What my 8-year-old is teaching me about aging — and what I’m teaching her.
“Mom, how old are you?”
I merged onto the highway and then glanced at my 8-year-old daughter in the rearview mirror, only catching the top of her sleek bob.
“39 soon,” I said.
“Wow. You’re vintage!”
I’ve been called plenty of things, good and bad, but this was a new one. Maybe she called me vintage in jest? No. I didn’t hear her signature giggle.
“How old is something vintage?” I asked.
“Like, from 20 years ago. Or older.”
I craned my neck to get a better look at her in the rearview. She was gazing out the window like a philosopher pondering a hard truth. That was when I asked myself a question I had never considered: Am I vintage?
My daughter was born after 2010, making her a member of Gen Alpha. The TikTok trends that are ancient to her, like the Skibidi toilet, are news to me because I’m a millennial. Members of my generation, born between 1981 and 1996, were the first to grow up with the internet. Tom from Myspace and the AOL running man were our roommates. We dove into media that was social. Some of us have been on Facebook for 20 whole years. We didn’t balk at advances in technology like earlier generations tended to. A camera in a phone? Renting DVDs by mail? An intelligent watch? Heck yea! Luddites, we are not. So how could I possibly be vintage?
I was still thinking about my daughter’s comment a few days later when I walked into a vintage store near the campus of my alma mater, NYU. I ran my fingers along designer blouses from the 70s, trying to find a good bargain on anything silk. Suddenly, I came upon a clothing rack that confused me and then horrified me. There, under a sign that screamed “Y2K,” were the styles of my youth. The pubic bone-grazing jeans, miniature purses, and studded clogs were displayed like artifacts in a museum. The items could have been pulled directly from my high school closet. Wait, I thought, So I am vintage?
I should have known. The first clue was my resistance to Gen Z’s sartorial statutes (skinny jeans are out, and no-show socks are a no-go). The second clue should have been my actual age. I turn 40 next year. Does that mean I’ll be over the hill? Do people even say that anymore? And how could I be entering the fourth decade of my life when college feels like yesterday and high school like the day before?
For me, the word vintage conjures up bellbottom jeans and rotary phones with curly cords, at best (at worst, odorous memories of musty basements), which are perfectly fine, but with all due respect, much older than me. When used as an adjective, vintage means “dating from the past,” or “old-fashioned.” Vintage store wares are indeed from the past — well-worn, well-loved, and not without a certain charm. But some people might consider the items old or dispensable. Was that how I was being perceived by the spry members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha? Antiquated or obsolete?
There’s another synonym for the word vintage that I find more agreeable: Classic. As in serving as a standard of excellence. I set out trying to prove this to my daughter, who had become mildly obsessed with talking about my age. During a trip to the mall, we stood in line for overpriced sugar-crusted pretzel pieces when I told her I was considering getting a second ear piercing.
“Oh, mom. You might be too old for that. One hole is good enough for you,” she said with a smirk.
I rolled my eyes. She had discovered a new button to push, and she was doing so with delight.
“I’m not old. I’m classic.”
“Sure, sure.”
“Anyway, I think you’re old,” I said.
“What?”
“Yeah. You’re from the 2010s. And it’s 2024. Can you imagine?”
I arranged my face into a mask of horror.
“Mom!”
We laughed, paid for our pretzels, and then headed to Sephora, where my daughter tried to decide between gloss balm and glossed lip gloss. (Thankfully, she’s not yet a pre-teen obsessed with $100 bottles of hyaluronic acid.) I went to a display of lip liners and opened them one by one, drawing parallel lines in a dozen shades across the back of my hand.
“I like this one,” I said to my daughter, handing her a pencil. “I can’t read the name of the color. The letters are too tiny.”
She took it from me and read the microscopic font.
“It says: ‘Made in the Nine Zeros.’”
“The ‘Nine Zeros?’”
I took the pencil back and squinted at the label.
“Oh my God,” I said. “It’s called ‘Made in the 90s!’”
We cracked up once again.
I flagged down an employee and told her I wanted to buy the lip liner in that exact shade. But she couldn’t find it.
“It’s sold out. That’s a popular one.”
“See? Classic,” I said.
Technically, I wasn’t made in the 90s, but I did grow up during those years, so a win for the lip liner was a win for me. I settled on a shade named Hot Sauce. My daughter chose a light pink lip gloss. I paid, and we headed out to the parking lot. But before we could leave, a song started playing. First came an iconic three-note piano riff. Then, a woman’s voice.
“Oh, baby, baby.”
Made in the 90s, and now a hit that had capped off the 90s?
“Oh! I heard this song on TikTok! I love it!” said my daughter.
Hearing the song at that moment was surprising, but her reaction to it shocked me. She knew the song I used to play on repeat on my Discman when I was a teenager? And she loved it? She sang along as we headed out into the parking lot.
“It’s so crazy that you know that song. I used to love it,” I said.
“What’s the name of it?”
“It’s called ‘Baby One More Time.’ By Britney Spears.”
“I never heard of her,” she said.
“That’s because the song came out like 25 years ago.”
She looked astonished as she got into the backseat.
“Seriously?”
I plugged my phone into the car’s USB port and tapped at it before pulling out of the parking lot.
“It’s that old, but it’s still so good, right?” I asked.
“Yes!”
I got ready for my mic drop.
“Because it’s vintage. It’s classic. Just like me!”
Before she could counter with a quip, I hit the play button on the stereo system.
Dum, dum, dum. Those three notes, again.
“Raise the volume!” my daughter shouted at the back of my head.
“Oh baby, baby.”
I cranked the volume up as I merged onto the highway, the car vibrating with the sound of both of our youths.
“Give me a siiiiiign. Hit me baby one more time!”
And as we started singing together at the top of our lungs, the generations blended together seamlessly.
