I shared a Gen X meme the other day that asked:
Therapist: Did you experience any anxiety when you were a child?
Me: Well…
Underneath was basically a greatest-hits collection of things designed to terrify children born in the 1970s: missing kids on milk cartons. Unsolved Mysteries. The rope hanging from the gym ceiling that some adult expected you to climb while everyone else sat cross-legged on the floor watching you fail. Playground equipment that could launch a small child into another zip code.
And apparently a Sleestak, which I had completely blocked from my memory.
I laughed because, yes. Word. And then I added my own contribution:
We also watched the Space Shuttle explode while we were in school and the reaction was, “OK, TV off, time for math!”
Except that isn’t exactly what happened to me.
I was home sick on January 28, 1986. I was thirteen years old, and I was watching the Challenger launch with my mom. I remember the excitement around Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who was going into space. Teachers were watching. Kids were watching. This wasn’t just another shuttle launch. A regular person—a teacher—was going. And then, 73 seconds after liftoff, Challenger broke apart.
I don’t remember exactly what I understood in that moment. I’m not sure any thirteen-year-old watching those strange white trails appear across that impossibly blue Florida sky could immediately understand what we had just seen. But I remember what happened next. My mom turned off the television. And that was pretty much it. We didn’t talk about it.
The more I thought about that memory, the less funny my joke became—not because I think my mom did something wrong. Quite the opposite. I’m pretty sure turning off the television was her way of protecting me.
Something terrible had happened. Stop watching it. Don’t expose the child to more. Move on. It makes perfect sense. Except turning off the television didn’t turn off what had already happened.
And maybe that’s the part of growing up Gen X that the memes don’t quite capture.
We joke about drinking from garden hoses and riding bikes without helmets and disappearing into the neighborhood until the streetlights came on. We joke about lawn darts and metal playground equipment and sitting in the way-back of a station wagon without a seat belt.
We were tough. We survived. Whatever. But there was another kind of toughness expected of us too.
We didn’t talk about anything then.
At least, my family didn’t. Something could be scary or sad or confusing, and the response wasn’t necessarily to help a child put words around it. The response was often to make the scary thing stop.
Turn off the television. Go back to school. Go outside and play. You’re fine. And I don’t think that meant our parents didn’t care. I think many of them genuinely believed that not dwelling on something was one of the ways you protected children.
Maybe because that’s what their parents had done for them. Maybe because they didn’t have the language either. That’s the piece I keep coming back to.
We know so much more now about helping children process difficult experiences. We ask what they saw. What they understood. What scared them. What questions they have. We know that children can fill silence with explanations of their own—and those explanations aren’t always accurate or particularly kind to themselves.
But somebody had to teach adults how to have those conversations too. And a lot of our parents had never been taught. So my mom turned off the television. I went back to school. Life continued.
Forty years later, a stupid meme on Facebook made me remember sitting at home sick with my mother while the Challenger disappeared from the sky. And what I remember almost as clearly as the explosion is the silence afterward.
Maybe that’s why these ridiculous Gen X memes resonate so much. It’s not really because Perfection was terrifying. Although Perfection was absolutely terrifying. It’s because underneath all the jokes about how feral we were is a generation of adults looking backward and realizing just how much we experienced without ever being asked:
What did that feel like for you?