A few weeks ago, I got a message from my teenage daughter. “Mom, my friend just texted me about monkeypox. Is it going to be okay this time?” I looked at that text and wondered how to answer. It was filled with anxiety, and the fantasy that, as a parent, I had some magical power that I, in fact, do not. Would it be okay this time? The last time I sort of lied to my kids and told them it would be okay, we turned out to be in a pandemic that killed more than a million people and still shows no sign of stopping. I thought about her use of the phrase “this time.” Those words knitted together was one of those tells, those hints that maybe the pandemic had changed her. Maybe the fear of illness and the years of Zoom schooling had changed the way she sees the world.
People have started trying to quantify the effect the pandemic has had on us and our children—the learning loss, the sadness, the suicides, the drinking, the shootings, the divorces—but we can’t yet know the extent of it. How did all those empty streets change me? Did my nights of not sleeping and staring out the window, watching ambulances collect people who couldn’t breathe, permanently alter my psyche? And we still don’t know what we’ll be like post-pandemic, largely because we are very much still in the pandemic.
I had a grandfather who lived through the 1918 flu. He was forever changed by the experience of being “lucky.” He was obsessed with his health, took handfuls of vitamins every day. He was convinced he’d catch something on the bus or the subway, so he walked everywhere. I remember once being on the school bus and seeing him power-walking, arms pumping like a madman, through Central Park. He was in his 90s then, in a frantic race against death. Eventually, death caught up with him.
Often when I’m at dinner with other parents, we discuss how the pandemic has affected our teens, how it’s shaped their little universes. Most of us think something in them has shifted, but few of us can put our finger on exactly what. But even beyond our kids’ personal peccadillos, America feels different. America feels scary in a way it never has to me, and I’m not alone. In January 2022, 62% of Americans said that they were fearful about the state of our country. The Times explained that “criminologists studying the rise in the murder rate point to the effects the pandemic has had on everything from mental health to policing.” Following the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago last week, a joint statement with the Department of Homeland Security warned of the “potential for domestic violent extremists to carry out attacks” in response to the search. (Scary, but not very surprising.) In reality, shootings are down four percent since last year, but to a lot of people America still feels unsettled, on edge. In a few days, we’re dropping our oldest kid at college. Besides having the normal anxiety, I have this worry about the weirdness I’m sending him off into; this strange new world filled with raging viruses and a sense that things just aren’t right.
For all the latest fasion News Click Here
