My Parents Told Me the World Was Ending, and They May Have Been Right
I Feel Fine
We were only thinking of moving to Plainfield because the world was ending.
Our gray Plymouth Voyager minivan was parked on the edge of a country road, filled with kids, heads popping up like prairie dogs to gaze on the windswept tundra where we might, soon, have a “homestead.” On the Plainfield prairie, we would build a house, get a gun, store up food, and wait out the apocalypse.
My dad’s hair was gray too, like the minivan. We stood outside, surveying; my mom’s belly swelled round with my sister, the sixth and last baby. The radio played 104.3, the “Oldies,” the only station we were allowed to listen to. My head covering, a bandanna folded into a triangle and tied around my waist length hair, was slipping off, and I tied it tighter against the wind.
People will burn the stores, and we’ll run out of food
When January 1, 2000 dawned, The Computers would fail, and society would collapse. I understood this, at first, to be because the machines would think it was 1900, and, realizing they hadn’t been invented yet, would collapse on the ground in embarrassed heaps.
Looking out at the Plainfield grass blowing in the wind, I imagined the rabbits I would raise. I learned in my homeschooling Abeka science textbook that the fur of rabbits that lived in snowy climates changed from gray to white, but this was merely an “adaptation,” not proof of evolution. I wanted my dwarf rabbits to be white and black.
Jim, a family friend, was one of the earliest computer programmers. He bought us our first IBM machine, its neon green cursor blinking like a suspicious eye. He started talking about the Y2K crash a year before the news outlets did.
My parents were determined. My mom and dad got their gun licenses and stacked the garage with buckets of wheat berries and sealed jugs of water. We had a wheat grinder, which churned the kernels into a dense, fragrant heap of brown flour.
But months passed, and the news outlets began reporting fixes. We didn’t move to Plainfield. My parents never did get a gun. Considering the matter, my dad said, “If hungry people came to our house, we’d shoot them?”
Anticlimactic, at first
Instead of building a homestead, we moved to a bigger house. My sister was born. I cut my hair, bought a pair of cargo khakis. The fog of armageddon slowly evaporated, ebbing away like a tide. I shouldered a backpack and walked through the doors of Libertyville High School, teaming with sleepy-eyed teenagers. The boy behind me in my world history class argued with the girl to his left about whether girls masturbate. “They DON’T,” she said with disgust. “Jason, you’re a fucking moron.”
By the time New Year’s Eve 2000 made its yawning appearance, I was at a youth group party, wearing a “2000” shirt with stars in place of the zeros, crushing hard on a boy with a floppy Dawson’s Creek haircut.
Dystopia settled into the dust of our family’s shared history, packed into hard earth by telling and retelling, laughing and head shaking and my mom’s guilt-ridden hand over her eyes; “Don’t talk about it,” she said. “We made a lot of mistakes.” The water bottles and wheat berries stayed, stacked in the garage, and we opened them one by one, eating excellent homemade bread and filling a pitcher in the refrigerator.
Until Chris Cuomo broadcast predictions of lines of people gasping for air, waiting for ventilators as the hospitals collapsed, I hadn’t thought much about doomsday. This time, I had two daughters looking up at me, all round faces and wide eyes like little gerbils.
My brothers and sister and I slowly felt ourselves pulled, magnetized, back to one another. We’d done this before. Was it real this time? We’d been here before. No need to overreact.
When is it time to freak out?
But this time it wasn’t us lurching into dystopia; it was everyone else. People wiped down their Barilla boxes with alcohol and wore goggles to Target. They sprayed their electric bills with Chlorox. My friend, yelling at me across the yard, her kids sealed shut in the car, said that her family would be isolated “for at least 18 months, until a vaccine comes.”
I called my brothers almost every day. “This is crazy, right? This is crazy.” I shook my head. No need to overreact.
When the George Floyd protests erupted, I watched people I’d known for years tip drunkenly into hysteria. I bought a copy of White Fragility, and when I mentioned it to a friend, she spit flames: “How would you feel if THEY marched down your street and set YOUR house on fire?” Another friend told me proudly that her six year old found their (new) loaded gun on the table, (bought to fend off rioters) and “She knew not to touch it.”
I called my brothers every day. “This is crazy,” we said. “This is crazy.”
In the second COVID winter, I determined that we’d only socialize outside, layered in proper winter gear, warmed by a firepit and a mask. My parents raised their eyebrows.
“You think I’m overreacting,” I said to them.
My mom shook her head. “You do whatever you think is best.”
School dipped in and out of Zoom. My kids wore masks, took them off, put them on again. Me and my friend Kara formed a two person CDC. We checked the state hospitalization utilization, the case counts, the percent positivity. I contact-traced and risk-assessed until I was dizzy.
For my girls, I scattered lights on the snow, filled squirt bottles with food coloring to paint pictures on its frozen surface, hung snowflakes from the ceilings, bought fidget spinners, built forts in the woods.
On January 6th 2021, I watched the video of Ashli Babbit being wheeled on a stretcher out of the capital, head flopped to the side, eyes wide, oxygen mask covering her mouth, blood pouring from her chest, while men in animal horns and painted faces danced like some grotesque Lord of the Flies homage.
I had to close the video when my seven year old burst into tears at her iPad, propped up carefully at a makeshift desk in the living room. “Mom, she’s going too fast,” she wailed, her teacher blurry on the Zoom window.
How will we know when the world is ending? I thought.
When Omicron hurricaned into us, and every text was a status report from COVID-plagued friends and family, I told my husband, “I feel like I’m sleeping with my boots on.”
He looked at me without expression. “Where would you go?”
I stared. Plainfield?
I remembered the buckets of wheat berries, stacked from floor to ceiling in the garage, and I understood.
On the phone, as I vomited recent COVID data, drunk with doomscrolling, my brother remarked, “It’s a good thing you really haven’t gotten into climate change science. I think you’d lose your mind.”
I just shrugged and said, “I guess the world’s been ending for a long time.”
But then I had to hang up. I had deadlines; he had a client call. As long as we were still here; might as well get something done.
