#I think they become siblings in highschool or middle school minimum

[nick-close]

Au where Jodie and Glenn are step siblings bc their moms got married send tweet

[levinea-yuuki]

I've been thinking recently

We don't have much foundation. Both Millennials and Gen Z are stuck with so much responsibility for our futures. We're judged for our quirks, called special snowflakes by the most entitled generations, and tossed out on our own by Baby Boomers and Gen X.

Now I definitely don't feel like a Generation Z child because of two reasons:

I'm 22 years old and that just makes me feel like a millennial based on the whole structure and my lack of a sense of timelines.

I've never gotten into fortnite or the majority of these memes or dabbing.

But honestly that is not going to stop me from enjoying watching all of these people having dance-offs or making cleverly woven jokes or saying things I'll never fully grasp, (I still don't understand "worm"), or simply feeling refreshed about the open-minded beliefs of equality and acceptance, understanding, and kindness. Pour as much of that on as your hearts can show.

Getting back to the point. Though there's not much of a generation gap between Millennials and Generation Z in my point of view, seeing as we're both dragged into the same issues that arose with having to deal with the baby boomer generation in the same manner that we're having to deal with Gen X, though maybe not to the same extent, I feel like the older Generations are trying to shove a gap between us or push the blame.

This link takes you to a website that expresses just how much there is to think about with what Baby Boomers have done to our economy... Even though they blame millennials. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/apr/29/millennials-struggling-is-it-fault-of-baby-boomers-intergenerational-fairness

It's not just our economy that I'm worried about in the long run.

We can repair that type of damage, what I'm really worried about how the younger ones are raised. Striking on a highly personal and sensitive note, my mother born in Gen X married young to my baby boomer father and had my brother and me, my brother being in the millennial generation. After seventeen years of supporting us, forced into not seeing us very much at all with working two jobs and still expected to cook and clean while he made no effort to get his own job, criticized her for everything she did as well as prevented her from having literally any friends in or out of work, she got out. Good for her, right? She left the abuse, lived a little, remarried, and had my siblings.

Now here's where it gets sticky.

This left us with our father (me as a sheltered albeit pampered 11 year old and my brother the inexperienced 16 year old who was also pampered) because he fought her in court and somehow won full custody of us. It came to the point where my brother was suddenly the sole money maker for the household (while also in school) in the time frame of a week after she left because dad still refused to get a job but insisted on smoking and drinking a six-pack a day anyway. At the same time his pride got in the way of accepting my mom's help because she had optional child support and when he did accept it he immediately went and spent it on his booze, so she ultimately stopped the fruitless. He cut ties between my mother and us and pretended everything was fine and dandy now that she was gone. When he died of an impending and incurable death triangle (kidney failure, liver failure, and sever diabetes) almost five years later we were left with his debts and he didn't teach us a single thing to get us started. Almost three years later, I left to live with my mother because she found us and got back in touch. My brother rejected her offer and went out on his own, swimming in the unbacked pride dad had set, and since then has been entirely incapable of holding a job for more than a few months before he's fired for one thing or another. He still refuses to speak with her.

Now on my end, everything started fine. I was expected to do some of the chores, finish highschool, and I finally had the chance to learn who my mother was the first time in my life... but once I had settled in I came to understand that she was in a constant defensive state anytime she was questioned and was afraid of moving forward. She suddenly had a late teenage daughter that didn't know a single thing about living. To this day four years later she has had a very easy-to-boil temper. It started as a self defense mechanism, she had to become this way to keep herself alive with my dad as a husband, but she became more than the overseer of the new family, she became an overbearing abrasive woman to make sure things were going her way so that there was no way she could slip back into what she had been living in.

She is now the type of person who considers pain to be a competition, a concept of reality she got from her father, my father, and her generation as a whole. Her existence is work, bills, her new spouse, and figuring out how to set me on my siblings on the best path. She has experienced more pain than I can picture, lived a longer life with many challenges, gave every ounce of effort to get back to her senses and I respect that wholeheartedly, but what I can't seem to respect or handle is her needed to feel like she's right all the time even when she's dead wrong, how deaf she is to the hurtful things she says, and how she goes about getting things done.

