I find myself in similar moods when I think about my struggles as a father. I feel like I spent 10,000 hours on each item of manhood, after becoming a man. Things that should have been taught and made normal during my adolescence years. Instead I was studying how to be a better man, how to navigate career politics, business, running my home, finding a wife and finally becoming a father. I refuse to place blame, and I have to acknowledge my dad's brutal childhood. He was raised in a shack with a lot of siblings, grinding poverty, alcoholic and violent father and a mom who passed away not too long after giving birth to her 7th child. Dad was a man's man. He had to learn everything just to stay alive. He fought every step of his life, for everything he ever gained. But in the end, he didn't pass this grit down to me and my siblings.
My mom's father was the opposite. A war veteran. A farmer, a heavy duty mechanic, a machinist. He had lumber mills hidden away from the Canadian government lumber monopoly. He was active in his local church, and was a school board trustee who would keep meetings running late into the night in order to push back the communists who had taken root during and after WW2. He taught all his many sons how to do everything. Including love and show affection. Moms huge family still boasts more happiness among themselves than any other family I have ever met.
Boomers come in all different shapes and sizes. Some of the greatest people I know are boomers, and some of the most ridiculously lost people I know are also boomers. I often wonder how me (oldest millennial) and my cohorts would have fared in such prosperous times. So many of my peers are on antidepressants. Many have no children. Some have drug addictions that will kill them sooner rather than later. I know others that never made anything of themselves as they stand to inherit millions from their boomer parents, so instead coast along waiting for a payday that likely won't come until they themselves are too old for that money to mean anything.
In the end, boomers raised what will probably go down as being the softest generation in history. The reflection of that should mean more than anything else.
