You really ought to check on your Gen X friends.
It is difficult to articulate what this middle is like right now for us. We are caring for the parents above us, watching this pandemic ravage their mental health as they stay isolated inside, but simultaneously worried that if we try to hug them or comfort them or encourage them to leave they will catch a deadly disease. At the same time we are trying to shepherd our kids through this thing too, somehow ensuring that they don't grow up to be permanently scarred and weird because all they know are screens and adult conversations and that is not a childhood. We are doing all of this while we hold the line on businesses and jobs and careers. We are twenty years in. We are the ones with enough institutional knowledge to keep the office or that business afloat right now. We are 15 years into a marriage and at best, two away from needing a new roof. We are holding ALL of it up.
But watching everything unfold yesterday just about nearly broke us. Throughout all of our adult lives we have been handed so much horse crap, like the Bush v. Gore decision, or even the Iraq war, and each time we were told to trust the system, to respect the rules. Pay your student loans. Show up for work on time. So to watch a bunch of boomers and millennials in cosplay light that on fire from our remote desks while we homeschool our kids, make dinner, and do a socially distant welfare check on mom and dad, was just maybe too much to bear. There is a great line in the movie Singles: “Somewhere around 25, bizarre becomes immature.” Like are you kidding me with this? Did this asshole really just break into the capital dressed like a fucking red white and blue elk and get away with it? I can’t. Where are the consequences? Where? Honestly Generation X has no time or patience to find out.
All this is to say, we won’t ask for it. Well, I guess I am. We’re trying to hold the line here as best we can on literally everyone and everything. But the one thing we are known for is being both completely judgmental of while simultaneously swallowing down everyone else’s crap and right now we don’t even have the time or strength to even reflect ironically on how fucking crappy all of you all are. Can you just keep democracy running? Would that maybe be too much to ask of the rest of you right now?
Anyhow maybe just check on us okay.
Hi Jenn - Gen X'er here, and I hear and agree with this. I just returned from visiting my dad 2800 miles across the country because, although I'm well aware there's a pandemic raging, I haven't seen my dad in 18 months and at almost 76, he is not in great health, nor does he have a fantastic support system where he is that would at least set my mind at ease a little. So I took the chance of going to see him, and I'll fight anyone in my life who has a problem with that.
ReplyDeleteSo now I'm sitting here in quarantine, WFH (since March), trying to keep my daughter's hybrid junior high schedule straight on the remote/in-person days, wondering how I ended up being the strongest person I know these days. I think it must be because I had to be. I'm trying to simultaneously handle my mental health, get enough sun and exercise when it's January in Upstate NY, worrying if my daughter has enough interaction, thinking about all we've collectively missed this year (her first junior high dance! holiday concerts!), and trying to stay informed on current events without losing my mind in the process.
In a way, I feel that these circumstances that have become THE YEAR OF COVID have actually been a gift in disguise. My sister, also my best friend, told me the other night that I have become kinder in the last year. In turn, I told her that I've seen her grow up (she is a very young 40). The tough circumstances of this last year have brought out the best in some people, and unfortunately little change in others. I simply don't feel like the same person I was 10 months ago, and I'm profoundly grateful for that. When the universe seems to want to push me to my boundaries, I feel like it knows I still have room to grow.