by Robert C. Koehler

 

Such a short time ago, they were playing Duck, Duck, Goose at one another's birthday parties. Now they're defining themselves as a generation. While they still sometimes look to us -- certainly for spending money, on rare occasions for guidance -- they look through us continuously, with cold wonder, amazed, it seems, at how little they find.

Thanks to them, irony is a growth industry.

Oh, teen-agers! Living in the past is an occupational hazard of parenthood. Now that I have to knock before I can enter my daughter's room, how I miss those days of baby fat and gleeful adoration ("I love you THIS MUCH, Daddy!"), when I was one of the co-stars of her parent-centered universe.

I loose the cry of a fool who thought he knew more than his own parents, who thought, under his watch, there'd be no surprises during puberty. Hadn't we, the boomers, rebelled for all future generations, made the world safe for youth and freedom and ... hair? Who'd have thought it'd be hair ... long beautiful hay-yer, streamin' flaxen waxen, long as God can grow it ... that would push my "square" button, that would be the first unmistakable sign that Duck, Duck, Goose is dead and the kids have minds of their own?

Hair was our rebellion, too. But all we did was grow it long, which is to say, natural. Natural was our god; the enemy was "plastic," which took in everything from false smiles to napalm. Mother Earth was our friend and role model and long hair was a little patch of wilderness atop our heads, the flamboyant antithesis of suburbia, with its obsessively manicured lawns. You didn't have to like what we were saying, but you could understand it, seems to me.

But here are Alison and her fellow 13-year-olds, these post-Gen-xers, these members of the unnamed Generation Next, standing in the force field of the future, letting go of our hands -- and ceaselessly dyeing their hair ... blue, green, magenta, orange, screaming red, sizzling pink. Colors about as natural as sodium nitrite.

A year ago, Alison came home with orangish-blonde hair after a sleepover. My permission wasn't solicited. Some months later she added blue streaks. And punk had a foothold in our house. These colors press against my values. Are they radioactive? Did the chemistry set explode? They alarm and befuddle me, hinting, surely, at greater defiance to come.

It quickens my heart to see the kid moving through the world on her own. A blue-haired teen was not the future Barbara and I had envisioned when we gazed raptly at our newborn, but you can't let go and stay in control at the same time. All I could do was try to keep my parental knee from jerking, which would only make matters worse. And one day she called from a friend's house to say the blue streaks were gone, but, well, something else had replaced them.

No one tells parents what they should worry about, so they fret and ruminate indiscriminately until life steps in and prioritizes their anxieties. That afternoon, when I got home and Alison wasn't waiting for me as I had expected -- and it was getting dark --a sudden emptiness of heart seized me, the slow numbness that precedes dread. Where was she?

I set off toward the train station in search of her, knowing full force what I sometimes forget, that I loved her no matter what color her hair was. Blessed false alarm! I spotted a familiar, backpack-toting figure a block and a half away and could hardly contain my joy. Her bare head was wreathed in a bright nimbus of hair. As she drew closer, I could make out streaks of dazzling fuchsia.

What a lovely color!

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