Age?

[stoutfellow]

I mentioned, in the last post, my liking for Carly Simon's "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be". But there's one thing that bugs me about it.

How old is the narrator supposed to be?

In the first verse, we learn that she's living, or perhaps just staying, with her parents. ("I tiptoe past the master bedroom where my mother reads her magazine / I hear her call 'Sweet dreams', but I forget how to dream.") Remember that this is supposed to be the '70s; adult children living with their parents were not as common as they reputedly are today. But in a later verse, we hear, "My friends from college, they're all married now / They have their houses and their lawns." Okay; presumably they're about as old as the narrator. Now, I didn't buy a house until I was thirty-five; I'd be surprised if that many college graduates get around to that before age thirty. But even so: "Their children hate them for the things they're not" - man, those are teenagers, right? We're talking late thirties at the very least.

But wait, there's more. "Soon you'll cage me on your shelf / I'll never learn to be just me first, by myself." She's at least in her thirties, never married (otherwise she'd draw on that experience, rather than saying "All I know is what I see.") - and she's never been her own woman? If that's what she wants, then why is she apparently still living with her parents?

I like the song a lot. But it really doesn't make sense as written. Am I missing something? ("Yes - a life" is not an acceptable answer.)

Comments

[commodorified]

I'm voting for "because she is helping look after them", but that may be my life experience mapping onto the song, as the tension between my mom and and our marriages is one of the things my sister and I spend a lot of time talking about lately.

[stoutfellow]

That's a possibility. If her parents suffered some kind of physical, emotional, or economic difficulty that forced her to return home just as she got out of college (or even before?), that would very nearly account for all the data. But it's not in the text. (Also, it vitiates any claim to her being Everywoman, which weakens the song a bit, I think.)