Finding Out You’re ‘Them’ and Not ‘Us’ : Aging: It’s time to face the unthinkable. You’re no longer hip, rebellious . . . young. It had to happen, but nobody said you had to like it.

It came to Janeen Quinn this summer when she hired two neighborhood boys to mow her yard.

A Hartford, Conn., mother of three preschoolers, Quinn, 36, was unaccustomed to the deference shown to her by the polite 14-year-olds. They called her “Mrs.” They shuffled, caps in hands, while she gave instructions about the hydrangea bush. When she cracked what she thought was a pretty good joke, they just looked at her.

Oh, Lord, she thought. They think I’m a mom.

Which she is, and is proud to be. But there was something empty about the whole thing, some kind of assigning of a role to Quinn that didn’t take into account that she might be more than a mother, more than a woman who needed her lawn mowed.

If it were a onetime thing, Quinn might have laughed it off.

But slowly during the past few years, Quinn notices more and more. She has entered--without her say-so--that zone of invisibility women 25 or so hit when they’re around young people. And this is entirely awful, because we, the generation that once was worshiped for our youth, are now being shunned by the people we once were.

“I’m a mother, and I’m happily married,” Quinn said. “But around younger people, I feel that trapped inside this body, there’s a 17-year-old dying to get out. Make that 12. No, 9.”

It’s why teen-agers don’t hear when their mothers talk. It’s why pinup girls are in their teens or, at the most, mid-20s. It’s because women over the age of 25 or so are supposed to be sexless wonders.

For that, we have that old whipping post, the media, to thank, said Cindy L. White, assistant professor of communications at Central Connecticut State University. By and large, older women are background noises or shrill harpies who plague the cool people--the youngsters.

“At this age, we begin to show up in the media as the ‘professional woman,’ or ‘disgruntled housewife,’ ” White said. “And that is a double-edged sword for women. If you’re younger, you’re portrayed as an object of desire. If you’re older, you’re sexless.”

Older men aren’t entirely without their own image problems. Television males are either unrealistically perfect super-heroes or doofusses from “Home Improvement.” Even the new, critically acclaimed “My So-Called Life” has a father who’s nearly devoid of soul and backbone. The show comes from the same people who brought us “thirtysomething,” during which in one episode a male character decried this very invisibility.

Preston Jackson of Newington, Conn., was picking up his family’s 15-year-old baby-sitter so he and his wife could go out, and she kept calling him “Mr. Jackson,” “which made me think she was talking to my dad.”

Wouldn’t she be impressed with Jackson’s various acts of vandalism performed as a willful teen? Wouldn’t she like to hear about the tattoo he had--and later had removed?

Probably not. If Quinn told the boys who mow her lawn that she once drove a ’72 Camaro with a spoiler, they’d think she was lying--or, sadder still, trying to recapture a long-gone youth.

“The point is: I had a life, a good, young life, and sometimes I feel like reminding younger people of that,” Quinn said.

We are probably--as a generation--going to take the expectation of ourselves as merely backdrops as gracefully as we’ve taken every other expectation. (Not very.)

“One of the ways the younger generation is encouraged to identify itself is in opposition to the older generation,” White said. “It’s not a new thing. In ‘Rebel Without a Cause,’ his parents are an absolute nightmare. Now you and I have stepped into that role, and we’re really (mad) about it. James Dean was ours, not theirs.”

Add that to a kazillion other portrayals of media moms, and you’ve set up an entire culture that thinks television (and movies, magazines, etc.) is how life is supposed to be rather than how life is.

“People don’t talk about mothers separate from their children,” White said. “This is something generations of women have confronted--silently, I think. We are a lot more vocal about it. We’re getting a pretty bad rap for it--discontented boomers, ‘When are they going to stop whining?’ ”

Probably when they figure it out, which could be their entire lifetime. Aren’t we sufficiently young-thinking? Don’t we read their Bret Easton Ellis? Don’t we wear street wear? Don’t we--and this is important--listen to Arrested Development? Our parents hated Creedence Clearwater Revival.

“The generation before the boomers had music for dating, which they outgrew and went into classical music,” said Richard A. Peterson, sociology professor at Vanderbilt University. “They grew out of childish things. The boomer generation took Chuck Berry literally with his ‘Roll Over Beethoven.’ They thought rock ‘n’ roll was significant music, good music.”

Peterson said some of the discomfort about the younger generation may be jealousy. We’re groovin’ on the gym floor, but we think the fun is probably in the mosh pit.

“I remember someone saying in ’74 or ‘75, ‘You know what’s wrong with the younger generation?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, no, Vietnam . . . ‘ And he said, ‘It’s that we’re not part of it.’ ”

Of course, we must eventually get used to the idea that we really are 30 or 40 or 50.

“I remember the most defining moment in my life as far as age goes was when I was 27 I got those little coupon books you get for a loan,” said White, who is in her mid-30s. “It was a graduate school loan, and I remember sitting in my little apartment, decorated in graduate school chic, looking at these coupons and laughing my head off. ‘I’ll be 37 by the time these are finished.’ That was unthinkable.”