Growing Up Hippie
(Page 4 of 5)
November-December 2003
by Adriana Barton from Elm Street
Sugar became my drug of choice. Today I can mainline up to three packs a day of Werther’s Originals, those diabolical butterscotch candies. I swear off them for months at a time but, like a woman obsessed, I inevitably fall off the wagon. Last night I enjoyed a dinner of brown rice, tofu, and salad—followed by a bag of licorice and jujubes.
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Living with hippie parents wasn’t all bad. Despite our modest means, I grew up in an exceptionally rich cultural environment. My mother painted exuberantly and my community-minded stepfather funded multicultural arts groups as a bureaucrat and taught fiction writing. I was surrounded by sculptors, poets, musicians, and intellectuals. My accomplishments as musician, writer, adventurer, and friend are directly related to the values I grew up with.
At least one study bears this out. In the early 1990s, after many hippies’ kids had graduated from high school, Thomas Weisner, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, reported that “a strong parental commitment to one’s family lifestyle can contribute positively to children’s school achievement.” This was certainly true for my older sister and me, who were placed in enriched and gifted classes in grade school.
Being a hippie kid was cool in some ways. While classmates zoned in front of the idiot box (mostly off-limits to me), I spent my free time crocheting Rasta-style hats, playing make-believe, and pounding clay. By 13, I was sewing my own clothes and working my way through my parents’ boxes of books, from Siddhartha to The Joy of Sex. And whatever my siblings and I might say today about the care we got from that free-spirited generation, we always knew we were loved.
I was raised with a combination of intense care-giving and benign neglect, a contradiction to which many scions of hippiedom can relate. One of my best friends is a granola-fed high achiever who similarly spent years hiding her counterculture origins. She too had to teach herself basic life skills because her mother was either busy finding herself or had never learned. Both of us endured restrictive diets, weird home remedies, “voluntary simplicity” (involuntary in the kids’ case), and parents who treated us more like peers than children, confiding in us about everything from money woes to their love lives.
What kind of parents will we be? When it comes to creating families of our own, we Adult Children of Hippies border on 1950s-style reactionary. The other day my friend and I were mulling over how to have children in the current economic climate, and what sort of men we should choose for this momentous commitment. Sipping tea with us, her mother was baffled. “We never thought about things that way,” she giggled. “Babies just sort of happened.” Her generation had always gone with the flow—why would motherhood be any different?
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