I've recently discovered that my children view the year 1999 the same way I viewed the Civil War.
They see it not as a time period. But as a historical event.
The other day I mentioned something from high school.
One of my kids deadpan looked at me and asked: "Wait... was that in the 1900s?"
The. 1900s.
As though I personally witnessed the invention of electricity.
As though I was present when the Wright brothers first achieved flight.
For the record, yes.
It was technically the 1900s. I get that. But that doesn't mean you have to say it out loud.
The disrespect is unnecessary.
My children talk about the late 1990s like they're discussing ancient Mesopotamia.
"What did people do without smartphones?"
We lived. That's what we did. We lived.
You called someone's house and hoped they were home.
You got directions before leaving.
You disappeared for six hours and nobody launched a search party.
It was a magical time.
They genuinely cannot comprehend life before phones became appendages and wi-fi was necessary for survival.
I've tried explaining MapQuest. They think I'm making it up.
"No, seriously. We printed directions."
"On paper?"
Yes, on paper. Mind-blowing, huh?
And if you missed a turn, the directions didn't magically update.
You simply accepted your fate and started over. Sometimes in another county.
I told my kids we used disposable cameras and they were horrified.
"Horrified" is actually too weak a word.
It was the same expression you'd make if I told you people used to communicate through smoke signals.
"You couldn't see the picture right away?"
No.
You took 24 photos and then waited.
Sometimes for days.
And then you discovered that 18 of them were blurry and someone's thumb was covering the lens.
That's what made it exciting.
My kids have never experienced true uncertainty.
They can identify any song in seconds.
They can answer any question immediately.
Meanwhile, my generation spent entire decades wondering what the lyrics were.
We just picked something that sounded close and committed to it.
The most offensive thing is when they call things from my childhood "vintage."
Vintage?
Excuse me?
Vintage is a wine.
Vintage is furniture.
Vintage is not the CD collection I still own.
At some point I mentioned renting movies from Blockbuster.
My kids reacted the way anthropologists react when discovering ancient tools.
"You had to leave your house?"
Yes. For everything. All the time.
We left the house constantly. We interacted with the public unsupervised. It was chaos.
And somehow we survived. Barely.
The older I get, the more I realize every generation does this.
I thought my parents grew up during pioneer times. Now my children think I was raised during the Industrial Revolution.
Soon they'll be telling their kids:
"Grandma Sarah used to print directions and buy music on plastic circles."
And those kids will stare at me the same way my kids do now. Like I've survived a fascinating but largely undocumented period of human history.
At this point, I'm one conversation away from telling them I churned butter and traveled by covered wagon.
I don't think they'd question it.