(I really do love me a vintage tee.)

Hezah, 26

My previous post on nostalgia spiraled an entire tangential train of thoughts. My closet full of vintage sweaters, drawer stocked with secondhand tees, and walls covered in genuinely hipstimatic filtered photos of my parents made me stop in my tracks. I realized my sense of nostalgia goes much further than reminiscing about old school Nick at Nite reruns.

Twenty-somethings of every generation have been drawn to anything vintage, drawing upon their parent’s youth as inspiration for expression and creativity; this isn’t a novel idea. Our parents’ generation sought fashionable creativity in western wear, a piece of nostalgia from their own childhood growing up idolizing classic Western films. Just as they donned cowboy boots and embossed leather goods reminding them of how the west was really won, there is something special about wearing a bag just like my mother did when she was my age. However, I still question if all our nods to the baby boomer era, which is unarguably one of the richest cultural and artistically explosive times in global history, are truly paying homage or if we’re straight up poaching.

As we make the arduous transition from child to adulthood, so much energy is expended on hate and resentment towards the very people who gave us our angsty little lives. We slam doors, hang up, close our eyes, turn away, cover our ears, and generally reject the only people who could ever still love your miserable hormonal self during and after some of the most retrospectively embarrassing behavior. As our bodies and minds deceived us with change, we in turn betrayed our parents. Unfortunately, it’s a universal fact that you treat the people you love the worst.

Tension must inevitably reach a breaking point, and for many of us that happens in our mid-twenties. Once you reach your mid-twenties, things start to even out a little. Generally speaking, you have a pretty good idea of where your career path is headed (for the time being of course), a place to live, a solid network of friends, hopefully financially independence, and a many of your immature insecurities start falling away. You begin to enter what will be your adult self as you squirm to fit into your own skin. Part of this metamorphosis is letting old grudges go through fits of tears and screams, which results in the birth of a new relationship with your parents. It’s such an interesting period because for the first time your parents are forced to see you as adults, and you start to really grasp the notion that your parents are just people; neither of which are perfect.

I’ve only been on one end of this total relationship revamp, but I can honestly say it’s one of the hardest things I have had to overcome. I can only speak to how it feels to be a child seeing your parents as real flawed people, when you had idolized and depended on them for so many years. Here is where our interest in their nostalgia comes into play.

(But seriously, my parents WERE awesome.)

We aren’t really aware of it fully, but our sudden curiosity in our parents’ mysterious youthful past have less to do with finally hearing all their acid flashbacks, and more to do with trying to find a way to relate to them. Blogs like My Parents Were Awesome and Dad’s Are the Original Hipsters, are perfect exploitations of our growing realization that parents used to be really cool. Styles have come full circle, and the outfits we used to mock and be embarrassed about, now look uncomfortably similar to our monthly delivered Urban Outfitter catalogues. It used to be cool to hate your parents, fuck authority. Now you’re not hip unless you can brag about drinking and smoking pot with them, like they weren’t doing that about thirty years before you.

Once we start to become adults, and realize that family values aren’t just rapper idealism, we begin to recognize the importance of having a mature relationship with our parents. It seems like the only way we can begin to see them as regular old people is to Honey I Shrunk The Parents them back to their twenties. It makes complete sense; the way we relate or don’t relate to people is based on experiences and lifestyles. It’s very difficult for a twenty-five year old to truly find themselves on the same level as a fifty-five year old. So, in order to close the raging generational and life experiential gap, we look to our parents as their former selves: the pot smoking, tight clothes wearing, big haired, drug experimenting, alcohol guzzling, music loving, movie going, reckless, broke, lost, scared, free spirits.

These are the people whose lives we understand and feel an intimate closeness, despite them being forever stuck in another era. So we rummage around old photo albums, start asking about the stories never told, wear their old clothes, listen to their crackling vinyl, run our fingers over the pages of old books and journals, and begin to see our parents as peers. It’s fun to wonder what it would have been like to know them in their youth, and whether or not you would have ran in the same circle of friends. Maybe, but it doesn’t matter because you don’t choose your parents like you do friends, and yet you still have to find a way to love them just the same.