What Your Favorite ’90s Band Says About the Kind of Bored Suburban Mom You Are Today
Veruca Salt: Like Captain Ahab, you are defined by an all-absorbing monomaniacal obsession: to find comfortable shoes that aren’t hideous.
Pavement: You spent your twenties watching movies off the Criterion Collection to impress boys, and it actually worked, so now you’re stuck with plotless black-and-white subtitled movies forever.
Smashing Pumpkins: You’ve disowned family members because they weren’t supportive enough of your career (i.e., they stopped buying the rash-inducing makeup and/or piss-scented essential oils from your MLM company).
Nirvana: You could never be one of those stereotypical soccer moms. (Your kids play lacrosse.)
Nine Inch Nails: You’re learning to pretend that gardening is an adequate replacement for the sexual adventures of your youth.
Eve 6: You go to PTA meetings just so you can whisper “critical race theory” into the microphone and then slip out the back door amid the pandemonium.
Jane’s Addiction: You suddenly realize you’ve saved a little money. You can’t decide if you should use it to fix your roof, your vision, your garage door, your feet, your skin, your wet basement, your dry vagina, your broken sidewalk, or your broken mental health. Before you choose, the dentist informs you that your kids need braces.
The Cardigans: In your quest to find comfortable shoes that aren’t hideous, you’ve convinced yourself that, with the right attitude, flats can be sexy. Unfortunately, your attitude is “desperately trying to make flats sexy.”
Neutral Milk Hotel: You vowed you’d never get a minivan. You got an SUV with a third row.
Mazzy Star: You have not yet admitted to yourself that succulents and macrame wall hangings are your generation’s Live Laugh Love decor.
Rage Against the Machine: You use the term “journey” to describe your training for a charity 5K, changes to your skincare routine, your evolving relationship with gluten, the fact that you occasionally take a yoga class, and your secretly failing marriage.
The Cranberries: Because you procrastinated so long on covering your grays, and now people think you’ve chosen to age gracefully, you’ve become a minor feminist icon.
Bikini Kill: You talk about your produce choices way too much, and now your friends’ secret nickname for you is “manic organic dream girl.”
Everclear: After hearing about the resurgence of lower back tattoos, you started an organization to educate young women on the dangers of the Tramp Stamp.
4 Non Blondes: You knit, and you’ve already given everyone you know a scarf. Time to retreat into decades of obscurity until people start having grandkids so you can make them baby blankets and regain some semblance of a purpose in life.
Pearl Jam: You’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on your town’s Facebook page complaining about how your favorite restaurant raised its credit card fees.
Blur: Just try to talk to you about TV without you explaining that the British Office was better than the American Office.
Garbage: You tell yourself you’re microdosing shrooms for creativity and productivity benefits, but in reality it’s the only way you can deal with the other moms at the playground.
Cake: Your entire identity is built around being Karen who is not a Karen.
Ben Folds Five: You know that no amount of glitter, hot glue, and parchment paper will fill the gaping pit of loneliness that is your middle-aged existence, but you’ll be damned if you aren’t going to at least try to craft your way out of this crippling depression.
No Doubt: You’ve finally given up on the quest to find comfortable, non-hideous shoes, but you still pretend your Birkenstocks are part of the “ironically ugly shoes” fashion trend.
Hansen: You’ve lost multiple friends because you say “don’t yuck my yum” too often.
Porno for Pyros: In a misguided attempt to bond, you showed your daughter a YouTube video of yourself flashing Perry Farrell at the original Lollapalooza. (“Look, honey, we have the same boobs!”)
Sixpence None the Richer: You love the Royal Family more than your own.
Hole: You don’t understand what the Bad Art Friend did wrong.
Harvey Danger: You can’t get through a single conversation without mentioning your junior year abroad in Paris.
Stone Temple Pilots: You put a HATE HAS NO HOME HERE sign in your front yard, and it’s not a lie, because technically hate is not the same thing as smoldering resentment, all-consuming envy, quiet hostility, and vindictive plotting to use subterfuge, fraud, or witchcraft to destroy the life of that stuck-up bitch in the charming Cape Cod across the street.
Letters to Cleo: You’re living a life less ordinary. (You have one kid or three kids instead of two kids.)
Dave Matthews Band: Your regular family is about to leave you because you won’t shut the fuck up about your Cross Fit family.
Radiohead: Every minor challenge of your life has been a warmup for this ongoing crisis: going through perimenopause while your kid is going through puberty.
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What Your Favorite ’90s Rock Band Says About the Type of Bored Suburban Dad You Are Today