The trio at the table next to me at the pub were of indeterminate but comparable youth. At least they seemed so to me. Until one woman recounted a litany of physical complaints and ailments that the doctor kept telling her were stress-related. She just needed to relax. Go home for Thanksgiving, she was told. This woman, young enough to go home for Thanksgiving yet old enough to carry enough stress that her body has revolted, has not yet learned the art of sotto voce. Each medically-baseless physical complaint boomed across the noisy room. She exaggeratedly shook her leg under the table to illustrate her previous body tremble. She noticed me looking at her, looked over my way, raised her eyes in surprise that I was listening, and continued describing bodily failures attributable to stress, bodily failures that could be cured by a weekend sleeping in her old bedroom, doing laundry and eating food cooked by her parents. How could I do anything but listen? She was a goldmine.
“Did it help?” asked the earnest man with the perfectly trimmed beard and mustache, bald head, red plaid shirt and intellectualizing eyeglass frames.
“It did!” enthused the woman.
And then the third spoke, espousing her theory of generational stress.
Really?
20-somethings are more stressed than 70-somethings whose bodies are accumulating actual medical breakdowns and illnesses, whose lives are increasingly spent in doctors’ offices and pharmacies, whose mates and friends are becoming disabled, demented, or simply deserted? More stressed than 60-somethings about to lose their health insurance and unable to qualify for Medicare? More stressed than 50-somethings who just endured the worst economic downturn in recent history, whose properties have plummeted in value and whose investments have flatlined? More stressed than 40-somethings who are scratching out a living while parenting late in life and being tapped to help care for their parents? More stressed than 30-somethings who are having their first midlife crisis, wondering their purpose and meaning in a world that has failed to notice they exist, facing choices that will forever limit their life trajectory – postpone kids or push ahead with frantic fertility efforts?
In your 20’s, you can still go home for Thanksgiving, get one or more of your parental units to take care of you, let you sleep in, let you graze their full refrigerator, let you do laundry without having to feed the machine quarters, let you borrow their car to see old friends, come in late, stay as if you were still a card-carrying member of the family but you are now excused from household responsibilities and chores. No trash or recycling, you may not even have to change your sheets or make your bed. You may not even have to attend Church on Sunday with the rest of the family. You are a guest in your former life, everyone poised to welcome you and remind you that you once lived here as a child, but you are now the Prodigal Child, the one who has returned. You may have exams and roommate struggles, but you have the full cushion on which to fall whenever you choose. You are the few, the proud, the one who carries your family’s hopes and dreams: The College Student Returning Home for the Holidays.
Maybe the CSRHFTHs hold more stress than anyone else. Or maybe they are the last of the cushioned, pampered, late-to-launch young adults who we have failed to prepare for independence. I’d give anything to go back to the ease of that time. When my boyfriend/professor/dorm troubles were so manageable, could be stuffed haphazardly into a pillow case, my overnight stuff fitting into a backpack, my tired and confused self on the Greyhound bus from campus to home, my folks meeting me at the bus so I’m spared even the indignity of spending 10 minutes in a bus station with people who, never forget this for one minute, carry a kind of life stress and life weariness unknown to one with my ridiculous good fortune of being a CSRHFTH instead of someone who actually travels by bus, sits in bus stations, uses bus station lavatories and eats food from bus station vending machines.
The conversation next to me has progressed, each one acclaiming the stress and outrageousness of everyone they knew in common. The formerly stressed-out woman has ordered her third beer, the older of the women, the one with a master’s degree, is on her third glass of wine. She’s peppering her conversation with advice, recommendations, travel suggestions, injunctions about not going certain places alone. She is the expert, the wise woman of the bunch, yet she herself is 20 years pre-menopause. The Wise Woman has just ordered another plate of pita bread; they’re sharing one plate of hummus and pita among the three of them. No matter how much stress they see and describe in everyone around them, no matter how much the eldest knows about generational trends, they’re oblivious to the fact that their server will receive next to nothing after serving them for two hours.
Maybe the 20-somethings have the edge, and they win the thankless contest of the most discontented, most out of sorts in their lives, most stressed. Maybe there’s something fundamentally off kilter when we need to determine who’s more stressed. But I cannot go home for Thanksgiving. I am creating the home from which my son will return with laundry in a pillow case and a backpack full of assignments due bright and early the next Monday morning. Sometimes, although my doctor can find nothing medically wrong with me, I am short of breath.