Today, the last day of my gratitude challenge, I posted 20 things I want to remember about 2020. The deep sacrifices made to save lives. The ways people spoke out about injustice. And the sometimes stunning silver linings.
- How I skimmed the articles about COVID-19 in January, thinking it wouldn’t affect me.
- How much health care workers sacrificed. How incredibly hard their lives had become.
- How many people lost their jobs.
- How much everyone sacrificed to keep each other alive.
- How resilient everyone was. How people worked so hard to find alternatives.
- How many people could not hug their loved ones goodbye.
- How many of the parents I work with, who were the newest to this country, worked the hardest.
- How one mom, in particular, would call me for help each day and how she had no interest when I told her that her daughter didn’t need to do every assignment.
- Watching a video with that mom of caterpillars turning into butterflies. How her breath was taken away. How parents learned alongside their kids this year.
- How when Distance Learning was less structured last spring, my own kids would have recess every day together for an hour. How they hadn’t played together that much in years.
- How before 2020, my high school friends and I were so busy carting our kids to activities that we hadn’t talked on the phone in years. But we met on zoom for hours each month.
- How jobs that had previously gone unappreciated became essential. The huge sign hung up in the window of my neighborhood grocery store, thanking the workers.
- How my gym’s zoom classes got better and better. How we worked out in the parking lot under the shade of a huge tree last summer.
- How resilient I realized I was. How I went from letting kids use chrome books a couple of times a week to teaching online and, somehow, figured it out.
- How the meditation retreat I go to for a week every year was online this year. How my daughter joined me, getting up early and sitting until late at night, chanting ancient chants.
- How we wore our masks, cut peonies from our garden, and went to George Floyd’s memorial site. How we felt the grief and the determination.
- How I joined a silent march led by Clergy of Color and marched past the members of the National guard. Dressed in camouflage with rifles strapped to their backs. Helicopters looming overhead.
- How much money and time people gave to rebuild what had burned down, to clean up the rubble, to support families.
- How President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris won the election. How I cried as Kamala spoke beautiful, humane words in her white suit.
- How nurses and doctors I know posted pictures of themselves getting the vaccine in December. Thanking the scientists at Pfizer.
