wool, and eyeglasses with black frames.

I love this quintessential college town. It oozes cool with its locally owned restaurants, funky art galleries and live music venues. It reminds me of how my husband and I lived when we were in our twenties, before we moved to the suburbs to raise our children. It reminds me that I am tired of chain restaurants, manicured lawns and cul-de-sac streets. I want my cool back.
“So what’s the deal with the kids wearing caps and glasses?,“ I ask my daughter.

“Hipsters,” she says.
I decide hipster must mean cool. I assume it is a cross between hippies and the beat generation; it must mean good music and social causes and great literature.

“You know, “ I blurt out, “Dad and I used to be cool. We were original hipsters.”
I want her to know that I was not always a middle aged mom with over- processed hair and fluctuating hormones. I want her to know that her Dad did not always have an achy back and goofy dance moves. I want her to know that we were totally cool.

“Uh, it’s really just about what they wear Mom, but I’m sure you and dad were cool. We should probably leave now," she suggests. 
Clearly, she is not getting it.
She goes to her classes, and I drive back home. My 16-year-old son comes home from school, and I meet him at the front door.

“Hey, I just found this old tape in the back of my closet! Will you listen to it?” I ask.
It's a cassette tape of course; we were way too cool for eight tracks.

“It’s your Dad’s radio show when we were in college,” I tell him. He was a DJ!” (weren’t we cool?)
My son politely listens to the tape while I point out that the music his dad played was very avant-garde.

The tape ends and my son says,
“Aw, Dad sounded so young! That was weird.” He forgets to mention cool; clearly, he is not getting it either.

The next weekend we all decide to explore a nearby city. We find a vintage record store with rows of vinyl, and it even has a display case housing turntables from the 1970's. It's a beautiful sight.
“A record store! Cool!,” my son says.

Then, he makes a beeline for a separate section in the back; the section that has the newly- released CDs. This is disappointing. Now, he won’t be able to see how cool his Dad and I look perusing the rock n’ roll album section.
“I feel right at home,” I say to my husband.

“Yeah, me too,” he says. “I remember spending hours in record stores when we were in college.”
He picks up an album and flips it over to read the back, just as he always did when we were young.

“I can’t read this,” he says. “Was the writing always this small? I’m going to the car to get my glasses.”
While he is gone, I walk through the store. I am wearing a new scarf, tied just right, and I think that it is billowing nicely as I stroll down the aisles.

I find an old favorite album. I rush over to my daughter, who has just wandered into the vinyl section.
“I listened to this  album all the time when I was around your age!,” I tell her.

“Aw, do you want me to take a picture of you holding it Mom? Here, let me fix your scarf first.”
She makes major adjustments. “There”, she says, “much better.”

She snaps the picture and shows it to me.
“Aw, that’s sweet. You look nice,” she assures me.

She goes back to the CD section to join her brother and I find my husband. He is reading the back of an album cover. He can see the writing now that he has on his 3x reading glasses.
He has just turned 51, and I watch him standing there in his Bermuda shorts and checkered shirt, as cute as ever.  I think about the years we have spent raising our two children, who clearly have kind hearts. I think about how, against the odds, we have been happily married for 28 years.

 And then, I think that we are totally cool.

32 comments:

  1. After you get yours back could you please help me look for mine!

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  2. Oh, this made me cry. You've captured so many of our thoughts so beautifully...

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  3. Sigh....WORD!

    This is my life exactly, well except for the COOL part. I was always a BIG ASS geek. Funny...my kids don't have ANY problem believing that one!

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  4. Excellent post, Amy! You captured us 50 somethings perfectly. We're still cool, but just in a different way than our kids. We think we're doing something really cool, and there are our kids laughing behind our backs! This tends to turn back around a little bit. My boys are now 30 and 31, with kids of their own, and they now think we're kinda cool again. Well - maybe that's going a little too far. They appreciate us a lot now - cool might be overstepping it still! That's OK, I'm "cool" with that! BTW, your husband does look adorable!

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    1. Thanks Nina. Now I will look forward to them being 30 :)

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  5. Cool is in the eye of the beholder! You go, girl! And take comfort in knowing that someday your kids' kids will think they're not cool...and so on, and so on.

