We've officially hit the four-year anniversary of when the world shut down due to COVID. Friday, March 13th was our last "normal" day, and the weekend that followed was when the dominoes really started to fall in rapid succession. It's mind-boggling that we've been at this new version of the world in some form for four years. In some ways it feels like forever, and in others it has flown. I laughed when I saw a post that referred to the pandemic as having happened "800 years ago, or yesterday", because that's pretty much my point. The pandemic has been an entirely bizarre time warp. I guess the saying, "The days are long but the years are short" applies to more than just parenting.
I just realized it also means that I've been working from home for parts of four years, and that seems absolutely insane. I didn't think I'd make it a week or a month, and here we are, where it's now my preference most of the time. Four years seems like a really long time and yet it feels like it was just a year or two ago that I was figuring out how to make all of this work. But in talking to at least one of my colleagues, I guess it's been so long that we agreed we don't even remember how we used to function while working physically in the office 40 hours a week. How did we make it without this flexibility? It's a mystery. Life has changed in so many ways, and it's so odd how some changes still feel weird and others are so deeply ingrained in our lives, as if a previous normal never existed.
I knew the anniversary was coming up because my Facebook memories were coming back across things that I knew happened right before, like my diamond painting attempt that got me through the first few months at home, and the last-minute basketball tournament and trampoline park visit from the last full weekend before things started shutting down. And then last Monday night I went to Wegmans and randomly I realized that it was the day before the anniversary of the Thursday night I went there and everything felt like crazytown. Shelves were empty, lines snaked through the entire store, and everything felt completely unnerving, like it was a natural disaster or third-world country. That was the moment reality started to set in, and when school got shut down the following weekend, that was when things started getting overwhelming. So much happened within a few days.
I went back to read my posts from that time. I spent a lot of time blogging back then, partly because I needed an outlet and partly because I knew I'd thank myself later for documenting it all. It was pretty crazy to read four years later as a lot of those details have faded and those posts brought them roaring back. It was overwhelming just to read all that was happening in 2-3 day increments, but living it was something else--and in a lot of ways I'm not surprised we all ended up traumatized from the experience. It was SO much. I sort of can't figure out how we managed all that change at once. It was one heck of an adrenaline-fueled, fight-or-flight, powering-through period with how much happened in a very short period of time. We went from normal life at the end of one week to home school, work from home, no social life, and barely leaving the house for weeks on end as of Monday. We didn't see family or friends for months. We could barely grocery shop, had to find new at-home hobbies, and try not to lose our minds from all the togetherness, all while hoping we didn't get sick...but watching plenty of news stories about the people that did.
Our entire world changed so quickly and felt so out of control. I'm pretty sure our brain chemistry changed right then and there, but the following few years didn't help matters, and I feel like even now we're all just on the verge of a mental cliff. Like, we're functioning, we're living, we're doing our jobs, but it seems like (at least among co-workers and some things that people share on social media) that we're all just a thing or two away from it all being too much, at any given time. I've said that about things like planning food for a family gathering or trying to do a big project around my house--adding those things on top of the rest of life just feels precarious. I don't even want to know what would happen if we were all called back in the office full time at some point. We'd lose a LOT of people because I think people just can't envision living like that again, and they will not hesitate to leave a job to ensure they don't have to. It's a little worrying because my job has only guaranteed hybrid through June 30 this year, and they haven't said anything about it in over a year since that timeline was announced. They just started doing a couple learning sessions as in-person only, rather than hybrid or Zoom only, so that made me wonder if they're testing the waters for going back to the old way. I hope not, but it's got me curious. I'm hoping we'll hear more at our big all-staff retreat in June, but that could set things up nicely for them to give us an easy summer and tell us we'd go back to full time in the fall. Those couple months of summer would likely be a hellish sprint then, with everyone trying to jump ship in time for fall. I don't even want to think about it. For me, I'd probably feel compelled to stick around and hope that the general flexibility (for appointments, sickness, kid things) would remain and still be better than most places, but I guess I wouldn't blame people for leaving because it's a very personal decision. I know I'm one of the few who's routinely there three days a week like we're supposed to be, and while I understand why people don't find it important, I worry that the abuse of the privilege is going to come back to bite us all.
