Reflections on a childhood November 7, 2020

This year, COVID has shattered lives for people all across the planet.  I was thinking the other day about the particular long-term repercussions for our children, who can no longer play with friends or participate in classroom learning.  Some of these children will have lost parents, aunts and uncles, or beloved grandparents to the disease.  Some will be victims of physical, psychological, or sexual abuse at the hands of their family members.  For many, whose parents have lost their jobs and source of income, there may be food insecurity and the threat of homelessness.  Surely most children have also internalized the fear of either contracting or spreading the disease, with constant mask-wearing and incessant hand-washing.  

This pandemic will be one of the defining features of their childhood, a time when the world stopped functioning, when stress soared, when existence seemed fragile.  And what of the murder of young black men and women at the hands of police?  Or the terror wrought by armed vigilantes and white supremacists, egged on by presidential provocation and rhetoric?  Or the threat of evacuation due to fires or hurricanes? Or even the threat to the rule of law and democracy in our country?  Surely our children sense that, too.

These ruminations led me to reflect on my own childhood and how incredibly safe it felt in comparison.  Yes, we boomers grew up with a lot of bad stuff: the continual threat of a nuclear war, the Cuban missile crisis, assassinations of three beloved leaders, and the Vietnam War, not to mention racial violence.  As kids, we saw all this on the nightly news, with Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley on a black-and-white TV.

But the truth is that my own childhood - as a white girl growing up in a middle class family in a small industrial town in southeastern Pennsylvania  - was incredibly stable.  I lived in the same house during my entire childhood, and I went to the same neighborhood schools from kindergarten through 12th grade.  My parents were kind to each other and never spoke harshly to us kids.  They never abused drugs or alcohol. They budgeted and saved their money.  My father had a good job as a structural engineer with Bethlehem Steel Corporation; my mother ran the household.  To my knowledge they never cheated on each other, and they stayed together for five decades until my mother passed away. 

I’m not saying it was a perfect existence.  It was a bit boring, one-dimensional, and far too conservative.  I always knew I wanted to fledge.

But last week I came to appreciate how very safe and secure I felt in my home with my family, in my particular neighborhood, in the United States, at that moment in time.  I am so very grateful for this childhood.  For me, on reflection, that stability is the foundation for all I have become.  Would that every child throughout the world could have the same.