My parents are the age I am now—37 years old. They have four children: 16, 14, 9, and 8. My mom works in an office for a life insurance company, my dad is a carpenter, and together they’ve settled into their very first purchased home.
Three bedrooms. A backyard. A huge upgrade from the apartment above the pizza place where the smell of pepperoni permanently lived in the walls.
They own two vehicles: a pickup truck for my dad to get to job sites, and a minivan for my mom to get to work and shuttle kids across town. That minivan would later become my older sister’s first driving lesson in patience and parallel parking. Back then, only my dad had a cell phone—and it was strictly for work. Later that year, my sister and I were gifted transparent Motorola pagers “just in case,” which felt both wildly cool and deeply serious.
Our days were spent recording music for our pager voicemails, redoing them over and over until the timing and song choice felt just right. We wandered the mall like it was our second home—Old Navy, American Eagle, Hollister, Jean Machine, Blue Notes—on the hunt for the lowest-rise jeans and the most important graphic tee of our lives. We’d feel a tiny surge of dopamine every time our crush signed in on MSN Messenger.
At the movies, 8 Mile, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and the original Spider-Man ruled the box office. Our portable CD players blasted Ashanti, Ja Rule, Eminem, Justin Timberlake, Usher, Christina Aguilera, J.Lo, B2K, Ludacris, and Nelly—songs we illegally downloaded from LimeWire. And downloading wasn’t instant. You had to sit there, wait, hope the file wasn’t corrupted, avoid the accidental techno remix, and then burn the songs onto a CD that could maybe hold 20 tracks if you were lucky.
American Idol and The Bachelor debuted that year, forever changing moms everywhere.
Meanwhile, my parents were in the thick of it—two teenage daughters in high school navigating hormones, mood swings, and boyfriends, while two tweens wrestled with the early stirrings of puberty and big, confusing feelings. The house was loud. Emotions were high. Money was probably tight, though I didn’t know it then. What I did know was that dinner was always on the table, the minivan was always full, and somehow my parents showed up every single day.
Looking back now, I realize how young they were. How much they carried. How they were building a life in real time, without Google, parenting podcasts, or group chats for reassurance. They were just doing their best—raising four kids, paying a mortgage, and unknowingly creating the memories that would one day feel like an entirely different world.
Messy Minded Momma 
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