When I remained in my twenties, there was a discussion subject that utilized to come up once again and once again with my good friends. It went like this: among us would be grumbling about something in her life – her single status, state, or her job that seemed like it was going no place. Perhaps she was groaning about her headache flatmates or her prevented imagine residing in her own location.
Whatever it was, it was generally a sign of how unsteady our lives felt, how eliminated we appeared to be from appropriate the adult years in spite of being, to all intents and functions, legal grownups. Anyway, at a particular point among us would constantly, constantly raise our moms and dads, generally our moms. “By the time she was my age,” we would state, “she had two kids, a mortgage and was married.”
To a degree, our moms’ timelines specified our own understanding of the adult years, which we saw almost as a series of boxes that you need to tick: house, spouse, profession, child. So if your mom got wed at 25 and by 30 had 3 kids, striking those ages just to observe that all you needed to your name was a set up overdraft and a stack of letters from the trainee lenders felt sobering, to state the least. It’s not that we felt competitive with our moms precisely – more that their lives appeared to stand in plain contrast to our own. Their turning points were the only plan we had, however a number of the standard markers of the adult years felt totally castle in the air.
It’s natural to compare, due to the fact that your moms and dads are the very first grownups with whom you are correctly familiarized. We hold them up as peaks, and a number of us are guilty of idealising their pasts and the opportunities they were provided, from complimentary college to more affordable property rates.
Yet, with our generation being the first to actually be worse off than our parents – and scenarios being much more difficult for Gen Z, who deal with a cost-of-living crisis, the fallout from the pandemic, and environment armageddon – how beneficial can it be to chart our lives in this manner?
Not extremely, is the response. Speaking from experience, it is definitely not the course to mental wellness. My mum married reasonably late for her generation, at 27, and had me at 30, however I still felt an unusual sort of unhappiness when I passed those turning point birthdays and discovered that I didn’t appear to have it found out yet. I knew I wanted to get married and even more than that, have children, however throughout my twenties and early thirties my life often felt like a pastiche.
Of course, being haunted by your parents’ timeline is of limited use when things are so dramatically different for our generation. For the first time, the average age at which a woman becomes a mother is 31 years old. The cost of childcare and housing, educational opportunities and career pressure are all factors, not to mention climate anxiety. So for me to be 31 and not pregnant was not at all unusual, yet I put myself under so much pressure (at least none of it was coming from my actual mother). There was some societal pressure, but not to the same extent that our parents’ generation faced. Settling down was often what you did in those days, whether you wanted to or not. Look at photographs of families from the 1970s and the parents often appear old before their time – they dress and look the part, and have the white picket fence, the car, the house in the suburbs, but they are kids, really (or perhaps we are just in a state of arrested development).
Either way, the one thing I have learned since getting deeper into my thirties, not to mention becoming a parent, is that nobody truly feels like an adult. Everyone is making it up as they go along. Perhaps your parents had a house and a garden and 2.5 children by the time they were 30, however that doesn’t mean they weren’t ever confused or bewildered by life. Besides, depressing though our prospects can feel in the face of huge generational injustice, there is freedom to be had in not having our lives mapped out for us in the same way. As women, we are able to look beyond marriage and children towards career opportunities, travel, sex, adventure, creativity, and fun. There’s less pressure to fit a certain mould of femininity that sees you branded a crazy cat lady just because you’re unmarried and without children, and more leeway to create the kind of life you want, to write your own story without being shackled by expectations.
Waterstones
It was exploring feelings around what it means to make a life when the old rules no longer apply that inspired me to write my book, The Year of the Cat. Getting a pet when the rest of my life felt unstable seemed like a step towards a more settled existence. Though it would be nice were politicians to make a stable adulthood more achievable for subsequent generations with affordable housing and child care, reliable employment and action on climate – not to discuss allowing those in rented accommodation to own pets.
Having to tread my own path has certainly made me more philosophical about what life may throw at me. I can’t say that I’m no longer haunted by how much my mom achieved and by what age, however I’m far less preoccupied by it. Whether you get there in the end or not, the journey – chaotic and confusing and ramshackle though it might sometimes be – remains in some methods as specifying as the location.
The Year of the Cat by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is out now