The Silent Cry of the Boomers

As a preface, I’m a Boomer but only by 7 weeks. As I moved through school, my class year was roughly half Boomers and half Xers. I noticed early on that we were unlike the grades before us or the ones that came behind. We were like a middle child that never quite fit into the family dynamic.

For myself, I’ve always felt a connection to both generations. I wasn’t alive when JFK was assassinated and I was only 3 when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy also fell. My dad had a blood type that exempted him from the draft. But he would have been too young for WWII or even the Korean War, a conflict that seems largely forgotten, another middle child existing between WWII and Vietnam. But the mindsets of those who did serve, and who survived, permeated the culture. They wanted order. They wanted to feel safe. They needed the external world to mirror that reality back to them because they were holding on for dear life from the Great Depression and the industrial scale butchery of WWII (and then Korea).

I started out life in a tiny house in a Houston subdivision, but it had a big yard and the neighborhood was full of kids. We moved to a slightly larger home when I was five years old. The collective value system required a green lawn, nicely cut and edged, properly pruned hedges if you had them, swept driveways and sidewalks including the street fronting the curb, and if you had a garden it should be ordered and neat. It was a working class neighborhood, many families struggled to feed and clothe themselves, but the house and especially the yard had to look pristine.

Boomers are sometimes called the generation that wasn’t allowed to cry. There’s a truth to that that’s difficult to understand for those children who didn’t live through it. Crying, especially for boys, was weakness but more than that it broke the unspoken contract between parents and their kids. When it came to having feelings, the kids were on their own.

I had a bad bicycling accident one day. My knees, arms, legs were bludgeoned after a hard crash on the street. I was in a lot of pain; there was blood flowing, getting on my clothes which I knew would make my mom unhappy. I picked myself up and rode home. Blood was flowing off me—there was a trail of it wherever I walked. I knew better than to go into the house. The pristine rules of the yard applied to the inside as well. So I sat in the garage, shivering, hoping that the blood would not stain the concrete. I was scared as the blood kept flowing. But I wasn’t crying. Big boys didn’t cry. But then my mom came home. I saw her face in the garage door window pane. I erupted with sobs. I couldn’t help myself. I was in pain and I wanted her to understand so she would do something about it. She raised the door, came at me with a skeptical frown, and said that I was faking. The tears stopped, not because I was faking but because of sudden overwhelming anger that covered everything else, including the pain. Anger wasn’t safe either, so I went numb. And I was reminded of an important lesson—my tears were not supposed to be seen by others. She would fix me up, but I was to keep my feelings to myself.

I learned the lesson at school as well. The example that popped up for me was when I was using the bathroom. I turned around, and the number1 bully smacked me in the eye, knocking me down. I was shocked, and in that shock, I cried. It wasn’t about the pain. I was used to being hit; indeed, I was used to being hit and not crying because that made it worse (I wonder looking back if my parents thought of crying as a kind of emotional manipulation as well as a sign of fragility that needed to be discipled out of existence. In truth, I did cry at first because I wanted the punishment to stop. But I learned that didn’t work.) So when I cried as I lay on the bathroom floor, it wasn’t from the pain of being hit, it was because I felt a hopelessness that I could not escape being physically harmed (a side note, at lunchtime, I was a frequent target of leg kicking from other boys and my legs were almost always bruised but schoolyard rules made it unacceptable to complain—I had to take it like a man!).

The crying in the bathroom broke the schoolyard rule. I got the bully in trouble. Other boys came over and asked me to smack their palms with the force used to hit my eye and then laughed that it didn’t hurt. They went around and made a big show with the other kids on what a pathetic boy I was to cry—they wanted to drive in the shame of my weakness. The schoolyard punished my transgression. Crying was not safe.

Alas, I’m a deep thinker…and a deep feeler. My emotions are intense—think bustin broncos. One way or another, they had to be expressed, and I was in a lot of pain, all the time. So I divided myself. In public, around anyone else, I was numb, I was stoic, I was dead but I had control over my feelings. But in private, I cried—a lot. I learned how to sob without sound so no one else in the house would hear. I was still crying as a teenager, and I learned how to drive even when heaving and sobbing; sometimes, someone I knew would see me in the car, balling, and would make a comment but I never said anything—I would respond with a blank expression of, why are you saying this? I don’t quite know what you’re talking about. Move along.  

It has taken a lifetime of getting comfortable with public emotion. Many people who know me today think of me as a big feeler but also someone who exudes calm. I still struggle with expressing emotion around others but much more so with anger than with sadness. I have done a lot of personal work, and through that I have developed an appreciation for emotional mastery. I want the ability to say to myself, I don’t need to cry, I don’t need to be sad, or depressed, what can I do to remedy the situation or where at least is there acceptance of what is. That doesn’t mean I believe crying should be suppressed, but it does mean that I want enough control to choose when and where I wear my heart on my sleeve.

I don’t cry as much. I’m still much more likely to cry in private; there is still that old belief that my pain, my suffering is not meant to be exposed or shared. I sometimes think about my parents and others like them—the ones who raised the Boomers to be seen but not heard, to keep a stiff upper lip. I wonder if when they closed the doors, when they were alone, did they allow themselves to cry? Or did they live out their lives in silence to their pain? Did the silence fall apart near their end in places where no one else would hear? Or was their internal chaos so extreme that they could not let it out into the open, even for a moment when no one else was looking?

I think there is a natural tension for generations to judge one another in part because the life experiences have been vastly different compared to earlier ones when the world changed at a much slower pace. There is also wisdom to be learned between the generations. From Millennials and Gen Z, Boomers can be given permission to be soft, to allow their feelings room to breathe and to understand that they and the world would continue if they cried, if they revealed their pain. Vulnerability requires strength.

Boomers understand that the world is not here to accommodate you—that the world requires resilience and toughness-- that is something that modern generations tend to resist. They want the world to accommodate them (by definition, this is entitled). They want to see themselves everywhere. They are locked and loaded into feelings to the point of being radioactive. Feelings matter. But so does data.  Discomfort is not the end of the world. Disagreement is possible without becoming enemies. Identifying too much with one’s pain consumes the heart and leaves the shell of a victim. I wonder how the generations after Xers will be able to endure growing old.

My want is compassion and grace—for ourselves, for those that came before and those that are coming into their own.

I have given myself permission to cry around those who are able to accept it. And I have given myself permission to keep my tears private, a sacred offering that is between me and my soul.