Greetings From The Gen-X Generation That Drank From The Hose — 'TV Commercials Had To Remind Our Parents They Had Kids'
I’ve gotta tell you: hose water hits different. You should try it sometime.
ArtMarie | Canva I remember seeing a TikTok a while back that made me rethink my life, or at least pay more attention to where I came from. A Millennial in a beanie looks confused. “Y’all say you used to drink from the hose,” he says. He pauses to scratch his chin and ponder before he asks, “Were sinks not an option?
A beleaguered Gen-X woman (Kelly Manno if you want to look her up) adds her response. She heaves an exasperated sigh and says, “Who’s gonna tell him? You want me to tell him? I’ll tell him.”
Then she shouts, “We weren’t allowed in the house! … Our childhood was like one unending episode of that TV show, Survivor, okay? We are indestructible. We never sat in car seats, nobody’s ever given us swimming lessons, and we’ve all either been shot with a BB gun or stabbed with a Jart.
The television stations had to make a commercial reminding our parents that they had kids. I kid you not. Every night on the 10 p.m. news a voice would come on and say ‘It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?’ to remind our parents that they had kids. So no, sir … shirtless … with the beanie … sinks were not an option.” And everything Kelly Manno said is the straight-up truth.
The Gen-X generation drank from the hose because we are indestructible.
We’ve been through a lot of stuff. And while we went through it, we pretty much just thought it was normal.
It was normal to hurl heavy weighted lawn darts called Jarts at each other across the lawn. My family survived without any major lacerations or concussions, which is in itself miraculous because we generally weren’t that lucky.
(Although we kids — unsupervised as usual — invented a game in which we smacked pool balls at each other across our grandpa’s old pool table using ping pong paddles. That game resulted in not only bruised knuckles but lumpy heads and contusions because you wouldn’t think a pool ball would be able to fly but it turns out that, with the right propulsion, they absolutely can.)
Gen-X kids were raised feral — our parents were too busy trying to survive crippling inflation to give us much thought.
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We watched Leave It to Beaver reruns on the four working TV channels most of us grew up with — often with our little brothers actively adjusting the tinfoil-wrapped rabbit ear antennae to get a better picture because that’s what little brothers are for — but we didn’t have Ward and June Cleaver as our warm, loving parents who were always there when we needed them.
I was lucky if my dad remembered to pick me up from school, or if I didn’t come home to an empty house and a note from my mom telling me to watch my brothers, do my homework, wash the dishes, and start the laundry.
Seat belts weren’t a thing. I mean, we had lap belts, but we ignored them. All of us did.
We knew our mom loved us by the way her arm would shoot out, smacking us across the chest, whenever she had to brake suddenly. That arm was the one thing standing between us and a head-on collision with the windshield.
We took on a lot of responsibilities at a young age. When I was 10, my parents handed me my infant brother, seven-year-old brother, and three neighbor kids between the ages of three and eight and asked me to babysit while the adults went out to a club 45 minutes away. There were severe thunderstorms and tornadoes that night, and the frantic parental units came home to find that I’d skillfully herded us kids into the basement, where we were curled up safely asleep with pillows and blankets.
We grew up differently. I grew up differently.
And yes, Gen-X drank from the hose because sinks were not an option.
And I’ve gotta tell you: hose water hits different. You should try it sometime.
Karen Lunde has crafted hundreds of articles for Grammarly and once herded brilliant podcasters like Grammar Girl and the Savvy Psychologist as a digital editor at Macmillan Publishers. These days, she's an expressive writing workshop facilitator, helping people make peace with their past through journaling. Visit her at Chanterelle Story Studio.
