Minivans and the new Middle Age

I am so not cool. 

Let me be the first to tell you that I experienced an identity crisis when I became a full time mom.  I had a great job for eight years at a liberal arts university.  It was mentally stimulating, I was respected and I did my job well.  I felt smart.  I felt important.  It doesn’t matter if I actually was any of those things, I felt like I was.  I loved my coworkers and my boss.  I had a network of support at work, my girls, my friends. And in my twenties, man, I was smoking hot.  Again, it doesn’t matter if I actually was smoking hot.  I felt like I was.  I was confident.  I felt great.  Then I got pregnant.  Then I was a mommy.  Then I quit my job to stay home.  Suddenly I was just a mommy.  Not to minimize the job of mommy by my phrasing, what I mean is, my only job was to be a mommy.  I was alone all day with a baby.  I had gained a ton of weight.  I turned thirty.  Stay with me moms.  Because taking on the identity of a stay at home mom is not bad.  It was just so, so different.  Hence my identity crisis.  I felt like I was thrown into a tumultuous ocean without my life preserver.  I barely knew how to swim. All of the things that used to make me feel like me were suddenly gone and in their place was this infinitely more important new role to fulfill. 

I’ve recently noticed that something weird is happening with my generation.  It’s already happened to a couple of people I know, no kidding.  Let’s say, Mrs. X starts creeping towards thirty, she is twenty eight or twenty nine years old, and all of a sudden in the prime of her life she has a full blown mid life crisis.  This could mean that she is going to die when she is sixty.  Or, and unfortunately this is my conclusion, it means that the priorities of my generation are seriously and disappointingly screwed up.  These people I know who have mid life crises in their late twenties/early thirties are usually married and have young children or are beginning to entertain the idea of having a family.  And then, full on freak out.  Suddenly, Mrs. X's life is not fun.  Her spouse is lame.  Her car isn't big enough or new enough or special enough.  She wants more; more people to admire her, to tell her she's hot, more stuff in her house, more friends, more money.  She begins to look around.  She looks different.  She wills herself into having an identity crisis.  She tries sucking other people into her vortex of self involvement and telling them how unfulfilled she is and how “I am just trying to focus on ‘me’ right now.”  She doesn't even know who “me” is.

Apparently I'm not the only one who's noticed this.  Today I saw the new ad for the Toyota Highlander.  It’s sick, and not the good “sick” that all the hip kids say but it’s sick as in it makes me want to puke all over it.  A kid, probably about eight years old, is in the back seat dissing his parent’s outdated and “uncool” minivan.  All the cool kids have parents who drive Highlanders.  The kid actually says “It’s cool.”  He begs his parents to please be cool.  Please buy this car.  Please make your son cool by proxy.   Puke.

What's even better than the Highlander commercial are these commercials for new minivans.  The Toyota Sienna promises that it’s now cool to drive a minivan because this modern and hip family drives one.  The Honda Odyssey takes it even further.  You are a too-cool-for-school god of rock who will rock your minivan like a hurricane.  (It's a Scorpions reference, geeks.)   A friend of mine once said she’d rather die than drive a minivan.  To which I said, really?  Cause I kind of want one.  My motives are out of pure laziness, to be sure.  I love the idea of a door that opens with a touch of a button.  Or a trunk that just opens without me having to do a thing.  But what’s not a reason I want a minivan?  Because they’re cool.  Uh, that’s not why people buy them.  People buy them because they have six kids and need someplace to store all of their crap.  I’ve never heard anyone say, hey, did you see that wicked awesome minivan?  Now that’s cool.  The fact that advertisers are now trying to create a "cool" factor with minivans of all things just confirms my suspicions.

I’m thirty two years old and I have something to say.  Grow up.  That’s the problem of my generation as I see it.  They are trying desperately, selfishly, unceasingly to keep the cool going.  Everything has to be cool.  Your house has to be cool.  Your car, your kids, your t.v., your clothes.  It’s as if we are, in our adulthood, stuck in the same competition as we were when being cool was relevant, in high school. 

As I said earlier, I am so not cool.  I’d like to think I used to be, but that’s probably not true.  Still, there are times when I miss the old me.  It was hard reaching beyond all the stuff to get to my core, to try to find what makes me authentically me.  I’m still reaching.  And you know what I’ve found?  I’ll never be cool again, if I ever was cool before.  It doesn’t matter what I look like or what I drive.  It doesn’t matter who thinks I’m important, how well respected I am, or if I am liked by my peers.  That part of me is over.  You will always be in identity crisis mode if you look to things like that to define who you are.  I may not be cool, but I can be grounded.  It’s so true what my mom used to say, and as cheesy as it sounded back then it sounds especially cheesy now.  She’d say, “Just be the best Carrie you can be.”  In my thirties, I’m still figuring out who that is.  But I’m getting closer every time my son says “Thank you mama.”

It is so cool when he says that.