Preparing for the Wrong Apocalypse

Once, not so long ago, I was a Mormon doomsday prepper. Yup. Me. I had a year’s supply of food in my bunker (buckets of wheat, oats, flour, sugar and bottles of oil, cans of food, dried food, bags of noodles and on and on. Water, too.). OK, it wasn’t a bunker. But it was a cold storage room specifically built under my porch for this kind of food storage. And I spent a month every year making my kids live off that food storage. So we could be prepared.

What were we preparing for? Well, for the apocalypse, of course. For a big apocalypse like a nuclear bomb, but also for smaller apocalypses, like a flood or a drought or the electricity going out or my husband being fired, and well, you know. Apocalypses. They happen. You can’t prepare for them. Except that of course you can. And we did. We didn’t have guns or generators. We weren’t that crazy kind of prepper. Just the regular kind. If our bishop ever asked us to go a week living on food storage, that was going to be easy-peasy for us. Because we practiced this all the time.

I was in the newspaper. A photo of crazy old me with all my buckets of wheat. I was proud of my resourcefulness. And my ability to keep making up new recipes no matter what was left. And sure, the kids were sometimes a little freaked out by me preparing for the end of the world, for the Zombie attack, for the moon falling out of the sky or whatever, but it was good for them. It helped them prepare for problems in the future. It taught them important life lessons. I swear, it did.

A few people tried to tell me that maybe this wasn’t the way I should be directing my energy. But I didn’t listen to them. I laughed at their foolishness. I was going to be prepared and they weren’t. When the moon fell out of the sky, they were going to wish they were me.

The thing is, I did face an apocalypse. Only it wasn’t one I’d prepared for. At all. The moon fell out of the sky, but only metaphorically. Because when my husband demanded I leave the house and filed for divorce without telling me, I wasn’t prepared. Not even a little bit. All the buckets of wheat did nothing for me. For one thing, they were in the house that I had to leave behind. For another, I didn’t have money. I didn’t have a credit card. I didn’t have a bank account in my own name.

I thought I was prepared for him to die. I had a PhD (now 15 years in old, and in a defunct degree like German Literature), but I was so sure I could find a job in academia. Until I tried during the middle of the pandemic when universities were firing, not hiring, and guess what? Never had a piece of paper been less useful in an apocalypse. I grew up in a world where everyone talked about nuclear bombs and Russia attacking and droughts and the government falling. All of those things, I could have handled. But the simplest apocalypse, the most likely one of al (50% of marriages end in divorce), and I had no idea how to handle it. There were not lessons in church about how to manage a divorce. No one from church encouraged women to be financially independent (quite the reverse, in fact). No one from church was interested in helping me in any way that I found.

So I faced the apocalypse alone. No, that isn’t true. There were solid friends and a couple of family members who helped me out. Mostly they were people who hadn’t planned for any big apocalypses, but who had walked people through these more normal kinds of end of the world scenarios. It was the end of the world and I sometimes am not entirely sure that I survived it. Have you ever read an apocalypse novel where the characters wonder all the time why they’re fighting so hard to stay alive? That was me. Is still me, a lot of the time.

The apocalypse came. The moon fell. I wasn’t prepared.

But there is an irony I will share with you. When I finally got possession of the house, it was stripped of all the shelves that had once held the cans of food. All of the cans were gone, as were the containers of emergency water, the backpacks full of the kids’ spare dry clothing and snacks if we had to bug out. But I was left ten cans of wheat. And a wheat grinder. In case of another apocalypse, I guess.