How is Your Pandemic Going?

A lot has happened in the last ______. Feel free to fill that blank with whichever unit of time you would like. Hour, day, week, month, year. I mean - that’s part of the problem right? All the units of time are, apparently, interchangeable. I’ve had some days that seemed like years and a month that zipped by in what felt like just a matter of days. Time is now a hall of carnival mirrors and moving through each day/week/month is disorienting. 

I could say, “a lot has happened in the last pandemic.” My first pandemic, that is. By far my best pandemic. And my worst. This is how I answer the question that I started asking last spring and that Julia continues to ask semi-regularly, “How is your pandemic going?” It is my best and my worst pandemic, I tell her. Oh how I wish it could actually be my last. And be my children’s last pandemic.

A lot has happened in the last year, specifically. March 13, 2020 was the last day Julia and Clara were in their classrooms at school. (March 12, 2020 was the last day I was at work.) Apart from four weeks in July (four glorious weeks!) when the girls went to an in-person summer school, they have been home - with me - every - single - day - for - a year. 

That’s a whole year of Sergio going to work and wishing to be home. And a year of me staying home and wishing I were going to work. A year of the angel on my shoulder saying “you are so lucky” and the devil on the other shoulder saying “this really sucks” and me saying to both of them “just shut up for once!”

A whole year of absorbing phrases like “chin hammock” into our vocabulary as though they had always been there. A year in which we made masks for dolls and stuffed animals and the girls invented a game called “quarantine” on the trampoline. A year in which we gave our kids two devices each after having gone so long without. And we got them email addresses. And so many passwords to remember.

A year of wondering, “am I doing this right?” wherein “this” could refer to mask wearing or contact tracing or pandemic parenting or dismantling white supremacy or sharing my screen or logging into the portal or … anything really. And a year of trying to grant grace when we realize we can’t be sure if we’re doing this right because this is our first pandemic. 

A whole year of hoping for a change for the better. A year of the four of us eating a lot of tacos in our minivan. Of binge watching everything together piled on the couch. A year of our dogs close by and underfoot and in our laps all day every day. A year of quarantine birthdays for everyone. A year of celebrating the big things and the small. 

A year of asking “What’s the most important thing?” and realizing that maybe - being together and being alive were always the most important things and we just didn’t realize it until the pandemic hit? A year of realizing that not everyone can be together. And not everyone can be alive. A year of not knowing what to do to help, to fix the unfixable. 

In December, Julia asked me, “if a word were misspelled in the dictionary, how would we know?” And two weeks ago Clara asked me, “If all the clocks in the world were wrong, how would we know?” Perhaps they, too, feel as if the ceiling fell in or the bottom dropped out or the compass just keeps spinning just like I keep asking “What’s the most important thing?” and also “How do we know what’s the most important thing? How can we be sure?” 

In nine days my kids will return to the classroom for the first time in a year. Only two days a week. Masked. With a smaller class size. With teachers they haven’t actually spent time with in person. A whole year of zoom. In some ways it will feel like things are going back to normal. But it won’t be normal. A lot has happened. And a lot still can. We aren’t going back. We’re going forward. Hoping our dictionaries and clocks are right. But recognizing they might not be. Watching the compass spin and realizing that we might be alright.