Pre-Vaccine Parental Appreciation

Jenée Desmond-Harris
3 min readFeb 12, 2021

I hope my mom and dad will get the shot soon. But I don’t want to lose this feeling.

Photo by Sam Moqadam on Unsplash

My parents, who are in their 70s, are each on about four different waiting lists for the Covid vaccine. Despite their best efforts, they don’t have appointments yet. When they finally get them, I’ll be so relieved. But I hope I’m not TOO relieved. I hope I don’t lose the overwhelming sense of pandemic-inspired gratitude that they’re alive and okay.

Like all parents — really, all people — they each have their quirks. And like all people who have parents, I sometimes get annoyed.

My dad could fill in for an MSNBC pundit any night, and offers several segments worth of commentary each time we talk. But with no commercials, no breaks, no questions, and sometimes, it seems, no pauses to breathe. Last week I edited an entire piece while he recapped all of Donald Trump’s bad acts, from five years ago through the day he was kicked off of Twitter.

My mom’s big thing is that she finds a way to be anxious about my well-being no matter what is going on in my life, in a way that borders on ridiculous. (“Oh my God, did you just yawn? Are you driving? I’m worried you’re going to have an accident.” “Oh no, you did yoga. I’m worried you’re going to overstretch.”) Recently she got so stressed about the crimes reported on the local news that she…

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Jenée Desmond-Harris

Writer & editor currently at @nytopinion. Before this: @jskstanford @voxdotcom, @theroot, @harvard_law, @howardu