Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There are moments when I sit down and do the math on my family history and my brain just kind of short-circuits for a minute. This year would have been my grandmother’s 100th birthday. One hundred years. A whole century. She was born in 1926, which sounds less like a birth year and more like the answer to a trivia question about silent movies and bread lines.

And I know I can’t be the only person who has looked backward at the chronology of their grandparents’ lives through the lens of modern social norms and thought, “Wait… hold on… that math feels illegal now.”

My grandfather was born in 1913. My grandmother in 1926. Their first child, my uncle, was born in 1943. My father came along in 1945. Then my aunt in 1956. If you line all those dates up against today’s standards, people start reaching for calculators, therapy, and maybe a mandatory reporting hotline.

By modern standards, only one of those births would have even remotely passed without somebody side-eyeing the situation. Today we hear phrases like “age gap discourse,” “power imbalance,” and “call the police.” Back then, people were just out there surviving the Great Depression, fighting world wars, and apparently getting married at ages that would make current social media implode in real time.

It’s wild how much social norms can change in a hundred years.

And the thing is, I’m not even saying that change is bad. A lot of it is probably good. Society evolved. We learned things. We became more protective of young people. We started questioning dynamics that previous generations accepted without blinking an eye. That’s progress.

But it’s still difficult to reconcile emotionally because these aren’t abstract historical figures in a textbook. These are my grandparents. These are people I knew. People who loved me. People who existed in a completely different social framework than the one we live in now.

When I think about my grandmother turning 100 this year, I don’t first think about controversy or morality or sociology. I think about the smell of old perfume and coffee. I think about those impossibly tough old women who survived everything. Wars. Rationing. Economic collapse. Raising kids without modern medicine, modern conveniences, or Google telling them whether a fever meant “drink water” or “prepare your will.”

That generation operated under an entirely different understanding of adulthood and responsibility. By the time many of them were teenagers, they were already working jobs, running households, or helping raise siblings. Childhood itself looked different. Life expectancy looked different. Expectations looked different.

And honestly, trying to overlay 2026 morality onto 1926 realities is like trying to install modern airbags into a horse-drawn carriage. Technically, you can discuss it, but the entire framework underneath it was built for a completely different world.

That’s the strange thing about family history. The farther back you look, the more you realize human beings didn’t suddenly become complicated. We just changed the rules around them. Every generation thinks their norms are permanent right up until the next generation comes along and decides half of it was insane.

Which makes me wonder what people 100 years from now will look back on us for.

Because if history teaches anything, it’s that someday our great-grandkids are probably going to stare at our timelines, our relationships, our politics, our beauty standards, our technology addictions, and say, “Wait… you people thought THAT was normal?”

And honestly, they probably won’t be wrong.