Checking the News

Shortly after I moved to New York my mother and her middle sister sold my childhood home in Chicago and moved to a small town in Indiana. Her youngest sister had just retired there with her husband and their two adult children moved to the same town shortly after. 

It was fine at first. We were in Chicago for a weekend around her birthday and drove down to have lunch. My mother came to New York for her granddaughters birth and then came back for a couple weeks after she was home from the hospital. Totally normal stuff.

She had even bought a ticket to come visit for Joni’s first birthday but covid happened and all travel plans were canceled. 

Fast forward to present day. Things are still dangerous but there are vaccines available for those that want them. 

She does not. 

Nor does anyone she is in frequent contact with. Throw into the mix an elementary school age child who is around every afternoon after going to in-person school and riding a school bus and others of adult age who for no reason other than classic small town dumbfuckery do not want to be vaccinated and I’m pretty sure it will be years before I see my mother again and years before she sees HER ONLY GRANDCHILD again. 

I practically begged her to get the vaccine and answered all of her misinformed notions but she is stuck on what she has heard (from sketchy sources) and claims she is being careful. 

I am hurt and disappointed and I am hurt for Joni. 

For a while I would try to have an idea what was going on in the town where she lives. Try to keep up on the covid numbers and how things were being handled but seeing the stories and how they were written and repeatedly making the mistake of reading the comments from the locals has proven too much for my own mental and emotional well being. Many of the comments are ignorant and uninformed and reinforce my fear that it will be years (if ever) before I see my mother again. 

So in an act of self-care and self-preservation I will no longer be checking the news for the backwards town where she lives. It won’t change anything if I know what’s going on there because she is going to make and have to live with the decisions she essentially allows to be made for her. 

It’s a strange and sad feeling to be an only child from a single parent family and still not be the priority and to feel like you and your feelings don’t matter. It’s a shitty feeling but one I’ve come to live with because it’s not a new feeling and one that I have come to terms with and nothing is going to change. 

I hope Joni gets to see her grandma again before she graduates kindergarten in a few years but right now it’s a crapshoot as to if that will happen. 

Aritfacts Lost and Found

Over a year after leaving New York I still find little artifacts from what now feels like another life completely foreign to the present day. The other night I was loading the dishwasher and grabbed a detergent pod from its package and noticed the price tag said Downtown Natural Market, the local-owned store we went to in Jackson Heights. 

Immediately I thought back to when we discovered it and were so happy that there was a good, non-chain, grocery store that had a good selection of organic food so close to our apartment. We were in there constantly - usually because I wanted to make a dish and needed just one ingredient. We’d go in with Joni and with the best intentions of getting just that one ingredient and an hour and $75 later we were headed home. 

I remember they had the chemical-free and natural products that we wanted - including the dishwasher pods. Fifteen months after we left Queens I used the last one. If I had been thinking I would have kept the price tag to stick in my notebook. A small artifact from a different time. A good time. 

We had a great apartment in a great building and were loving being new parents to the best Tiny Human ever! 

Everything has changed in the last 15 to 18 months. We went from an apartment in a pre-war building in New York to a mid-century 3 bedroom house with a yard just outside Detroit. 

We still have the greatest Tiny Human ever and we still have a dishwasher and I just got more pods. I don’t know when I’ll discover these next artifact from the Before Times but I’m sure there will be another since we still have a few boxes to unpack. 

Author’s note

I posted something written in a similar manner a while ago. This isn’t super polished or edited or workshopped and isn’t meant to be. I usually end up recording these memories in the notes app on my phone as I’m trying to fall asleep so I get the main points down and then fill in the rest. There’s something cathartic about writing about this time in this way. In March and April of 2020 everything was happening so fast we didn’t have time to process what was happening. We only had time to react and implement what would keep us all as safe as possible. We’re all still safe and happy and healthy so we must have done something right. 

Another reason writing these memories has taken me so long to post is that it’s taken this long to process what happened. We look back with the benefit of hindsight and can see how a couple different decisions or choices at any point could have resulted in a vastly different story and not necessarily a happier one. We’re happy and healthy and believe that we’re where we belong.