Curse of the hippie parents

I took him into the kids' building. He took off all his clothes and lay down. He had an erection. I took mine off too and lay down on top of him. He kissed and fondled me. After a while, he got up, kissed me on the top of the head and thanked me. I felt confused and embarrassed.

Over the years, I had many inappropriate sexual experiences, with different partners and levels of interest on my part. The confusion and embarrassment were a constant. Even in less ambiguous situations in which I was exploited by predatory adults, I blamed myself for what happened. I had been raised to think that saying no was uncool, and that my body was up for grabs.

The worst part was that even when I was really uncomfortable with a sexual situation, I would sometimes respond sexually. This sent me into an abyss of self-loathing before I grew up and learned that children naturally have sexual feelings, and that they can arise even when the child is scared and unwilling.

My parents wanted to raise a happy, sexually liberated free spirit. I took the "free" part to heart, anyway. By the time I hit puberty I was already sexually jaded. I can't remember not knowing what went where, complete with variations and sub-routines. From age 11 until I whipped up a new batch of self-esteem in my late 20s, I slept with so many people that I lost count at around 150. To this day, I can be standing at the sink washing a dish, woolgathering, and something will trigger a memory of a long-forgotten sexual encounter: the guy I slept with in the bathroom of a Greyhound bus, or the taxi driver I screwed for the sole reason that he had a cute Irish accent and I had no money for a tip.

I slept with my friends' boyfriends, or their fathers, just because they asked. I alienated a lot of people, mostly women. I was lucky to dodge the scarier of the venereal diseases, but I got a lot of urinary tract infections and had a few unplanned pregnancies. Hey, man -- love the one you're with. Right. Im pretty sure that an overfamiliarity with Bactrim and cannulae is not the beautiful expression of sexuality the hippies had in mind when they rejected traditional parenting.

But all this has a happy ending. Paradoxically, the dangerous freedom I was raised with was the thing that allowed me to rebuild my self-esteem and set boundaries for myself. I had been told for so long I could be anything I wanted to be that I finally figured out I could, by that same token, get over the anger I had for my parents. They had no childraising instruction manual, and they lived through one of the most turbulent, strange times in our country's history.

In the course of working on this, I finally found ways to shock my mother. At one point I decided to become a lawyer, and when I told Mom, she looked stricken. "Oh, no! Anything but that!" she said. "Honey, be a painter or a poet or something else instead!" I felt like a tax-payin,' job-havin' James Dean. All I have to do to freak out my Mom is work too hard, or mention my 401K.

Now Im 35 and happily engaged to a wonderful man I've been with for five years. Life is good. I impose boundaries on myself and try to stick to them despite an innate rambunctiousness that won't quite go away. I love my mom, who lives close by, and I live right next door to my "other mom," a woman we met on the commune, who helped raise my brother and me and is now my best friend.

People who were raised by hippies are writing books now, and I'm finding out how common my experiences were. Chelsea Cain's excellent collection of essays, "Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture," is full of stories similar to my own. I've interviewed a lot of ACHs (Adult Children of Hippies), and we all pretty much agree: Loved the God's eyes and the baby goats; hated the lack of Lucky Charms, boundaries and discipline. We have nice traits in common, like adaptability, resourcefulness and a tendency to be more open-minded than not. But we are all a little bit control-freakish, and we have no patience for people who romanticize the hippie era uncritically. An accidental Wavy Gravy sighting can send us into a frothing rage.

Which brings me to why Im writing this. In the past few years, hippie culture has had something of a revival. Hippie music, hippie clothes, hippie politics, even hippie hairdos are big. More and more, I see VW buses with cedar peaked-roof add-ons, lumbering up Highway 1 on their way to Reggae on the River, the happy scruffy singing hippies inside dandling little newborns in tie-dyed Garanimals.

It isn't surprising that in an era tinged with the paranoid ultraconservatism of the '50s, people seem to want back some of the '60s freedom and revolutionary feeling. The George W. Bush presidency is almost enough to make me sell everything and buy one of those buses myself. Almost.

Growing out of the anger I felt has allowed me to admit that I also long for some of the feeling of that age, but I don't want nouvelle-hippie parents to make the same mistakes with their kids that the first hippies did. Once you have kids, finding yourself should never trump the goal of giving your kids a safe, thoughtfully limited environment.

So this is a cautionary tale. Go ahead, eat carob. Weave your own dashiki. Get off the grid. Open your mind to new experiences. But when your microbus pulls into the festival lot, don't drop acid and ditch your daughter at the child-care tipi. Sometimes your mind can be so open, your brain falls out.

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