#but noo it's one diamond surrounded by gremlins

[sweetdreamspootypie]

Intergenerational friendships are pretty neat in that it can provide answers to questions you didn’t even think to ask because you don’t even realise just how much it didn’t always used to be this way like days like today when I’m tired and sick and emotional I get to being a lil melancholy about the ways I’m having to teach myself to be human for the first time in my mid 20s There’s an old lament of why did no one do anything about the obvious psychosocial needs of the child-me? what did they think that children just raise themselves? except. yeah. They did, in the past. Parent’s didn’t need to think about the psychosocial development needs of the child and maybe they should enroll them in some kind of after school club. because that stuff just ... happened by itself, before Kids had siblings and neighbours and cousins and classmates and school acquaintances who weren’t classmates, plus any other community connections from jobs or community stuff like church

My Boomer(tm) friend shared a memory which is viscerally seared into my skull with envy there was an outdoor swimming pool that was just filled by the rain. it had amphitheatre grass mound edges. In the summer all the kids would go and just hang out. At a recent school reunion one lady told him that she always thought he was just so cool because he brought a little portable radio to play by the swimming pool

and just. Does that exist anymore? For anyone in westernised countries? just social gathering places. No money required. Kids and teens with free time to just socialise. Unsupervised by adults. Independent movement (by bike or foot or public transport) so that they can choose to take themselves there. And that’s not mentioning the unsupervised bush camping trips with just the brothers. Cooking sausages on the beach with a campfire. Making funky DIY bicycles in the workshop.

Is this normal? how much am I attributing to the millenial/zillenial siloed suburban experience that is actually just my family’s specific siloed experience? how much is it the normal experience of growing into adulthood and everyone feeling they still have more to learn? how much is it just being human and always having more to grow? on the scale of it it’s obviously not a bad regret to have as a childhood scar but feeling like I can’t have kids yet because I need to reparent myself first about everything is a sore spot

I need to remember that I started this post and these trains of thought on an optimistic note because I have someone I can ask there are answers there is a better way of doing it it can be done