Was chatting with my daughter over dinner about the position of women in society, and how the decades have been so different in their reality for girls, when something was said about the '60s. I don't know who said it or what it was, but suddenly there was a scent of hostility, a rancour that I found disconcerting.
It pulled me up short, and I suddenly felt a gulf between my daughter and I, a friction -- something hard and cold that made me feel that her generation, which I had always considered my good friends, had come to the point where they wanted to push mine aside, not because they didn't like us, but rather because we had something that they could never have and they deeply, deeply resented us because of it.
I realized then that I have never really spoken to my daughter about my life in the 60s. I just don't talk about it, even though I am, I think, reasonably open about other aspects of my life. Even though it was a flashpoint of modern history; even though I had adventures that are worth repeating; even though an understanding of what I was doing in the '60s is essential to an understanding who I am today -- even with all that...I don't talk about it.
I don't know why I don't talk about it. Perhaps because it is such a private, secret part of those of us who are of a certain age, those of us who lived it.
But perhaps we should.
Our children obviously want to know. They want to understand what it was we had then. And maybe what they could aim to have now.
Maybe we should tell them. Or not.
I don't know that I'd know where to begin.
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