It’s not often, but every now and then a bit of genius will strike and I’ll crack the code of life. Usually it’s while I’m in the shower and I forget whatever the brilliant thing was, but there are times when I actually remember what I thought was so great.
This one struck me while driving to work, listening to an adventurous podcast, sipping my fancy wellness tea, wearing a new vest. I considered my kids and conceitedly thought to myself, “I think I’m a cool mom. I do cool stuff. I listen to cool music. I am totally hip and I can relate to teens and all of my kids and their friends must think I’m pretty rad. I mean, look at me. I’m drinking gourmet tea and wearing funky, yet practical, shoes. I am winning.”
And then, as quickly as it came, I had flashbacks of all of the ways my children remind me I am not very rad at all, including the way I sometimes use the word ‘rad’ and also ‘cool beans.’ I don’t understand half of the slang they say and most of the time the memes they show me don’t seem funny at all and yet they are cracking up. Also, they wear a lot of sweatpants which I think are anything but stylish.
So why is it, then, I think I’m so cool and they don’t?
Enter my wild hypothesis of coolness, and rewind to my teenage years, specifically when my dad picked me up from band camp on his Harley while wearing leather from head to toe.
I’m most positive that my dad thought he was pretty rad when he chugged up to the high school parking lot where I waited with my fellow saxophone players to be picked up. I’m sure he was thinking that he was the envy of all the other kids, wishing their dads had leather pants. I, however, was slinking away as invisibly as possible pretending that the pop-pop engine sound wasn’t as loud as I knew it was.
Which brings me back to my hypothesis. My kids think they are cooler than me. I think I am cooler than my parents. I can assume my parents thought they were cooler than their parents. And once you think you’re pretty rad, and you are lucky enough to have your non-rad parents around, the feeling sticks and you spend your days thinking you are hot stuff. But your kids will never agree.
So to conclude, we are all cool, relatively speaking, when compared to our relatives.
I, however, am much more rad than my parents ever were. I’m sure there’s a non-funny meme about it somewhere.
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