The Best of Times, the Worst of Times—the 80s

Sacchi Green

Do I have to remember the 80s? Are you sure? There are years I’d rather remember. In a way, the past is a different country, one we’ve passed through, and can never truly revisit. But why I am I dragging my metaphorical feet about this particular decade? By some measures those years were the best of times for me. Once early in that decade I had a sort of epiphany, a sense that I’d figured out this whole being grown-up deal at last. The business I co-owned in Amherst was doing so well that we opened a second store across the river in Northampton. I was on the board of the local League of Women Voters, and singing with the Hampshire Choral Society. My older son, geeky and somewhat eccentric, found kindred spirits when he got to high school and was thriving, and by mid-decade was studying computer science at UMass with a full scholarship, awarded to the four highest scorers on the SATs in each Congressional district (or at least the four highest scorers who wanted to go to UMass.) Business, civic affairs, music, motherhood—I must have been doing something right, right?

Well, yes and no. Or who knows. It was that last part, motherhood, that showed how false and ephemeral that epiphany was. My younger son, ten years his brother’s junior, was geeky, too, but more than eccentric, and growing even more so as adolescence approached. The best the doctors could do was call it OCD, which was certainly accurate, but far from all that was going on. His very bright mind found extreme and dramatic ways to react to whatever synoptic imbalance was under way. Matters became complicated by a physical injury requiring a brace, a stress fracture of a vertebra due partly to very fast growth. And there was bullying in junior high school, not physical, because he was big and tall, but all the worse because he was afraid he’d be driven to lashing out and injuring his tormentors. School became untenable. We turned to homeschooling. He pretty much aced the GED test, and started taking continuing education courses at UMass, earning a BA degree after ten years. Not so bad, but the process of getting diagnosed and medicated took years, very painful years, and there were times I wasn’t sure he’d survive them. I won’t go into further details, and I really shouldn’t be saying this much, since it’s not just my story. Things are stable now, and finally a new psychiatrist (two older ones had retired) has made a firm diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, unknown in the 80s. If we had known more back then, could we have done more to help him? I’ll never know, and always wonder, whether I should have done more, pushed him harder to adapt socially, something I wasn’t all that good at myself, or whether the support I did give was the best that could be done. In any case, we’ve survived.

An odd side-effect of all this was that I finally started to write in the late 80s, fan-fiction for my son from one of his favorite fantasy worlds, the Elfquest graphic novels about wolf-riding elves descended from immigrants from a distant planet. It wasn’t until 1995 that I ventured into original sf/f writing, but the gears had been set in motion, and they’re still grinding away.

I’ve been forced to think more about the past lately, as I go through stacks of old photographs in my father’s house, helping him (because he knows he won’t be able to stay there much longer) by winnowing out the duplicates, inconsequential shots, shots with heads cut off (my mother was an avid but not very skillful photographer) and various pictures not worth keeping. It’s a painful process, sometimes rewarding, often depressing, and I can’t stand to do it for very long at a time. I’m startled now and then to see myself from the past—maybe I really was in my prime in the 80s! And my kids, at various ages. And my granddaughter, growing so fast, from a baby to an overwhelmingly cute toddler to a self-assured nine-year old who’ll be taller than I am in a couple of years. I can scarcely comprehend that stretch of time, much less the 90s and 80s and 70s—although the 60’s still seem like yesterday, a country I remember vividly and wish I could revisit.

Don’t mind me. Who wouldn’t be somewhat melancholy in an ongoing stretch of snowstorms and bitter cold the way it’s been here lately? Spring will come again, and already I have flower seeds growing under plant lights in my kitchen, as I do every year. Some things can be repeated year after year. And don’t worry about me. I still haven’t really got the hang of being a grown-up, and that’s just fine.