The concept of “2020” has become our national foil – an easy punchline and a quick way to shrug off our misfortunes.
But when used this way, “2020” is also a shorthand for the hope that things will get better soon (though I fully expect to see 2021 “hold my beer” memes in the very near future).
The events of this year will undoubtedly shape my kids’ development for years. My 23-months-old daughter hit huge milestones with very limited social interactions and my son was conceived in May, carried through the bulk of the year, and is due to be born soon in a hospital that’ll likely be under siege from a post-holiday coronavirus surge.
His class will likely be labeled and analyzed as “quarantine babies” for their entire lives.
As the year draws to a close I’m thinking a lot about what I’ll tell my kids when they ask about 2020 – not wanting their earliest moments to be a punchline or some long sustained tragedy they were lucky to escape.
With the full understanding that history can’t be written from the present and that future events may overshadow the way I see it now (i.e. it turned out to be “democracy’s dying gasp,” or the virus was just an alien species’ tactic for softening us up prior to invasion), I’m starting to frame my own understanding of a year that saw our country handle a global pandemic, slog through a disgustingly bitter election, have it’s economy turned upside down, and have systemic racism dragged into the open for everyone to see.
I view 2020 as a national stress test that revealed troubling, though not yet fatal, results. 2020 has made our country acutely aware of its weaknesses and vulnerabilities; only we can decide whether to address them or to sidle back up to the all-you-can-eat buffet.
Unfortunately, knowing the right thing to do isn’t the same as doing the right thing.
I learned this watching Mom.
Mom was a biologist who trusted science as much as anyone I’ve ever known yet she smoked her way through pancreatic cancer and back again to a tragically early grave.
Mom wasn’t stupid or self-centered; she was human – just like all of us.
When I hear 2020’s heart-wrenching stories of people who didn’t take covid seriously dying alone on ventilators with last words like “I thought it was a hoax,” I can’t help but think of Mom and how a month from now (God-willing) she will have twice the number of grandchildren that she never met as the two she briefly knew and loved so well.
Regrets don’t die with death.
If you’re expecting heartache to disappear with the year 2020, you’re sorely mistaken. Heartache is essential to the human condition.
When my kids ask what it was like to live in 2020, I won’t gloss over the heartaches like the strains it put on family relationships.
Love isn’t shown when people meet our highest expectations, it’s shown when they fail; I want my kids to know that.
Though 2020’s challenges have divided us in many ways, they have not defined us.
What defines us this year isn’t HOW we adapted, but rather THAT we adapted trying our best to protect our families and our communities.
I’ll tell my kids how though we weren’t at our best in 2020, we proved resilient.
It’s frustrating that things have gotten so out of hand since Thanksgiving. With the end in sight, our country collectively became that one coworker who’s clearly sick in the company meeting but says, “it’s just allergies,” so he can use his PTO next week to go tubing down a river when his friends are in town.
I understand why they’re doing it but it doesn’t make me any less angry to hear them sniffling through the meeting without any consideration for the other people around the table.
Mainly though, I’ll tell my kids about finding calm amid chaos (and not just from my Zoom yoga class). I’ll tell them about when the first lockdown started and everyone hunkered down to make do with the things we have and with the people who we love.
I’m sure they’ll be fascinated by the toilet paper and the masks but I hope their takeaways are the persistence and the laughs. I hope my retelling gives justice to the beautiful things that happened each and every day in spite of the hard times.
Here’s to the end of 2020 with gratitude for the tough lessons it’s imparted and continued hope for better times ahead.
If you enjoy my humor writing, please subscribe below.
If you want to syndicate this column, you may contact me here to discuss the details.
You may notice that I’ve disabled commenting on this post. I’d love to hear your thoughts by email at [email protected].