Edwina Bartholomew: I’m part of the 9/11 Generation, now raising a coronavirus Generation baby
I became part of what is now known as the “9/11 Generation” growing up, but now we are raising Generation C — COVID Kids — and it will change them in a way we can’t imagine.
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Th ere is so much to remember about your final year of school.
All the study, yes, but mostly the other extra stuff. The formals, the friendships, the rites of passage that mark the end of one era and the beginning of another.
My final year of school was memorable for another reason. It was 2001, nearly 20 years ago now. In September, as we looked towards our Year 12 exams and freedom from uniforms, books and timetables, the world suddenly shifted.
On one day, the 11th of September, all that we knew was no longer quite right any more – we felt a little less safe, a little unsure. Two planes hit the World Trade Center in New York and, halfway around the world, 1000 girls sat stony faced in a school hall, trying to work out what it all meant for them. We became part of what is now known as the “9/11 Generation” – a group of kids growing up in a world where terror and the wars that followed changed our perspective.
Now, we’re going through it all over again. They call them Generation C, Covid Kids – children who will be too young to remember a pre-pandemic world.
My daughter was born just before Christmas. We had two blissful months where people dropped around lasagnes and quiches, and more lasagne.
Grandparents swooped in to take charge while I had a shower and a sleep. We floated through those first few months in our baby bubble, long before “bubble” was a word reserved for AFL players.
We were lucky. We had that time. So many new parents did not. So many more, particularly in Victoria, will not.
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While today there will be ceremonies and services to mark the anniversary of 9/11, future generations won’t recognise this seismic shift, the start of this pandemic, in the same way.
Instead, the changes for Generation C – from new babies to tyrant toddlers trapped inside four walls, from lonely primary school kids to troubled teenagers – will be marked in other ways.
How? We are still not sure. We rarely know how milestone events transform a generation until long after the fact.
Were the kids born in the Great Depression frugal for life? What about the children who lived through World War I and II? Were they scarred by the experience or stronger for it?
I hope that when my daughter looks back, in 20 years – as I’m doing now – it’s all a distant memory. I hope we are closer for the extra hours we have spent together as a family. I hope FaceTime soon turns to real time for grandparents separated from their grandchildren.
I hope all those missed milestones will be replaced with new memories – different, socially distanced but just as valuable.