Rebelling against me should involve wearing kelly green and pink with pearls, investing in Big Oil, voting Republican, eating meat, and vacuuming.

Instead, rebellion has manifested itself in my house as a penchant for eyeliner, facial piercings that have to be removed before visiting grandparents, music seemingly without melody, and a strong desire to live in the crush of city crowds.

While I read books on home midwifery and holistic healing, my daughter signed up for what the high school brochure unsettlingly referred to as the “health occupations tract.” (I tried to justify that spelling; I really did. After all, students traverse the hallways of their high school and are eventually spit through the orifice of graduation, if all goes well. That could be a tract of sorts.)

While I think modern medicine is often intrusive and goes looking for trouble to overprescribe and treat unnecessarily, she thinks doctors and hospitals are hella cool and watches surgery shows that leave me squeamish.

While I dreamed of finally owning my own exotic chickens, collecting their eggs, growing organic vegetables, and tend to lapse into rapturous squeals of glee when I can point to all the food we eat that came right from the backyard, she dreams of apartments and houses with postage-stamp yards where people walk by on too-close sidewalks at all hours. She wants traffic and noise while I count rooster crows and listen for the hummingbirds at the feeders.

While I dream of moving ever further from civilization, Montana maybe, or high in the mountains and living off the grid, she craves nightlife and people.

I can’t get far enough away from others, and she wants to move closer.

I just knew that even though biology and psychology and a lot of other –ologies I can’t spell all say that our kids have to decide we’re hopelessly lame or they’d never get their own apartments, I thought we’d navigate that time easier than regular people because I’m so freakin’ cool. I got it. I knew what was important. I was an artist dreamer, just like they would be.

Guess not.

I get the jokes on Family Ties reruns now. There’s a subtext I never noticed when I just had a crush on Alex Keaton. You should watch. It speaks to the whole parenting experience in a profound way.

I heard an author on Fresh Air on NPR say that from the time they can crawl out of our laps, kids are telling us in a million different ways, “I’m not you.”

And that hurts our feelings because we thought we were making a series of Mini Me’s.

Understanding that it’s part of the natural order doesn’t help much. Just like having a baby is a tremendously Big Deal when it’s your turn to do it, so is every other milestone we know is coming. Just knowing we’re in line with the regular lockstep order of things doesn’t make any of those steps one bit less wrenching.

And like I’ve said, WE WERE SO COOL. We were different. We had values and ideals and hallucinogenic drugs that really worked. Who would want to rebel against that?

So is this just a pendulum cycle over and over again? Crass materialism and focus on this world in alternation with a dreamy metaphysical focus? Or was that boomer focus on the universe just a blip – an anomaly that will disappear as we all dodder off into the sunset on our tie-dyed walkers?

I hope not. We had such great and noble ideas. We weren’t practical, but we changed the world, often for the better. Some of the changes have taken longer than we would have liked, but they’re there, all the same.

Even at the start of the current collection of wars, were there any true hawks, anyone who really wants to bring harm to civilians we don’t know? It seems that our attitudes toward killing, other than in Texas and Virginia, where the state still executes an awful lot of people to keep the rest of us in line, has evolved.

There seems to be a general understanding of basic human rights, and the debate is more about the finer points of making fair treatment a reality than debating the need for it to exist. That’s progress.

The concern with the environment has become much more universal, with only Michelle Malkin and a few others claiming that what hurts big business hurts the Earth. We don’t seem so out there anymore.

Even our understanding of Eastern ideas like karma are mainstream sitcom fodder. We knew The Secret before it was a blockbuster and a movement. You get what you give. And what you expect to get. We got that.

And we all knew that if we kept the clothes long enough, they’d come back around.

Maybe the kids don’t know the struggles for women’s rights and civil rights and the ones for artistic and philosophical freedom because we’ve protected them the same way our parents sheltered us. We grew up sure that there would be enough to eat, that the economy wouldn’t crash, that there would always be enough—of everything—to supply our needs. Our parents told us often in our own rebellious phases that it wasn’t always so, and they knew we didn’t understand all they’d experienced. They were right. We were right. And, as far as something to rise beyond that we don’t know about yet, our kids will be right, too.

Maybe THAT’S the trend: each generation protects its young from the evils it knows, and the young grow up to conquer a new set of evils. By the time our grandchildren and great-grandchildren go through the process, maybe there will be less and less evil to vanquish. Maybe things are getting better all the time.

But our music was still better. Melody, you know.