It's not just life she tackles harshly now, but pain is measured on her own set of scales. It is her competition in order to feel sturdier about her situations and I see this a lot in her age group, frequently and everywhere, but in the process of all of this she invalidates anybody else's difficulties if they are less than her own. In her eyes, "if I can tolerate it then you should be able to" or "if it's not bothering me then it shouldn't bother you" is the only reality. There are no extra spoons or forks, no in between, no consideration for how somebody else perceives a situation or how much somebody else can handle before they burst, and particularly with people in my age group she holds absolutely no patience. It's almost like she considers us a to be hypochondriacs because we haven't learned how to "suck it up" or "save face" when the physical aches or mental loads are too much, or the shambles they've left our economy in and voting Trump in because they think he will just fix it right up like changing a tire. It's entirely irresponsible, immature, inhumane, and unreasonable. She and most people her age, and people like my father, are incredibly blind to it. I can no longer respect them or trust them.

Now here's the kicker.

She as well as many other mothers claim that people in my age group have tunnel vision, that each day is brand new for us, that we don't know hardship or real stress, when in reality we are all facing the teeth gritting consequences for their choices. We are trying so hard to have optimism and open hearts, the patience they lack, and the wisdom to break free from their mislay of twisting roads and bare minimum guidelines.

As an example of her mindset and the challenge it presents, she believes I am entirely incapable of taking care of stressful situations when she hasn't taught me how, just like my father but and almost an exact opposite sense. My father pampered me and sheltered me, my mother drowns me only in harsh reality and expectations. It's not just her, the society these Generations have built are also malfunctioning and sending catless mixed messages. There are scores of American schools that don't teach a lick of daily knowledge like how to clean without making freaking mustard gas or how to go about sewing on a button. Cooking, paying bills, skills like changing a tire or what to do when the electricity goes out and it's not the breaker. Finances and taxes. They believe that schools only need to teach things like the states and capitals, sports, math, language (but only English and Spanish, I wanted to learn Japanese and sign language guys...), wars, a collection of science subjects, and maybe music. They've cut the budget for anything else. Screw the general public. Even my mom acts like her goal is to become middle class so that my siblings have more opportunities to learn what they need, but she's so fixated on raising her rank in society's standards thinking that it will solve everything she can't comprehend the real issues.

She believes I don't get certain responsibilities done the instant she tells me to because I'm lazy or inconsiderate, but mostly it's because my mind doesn't allow me to multitask like hers does, or I'm not sure how to go about it because I have to teach myself, and therefore it's just one more thing she has to add to the list of what I am not putting any effort into. She doesn't understand, or maybe she doesn't WANT to understand, that I have anxiety when I'm put on the spot because if I don't have a moment to think about what to do she chooses to scream at me instead of simply suggesting a solution or helping me think, and then decides to take over the responsibility with an added bonus of guilt-tripping and gaslighting. After years of this I've grown apathetic to her to the point where she has started calling me heartless and disrespectful. It is incredibly difficult to respect somebody who treats you like a tool that needs fixing but also doesn't make the effort to find out what's wrong in the first place.

I've read so many cases of this, just terrible awful parenting, it's to the extent where it's old news and that's unfortunate because it still hasn't changed. Make situations like these current news, spread them with a warning for our future, this problem has been around for so long it is almost entirely ignored by the older Generations in exchange for the opportunity to push blame. I myself have gotten so tired of asking "what is wrong with them? Why don't they see what they're doing? Don't they understand how harmful this is?" I see my mom giving sexist excuses about the behavior of men into the mind of my younger brother, I see her pushing my sister to tolerate him instead of stopping him from acting this way, and I think, "why can't they take responsibility for the damage they've done, re-evaluate themselves, or feel any regret for the stigma they choose to keep planting in young minds?" At every turn I'm invalidated, and though I'm expected to watch my siblings, I'm not allowed to stop them if they choose to play recklessly, rebel, or cock an attitude if I tell them they need to do something like brush their teeth or put a toy away. Unless there's an obvious chance of injury, I'm prevented from intervention. What kind of children are these siblings of mine going to grow into with this mindset? What are the claims that her generation are going to throw on them when there's no one else to blame? Why am I expected to relent to her demands and stretch and mold myself into her concept of what an adult should be if I can't suggest a compromise or take a stand? How am I or anyone else supposed to know what to do in shaky situations is if were not given the chance to learn, shown an example of how, or charted a better path instead of setting expectations and just demanded to reach them? I can't stand this. Each of these generations all hold individual, unique, brilliant people but the younger ones are treated like entirely different entities based on societies obsolete standards and malformed beliefs. This needs to change.