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  6. I completely understand. Although, since I write my blog about parents connecting with their teens through pop culture and technology, many of my kids friends think I'm cool. I know that inside my sons think that also, but they would never admit to it.

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  7. Your husband and mine must have the same wardrobe...we ARE cool, all of us. What's cool is that we remember being young and don't wish we still were.

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  8. Yes, you are totally still cool. As am I. As am I.

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  9. This was totally cool and so are you. I love this.

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  10. OMG this is my family. My 20 year old thinks we are hopeless and my 16 years had just recovered from being embarrassed that we even exist. When I drop one of my kids (have two in college) at school and stop in a bookstore or coffee shop I feel like I am in my 20s and my 50s at the same time. Wonderful post.

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  11. You are awesomely cool! This is the same point I try to get through to my kids! I tell them.. Hey.. I used to be cool, I was even a cheerleader. But I suspect that it's pity I see in their eyes now. Although, It really makes me feel good when I overhear their friends say, "Your Mom is soooooo cool." Nope.. I still got it! lol.

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  12. Thanks all you totally cool ladies!

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  13. LOL! I read this post and took a closer look at my husband. I never really see how he or I have changed. I still think we are pretty cool. Well...until our children tell us otherwise!

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  14. I remain in denial and insist I'm cool no matter what other think. LOL What 'til you have grand kids and your children will drool over your popularity amongst the grand kids and then they will see how very cool you are!

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  15. Oh, Amy - this post so eloquently captures what I feel so often when I am out and about with my kids! I am heading to my daughter's college campus - just the two of us - for Labor Day weekend. It will be a true test to discover the level of coolness I still possess!

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    1. Have a wonderful time with your daughter Dawn. I know you will be totally cool :)

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  16. Really fun read! My husband and I are 54 and have 11 and 13 yr old boys at home. By the time we get our "cool" back, we will be too old to care!

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  17. What a lovely post. I am just getting to the point of no longer being a goddess to my children. The begged me to stop dancing in the car the other day. Just when I am no longer embarrassed by my inherent goofiness, they ARE.

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  18. So sad that our interior cool is not visible to the younger generation! I wrote this post after a similar conversation with my 20-something niece. http://olderthanelvis.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/two-tribes.html

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    1. Love your post and so true. We recently took our kids to Haight-Ashbury in San Fran(we took ourselves too..1st time)..they said 'mom it FEELS GOOD here..peaceful.' Then they talked with a guy, a hippie straight out of the 70s and they said "he was so nice'! They were surprised as they do not think that of 'hipsters'..on that short visit they 'got' what I had been trying to tell them, that there was a 'something' behind 'cool' and that kids these days didnt even know what 'cool' meant ;)

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  20. Hey--we are cool. It's the kids that just don't realize it! Great article :)

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  21. You made me laugh...there is just something so beautifully hip about a college student in awful clothes and wonderfully strange hair and their coffee talk. I would go back to that any day of the week...well, without the worry or the work or the proverty or the uncomfortable bed or the.... Well, on second thought, maybe not!

    b+

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  22. AWWWW! Awesome post! I absolutely loved reading it and it touched my heart. Well done!

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  23. I am also a (late) middle -aged mom with a cool daughter and son and related to your post from the first line to the last. I suppose our "cool" is invisible...oh well. And found your ending touching.

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  24. Great post Amy- glad I ran across it. I enjoyed it very much! Virginia- FirstClassWoman

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  25. Totally 100% cool. *sigh* I've visited my daughters at college, too, and felt exactly the same way. I didn't have the formal education college experience, as I had her when I was twenty...I couldn't even drink legally yet. My mom took me out to dinner for my twenty-first birthday to order my first legal Bartles & Jaymes wine cooler. Next to me on the bench was my six-month-old daughter in her carseat. I couldn't imagine her having a child already when she was twenty. She probably would have been perfectly capable of doing it even better than I did, and she managed to get a degree from Purdue University. Guess I didn't do so badly after all either. You're so not cool, however, when you have a baby the same year your first daughter gets her drivers license. Blew all my street cred right then and there.

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