A couple of months into the pandemic, I bought a cheap plastic box and started shoving Covid-related odds and ends inside. (It’s too ugly and chaotic to call a “memory box.”) It holds the slapdash masks I sewed out of pillowcases in those first weeks, some public health flyers, and the “I Got Vaccinated!” stickers from my five-year-old’s trip to the American Museum of Natural History for her shots. That box is my own little attempt to answer a question explored on Scary Mommy by Emily Mendenhall, a medical anthropologist and professor at Georgetown University: What are we going to tell our grandkids about this? How will the last two years shape us for the rest of our lives?
She recalls how the Blitz stayed with her grandmother for the rest of her life: “My Nana was always jumpy. She told countless stories about coming of age in London, watching for bombs near her home in Parliament Fields during World War II. Her mother panicked when she and her twin sister missed curfew.” I remember my dad telling me how his mother refused to let anybody waste food, because she’d lived through the Great Depression — you had enough for leftovers, or you cleaned your plate. What will start the convo for you and your grandkids? A stray magazine cover from April 2020? A crumpled mask in the pocket of a hand-me-down jacket? Maybe it’ll be one of those school projects they don’t tell you about until way too late.
“We’ll not only talk about these divided states of America for several decades, but I suspect we’ll also feel the mistrust of this time for generations,” Mendenhall suggests. Maybe by the time I’ve got grandkids, I’ll finally be ready to unpack everything I shoved into that box.
– Kelly Faircloth, Executive Editor |
