Dad Man Talking - Children of Mad Men

Let me set you straight right at the top. This is not going to be about the TV show Mad Men. This is going to be about us. More specifically it’s going to be about those of us who were small children during the time in which the show is set – the 1960s to be exact.

There’s been a lot written about the show. And I watch the show. And I like it enough, if “like” is the right word. If you’ve ever watched it, you can’t help but be sucked in by the overwhelming sadistic sadness in every plot line, the obliviousness to which these chain-smoking, alcoholic characters are headed toward their own destruction, the unrelenting scenes - like something dug out of a time capsule - showing what happened when a privileged segment of society gained nearly unlimited freedom for the first time in its history. It’s like watching two gorgeous, gleaming bullet trains headed toward each other on the same track. You just can’t turn away. And it couldn’t be any more gripping if this gang of white, middle class men and women were to strip down to their underwear and drop acid while standing on the ledge of a skyscraper (which for all I know might very well happen in an upcoming episode). It’s all there – extramarital sex, slow suicide, heavy drinking, marriages crashing in on themselves, money earned obscenely being obscenely spent – and it nearly always ends in a tableau of people eating each other alive.

And yet, because I am not really a voyeur of other people’s pain, I don’t feel I’ve been compelled to watch the show because of any of the above. In fact, I wasn’t even sure why I was so eager to watch it episode after episode, until I realized the following. In the background of most of the scenes of family life are two little children: a boy of about 5 and a girl of about 8. They belong to the show’s main characters and these children are almost always there when we see one or both of their parents at home. At first I wondered why the children were always part of these scenes. They didn’t seem to further the plot in any significant way, and I know that the show’s writers are much too cunning and invested in making us think about ourselves to simply have these kids around as set decorations.

And then it hit me hard. The kids are there because the show is really about them and what their parent’s behavior is going to do to them. And that’s when I realized that those kids are really me. Mad Men is about the next generation - my generation – the one that would be set adrift after being raised by a group of mad men and their wives.

When I realized this, watching the show became like looking at hidden home movies that my parents never dared show us for fear of reminding us what they put us through. There is the eight year old daughter of the main characters mixing drinks for her parents over the course of a long Sunday, and there is that same little girl later that night trying to awaken her mother from a drunken stupor to remind her that she and her brother have not yet been fed their dinner. There is that sad little boy, undersized for his age, lying about breaking the hi-fi and being scolded by his father who has been lying all along about his own past, indeed about his real identity. There again is that second grade girl caught smoking one of her mother’s cigarettes in the downstairs toilet and there is her mother punishing her for this by locking the girl in a closet while she lights up just outside the door. And there again is the boy child yelling about his dinner at the black woman who cares for their home as his mother snaps back to tell him that he can’t talk to this woman like that because she works for her. These kids are doomed. And every time I see them in a scene, I feel doomed right along with them.

We know where these kids are headed. They’re headed toward the same place as the rest of us born in the two decades after World War II. Dammed by our parents’ ignorance and sense of entitlement, we inherited lives of confusion, wrong choices, drug addiction, bad marriages, anger, anxiety and guilt over everything from how much we should eat to how much we should love those who are trying to love us.

And lest you think that the scenes of these children in Mad Men are not from our own lives, I offer you the following from my life and the lives of one or two others whom I have loved. There I am at 12 years old accompanying my father into a neighborhood bar where he will introduce me to some friends of his, including a woman with whom he is sleeping and who is not my mother. There is a dear cousin of mine at 14 years old sniffing glue in a closet in his bedroom while his parents drink happily night after night in their kitchen, a cousin who barely 15 years later will take his own life. There is my innocent wife and her good-hearted sister, joyous young girls really, being abused by their father, a man who had endured the German blitz on London side-by-side with his mother’s abuse, only to prosper and come to America where he would drink heavily, hate mostly everyone and nearly destroy his daughters with his own needs. I’ll stop here. Those of you in my generation all have your own stories. And I’ll bet you all go to bed at night saying the same prayer that I do, “Oh dear God, forgive our parents sins and save us from ourselves.”

Has God heard us? Many times I think not. I still struggle daily with my fears and my guilt over the modest abuses that I have distilled down from my own parents’ more monstrous abuses and that I still, in my darker moments, act out on those I love.

But then sometimes in these later years of my fathering I catch a glimpse of my nearly grown children and I see that God has been listening. My children are strong and they are honest. Most of all they are happy because they understand – in a way that we never did - that the world will not give them everything but it will give them some things. These children of mine seem to know how to love us and to forgive us even though we may have trespassed against them.

Why is this so? Well the Mad Men-watching dramatic side of me likes to think that, because we took the bullet for our kids, they have escaped a bullet of their own. But I know it’s really not that. God simply answered our prayers through our children. After all they were not raised by mad men, and with the help of God we children of mad men have worked to make sure that the madness stops here.