I *heart* the '90s

I’ve been 60 for a few months now and have spent some time this winter figuring out how 60 feels compared to my previous ages. I know many of you have felt this before: that your current age doesn’t feel like you expected it to.

I’ve been looking to reminders in the past to gauge how I’ve changed (or not changed), and something I realized the other day is that the most influential decade of my life was not the one in which I graduated high school, got married, had a baby, and became a widow all within two years (the 1980s), but rather, the 1990s.

It happened when I heard Lisa Loeb’s song “Stay,” one of the quintessential anthems of Gen X (although, as my grandchildren like to remind me, the year I was born, 1963, was the final year of the Boomer).

I entered 1990 at 27, moved to Pennsylvania in 1991, turned 30 in 1993, and graduated from college in 1996, the same year I started writing for a living.

The music was much better in the 90s than the 80s, and so was my hair. I fell in love with Eddie Vedder and Toad the Wet Sprocket, Tori Amos and Blue Rodeo, and signed up for an America Online dial-up account (14.4 kbps, baby!) the minute I got that disc in the mail.

I discovered I loved antiques in the 90s and started a collection of early books on sexuality. The oldest one in the stack is from 1864. Let me tell ya, they had a lot of weird ideas about sex back then, and whoooeeeee daddy, many of them are weirdly racist. All of them are sexist to some degree, which is no surprise, but there’s a chapter in the book Female Sex Perversion (published in 1935) that argues that white women are attracted to black truck drivers because of their odor.

What?

Anyway…

Some of my favorite movies came out in the 90s—Dead Poets Society, Thelma and Louise, Dances with Wolves, Pulp Fiction, Fargo, et al.—and I met a woman who not only became a dear friend, but taught me more about forgiveness and Wuthering Heights than anyone ever has. (Thanks, Frankie!)

I got my first and only tattoo in the 90s and learned a whole lot about raising stepsons and teenage girls…at the same time. (Trust me, it’s an interesting combo and not for the faint of heart.)

I know not every decade is perfect, and I made some really bad decisions in the 90s that still make me cringe a little today, but I learned more about myself in those ten years than I had before or have since. I found the footing I didn’t have in the 80s, and I learned to trust my instincts. Moving away from my home state of Minnesota (and by extension, moving away from my family), I learned to be uncomfortable, and the friends I made here became like family.

Sixty isn’t anything like I expected it to be, but maybe that’s because the 1990s continue to influence me and inform who I am.

I only wish I still had that hair!