Broken Homes

A Generation Lost in Space with No Time Left to Start Again

The names in the following stories are changed to protect the privacy of the individuals in them. These are all anecdotes from the lives of my personal friends, family, or acquaintances.

Heather is 35. She has red hair and she works as an a sales representative for a company that sells software for home security systems. She has one child, is an alcoholic, and requires pills to go to sleep at night. She’s currently in the middle of a painful divorce and thinking about giving up on men altogether and becoming a lesbian. Maybe she always was one anyway. She isn’t sure. By 35 however, you should be sure and she knows this. It’s not normal to have not figured out which genitalia you’re attracted to by mid-life and on some level she understands this and it makes her uncomfortable and question her own sanity that she hasn’t. On another level she also knows that 35 is midlife because it’s perfectly acceptable to drop dead at 70. This makes her more uncomfortable. Far more uncomfortable than not knowing whether or not she’s gay. She drinks wine every night to avoid thinking about her age and sometimes she collapses in the bathtub. She’s never late for work though, even though she hates it there. Her favorite television show is Schitt’s Creek.

John is 42. He’s a civil engineer by training but he married a single mother a few years back and moved in with her and the kid. She made more money than he did, so it made sense. Unfortunately because she works remote and lives in the middle of nowhere he can’t find a job in his field so he’s taken a position trying to sell recycled bamboo that’s been made into various iPad paraphernalia. Mostly it’s marketed towards millennials. The company still thinks “hipsters” are a demographic worth targeting and all their ads feature somebody in skinny jeans with a beard. His wife won’t have sex with him. Says she’s too depressed. He tries to get along with her kid but the kid is traumatized from the divorce and refuses to get close to another father figure for fear this one will also skip town. The kid is 11 but still poops his pants. This is probably a way to get attention from his mother who, if she didn’t have to help him clean up, would spend all day sleeping under a weighted blanket she bought from Costco. John has grown distant from his friends and sees his own life as a failure. The last time I was able to get him on the phone he told me that he wished he had enlisted in the army so he could have gotten blown up in Iraq. “At least then somebody would pretend to care,” he said. He appears to be genuinely jealous of wounded war veterans because people tell them “thank you for your service” at Starbucks. No one has ever thanked John for his service. Probably nobody ever will.

Gibbs is a truck driver. He has a dumb name. Stupid parents.