My family was at a rooftop restaurant in St. Augustine, Florida. The scene was idyllic, moonrise over the Atlantic and terns swooping for baitfish. We were salt-soaked and satisfied from a day of play; our meals arrived and we tucked in — except my husband.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Nothing,” he said, plucking feta crumbles from his salad like a surgeon removing buckshot.

“Oh, maybe he didn’t hear you?” I said, looking for our server. “No big deal,” he wrinkled his nose, making a pile on his side plate.

Sidebar: Being married to a Nordic skier, you learn every inconvenience is an invitation to soldier on. Annoyances like holding your breath while extracting feta cheese from your salad with a butter knife don’t register when you ski uphill for fun. At this rate, Operation Stink Sock Cheese would conclude at midnight.

“I’ll find our server,” I said.

“No!” both my children said. I was startled.

My oldest son mumbled, “Please, don’t be a Karen.” His brother nodded.

At the time, ‘Don’t be a Karen’ was just a meme about overbearing women. However, I never met a Karen I didn’t like: Karen Johns, Karen Marriott, Karen Baker, Karen G Kan, Karen Miemis, Karen Brelesky, Karen Minehan, Karen Delaney, Karen Morris, even Karen Carpenter. The Karens I know are kind, grounded and admirable; they are musicians, philanthropists, teachers, lawyers, mothers, doctors, artists and elite athletes. So my son’s directive first translated to “Don’t be awesome!”

I explained this, he replied. “No, it means don’t be that entitled know-it-all middle-aged soccer mom, who demands to speak to the manager and treats the help like dirt.”

Middle-aged? Moi? Hadn’t I bored them with hundreds of toiling-for-tips stories over the years? Did I not relay that I cleaned barns for $1.50 an hour? Did they miss that I was ‘the help?’ “How can you think I am a ‘Karen?'” I asked. They studied their plates.

I started to defend myself, and then stopped. There was no sense trying to penetrate the tungsten teenage brain. I considered the potential kernel of truth. From their perspective, anyone who asked for her discount or the feta on the side was part of the Karen meme. Was there a happy space between self-advocating and conflict-avoidant?

The Silent Generation 2.0

Their aversion to conflict reminds me of a modern kind of silence–not out of respect, but disengagement.

To avoid interaction, it’s a generation that eats food they didn’t order, pays full price for on-sale items and texts for five minutes to retrieve information relayed in a 30-second conversation.

Of course, “Karen” didn’t become a cultural slur over lukewarm soup. Things escalated in 2020, several years after our vacation, when a woman in Central Park called the police on a Black birdwatcher who asked her to leash her dog. The video went viral, and suddenly “Karen” wasn’t just a punchline — it was a symbol of weaponized entitlement and racial bias. The meme shifted from customer service complaints to commentary on race, power and privilege.

That’s where the self-examination kicks in — which we’re less eager to post about. Because it’s not enough to point at that Karen over there and breathe a sigh of relief. The harder question is: where does a bit of that behavior live in me? The urge to control, to assume I know best, to speak over someone?

Then, layered on top of that, is a more familiar pressure — the kind that tells women to take up less space, to soften their voices, to round their edges to be more acceptable, yet still carry more weight. But self-reflection isn’t about shrinking. It’s about standing in your truth and owning that your behavior might unintentionally hurt others. The invitation is learning to spot both Karens in the meme in our own reflection.

The server cleared our plates as the moon rose above our table. He noticed the pile of feta. “Oh dude, no feta — I forgot.” A few minutes later, he returned with a giant chocolate lava cake and four spoons. “It’s on the house. My bad about the salad.”

I scooped gooey cake, accepting that maybe I had a tiny bit of Karen in me — but not that kind of Karen.

Then I remembered Karen Johns, my confirmation sponsor. I took her name with an Italian twist — Carina — back when I dreamed of living in Italy someday.

So yes, I’m a Karen after all — just not the one you meme about.