When I was very little, my grandmother gave me a necklace. It was a jeweled cross necklace with one of those swoopy lines across it, nestled in a small pink box.
She told me it was real diamond and gold, and that it was my security, and to keep it secret.
I think I was 5 years old.
This wasn't entirely out of character for my grandmother. She once became extremely angry with my grandfather for throwing away a box of tampons he found in the bathroom.
What the hell did you need a box of tampons for, Sheila? You haven't had a period in ten years.
Well. She had emptied all the tampons out of the applicators and filled them with rolled-up $100 bills.
She always kept some kind of financial safety net in places she thought her spouse, her children, her friends, wouldn't be able to find them. Because she trusted fuckin no one.
She was also, historically, the most unreliable narrator. So I periodically had my doubts about the worth of the necklace.
Doubts which were proven when, a few years ago, when I was hard up for cash, I got that necklace appraised and it stuck to a magnet.
Imagine if I had been counting on that safety net she lied to me about.
I don't know if I'll ever inherit anything from my grandmother more valuable than that necklace. We don't speak, and my family is ... complicated.
But in the supposedly wholesome propaganda that was poured down my throat every day of my American life, I'm supposed to. I'm supposed to get my grandmother's wedding ring, her recipes, her blessing on my wedding day, a few pieces of fine jewelry.
Never mind that my particular grandmother has had three wedding rings, can't cook for shit, refused to come to my wedding, and lied to me about a cheap piece of costume jewelry.
Let me be clear: I'm not bitter because I feel entitled to generational wealth.
I'm thinking about this today as I'm glued to a live feed of everything in my home country—and frankly, most of the rest of the world—going to absolute dogshit.
I was told that the point of the generations before me was that I would inherit a better world.
Look at all we sacrificed. Look at the horrors we endured. The progress we made. And we did it for you, all for you, so you could live a better life than we had, with every opportunity before you, in the land of the free and home of the brave.
They gave us a glittering golden world in a little pink box and whispered in our ear that it was worth something. They told us, with fingers crossed behind their backs, to treat it like something precious, to rest a little easier because one day, when we had adult responsibilities, it would be there for us.
Fuck them and their shitty lies, a shining world that sticks to a magnet.
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