I was thinking the other day about my grandparents' generation and how they had a pandemic too. My grandparents were actually barely part of the last one--my grandpas were both born in 1920 and my grandmas in 1924 (go figure!), so they missed most or all of it, but certainly had to have family or family friends that were impacted. But during their lifetimes they dealt with the stock market crash, Pearl Harbor and a world war, two more wars across the following three decades, and an awful lot of social and cultural change. Their generation is generally perceived to have been tough as nails, but I guess it's no wonder there's so much internet discussion on how previous generations aged faster than more recent ones. Perhaps we'll start reversing that trend post-COVID from all the aging this stress has likely caused? But the thing that threw me off is that their generation got tougher, and yet it feels like this time around we've just crumbled as a result of this stress. To be fair, mental health struggles and awareness are at an all-time high, so I think some of it is that we're allowed to express our stress and exhaustion. Older generations were always taught to hide it away, ignore it, and solider on. That probably wasn't healthy and I'm sure it caused problems of its own, but kudos to them for mostly making it work. But I think a balance isn't a bad thing--we're allowed to be human and feel things but we also can't allow it to overtake us because we need to keep living our lives. Sometimes I think we've opened the floodgates a bit too wide, but I don't like the alternative of bottling it up and shutting out very valid emotions. I'm not saying this balance is easy or that I have answers, but I just caught myself pondering that difference between generations and wondering why it's so pronounced. I will say that years from now, down the road, we may find out that the younger generations who lived through this did end up stronger in the end because of all they've endured, even if right now it's all a little raw and still in process. Maybe it can evolve.
I'm still thankful my kids don't feel traumatized by the experience. Jacob actually enjoyed a lot of it, and while we've had our struggles with Carter, I think it accelerated getting him help with his ADHD, so I can be grateful for that even as the screen addiction persists and we battle against some parts of his school performance (namely writing) that took a hit from online work. I saw a discussion on social media the other day where one person said they didn't think their kids were traumatized because they explained why lockdowns and masks were important, and their kids understood why it mattered so they didn't feel upset about what had happened. I'd like to think my kids were much the same--even if they didn't enjoy things, I think they mostly understood why it was important. The commenter essentially insinuated that the families that told their kids they should be upset about masks and closures were probably the ones who were most negatively impacted by everything, and I can't help but agree. I can see where people who made it feel like a big infringement of rights might see the whole situation as more upsetting. We dealt with it as a matter-of-fact thing, this is just what we do, and it wasn't a big deal. Inconvenient and uncomfortable, maybe, but a modest sacrifice for avoiding COVID and not putting others at risk. People in the thread were bemoaning how schools are out of control, kids don't care, etc., and that the pandemic made all of that worse. But the unexpected wild card in the discussion was the people who insisted that lockdowns probably weren't the cause because their areas were only closed for those couple months when everything started and they went right back to school as normal in the fall, but their schools and students are just as screwed up and off-kilter as places where things were shut down for longer. It was an interesting point. A lot blamed lazy parenting, but shockingly few pointed out the fact that the "lazy" parents were probably burned out themselves and doing double duty working from home, and that's why parenting got a little lax. In the end the phones seemed to get the most blame, which was obviously made worse by said "lazy parenting" and the unlimited screen time it involved. I get that and don't disagree, but it was literally survival mode at the time because we needed to get work done and we needed to not have kids up in our space 24/7. I'd like to say I would do things differently if I could go back, but realistically I know it was more complicated than that and it was a desperate situation a lot of the time. I think all my phone time back then changed my brain, too (or maybe it was the COVID exposure where the brain fog never entirely went away?), so it doesn't surprise me we're dealing with a lot of people who aren't functioning quite the same as they were before. It's phones, it's exhaustion, it's stress, and it's probably the realization that the same setups don't work for everybody all the time, so maybe we should have choices we didn't have before, like working from home and home schooling. Our world has fundamentally changed.
COVID is still around. It's not this big scary thing it once was. It's not really killing people like it used to, it's not overflowing hospitals, and it's on par with the flu--if that--for most people. My mom is just getting over it for the second time, and hers was pretty nasty this time around with some lasting symptoms almost two weeks in. But considering this is something that killed off a lot of people my parents' age early on, I'll take it, I guess. It's so much like the flu now that the CDC recently backed off on all quarantine recommendations and we're just supposed to mask now. I guess that's nice, but I'm sure it won't matter to my family next time someone gets it because they definitely did NOT want me around back in August, even with a mask. It's a far cry from how everything felt early on, or even Jacob's first infection where we were all stuck at home for 10 days. I'm thankful things are better and grateful for the vaccine and natural immunity getting us to this point. I'm sad for the people who didn't make it this far, and to this day I can't help but wonder how many more we'd have lost if the revisionist history people had their way. I came across a memory a few days ago of a tweet that said:
Months from now, if we're lucky, the extreme measures being taken now to limit the spread of COVID-19 may seem like they were an overreaction, because relatively few people died.
That's the point. That's why we're doing it.
That felt oh-so-true this time around, because so many people are still saying how the shutdowns were overkill, for the schools, for the businesses, for the economy, for our freedoms. They're saying it was overblown by the media and never more than a cold. But I think they're forgetting what those early days looked like, before we understood how it spread, how contagious it was, how to treat it, how jammed hospitals were, and how many people were dying at a rapid pace. Remember the refrigerated trailers? That was real and it was scary. I'm not sure I'd say that "relatively few people died"--inflated or not it was in the millions--but had we not done shutdowns at first, that could have been exponentially worse. We did the shutdowns to minimize the spread, keep hospitals from overflowing, and give us time to figure out how to treat it. Had we stayed open, who knows what might have happened in those first few months. We can assume we just would have gotten to the same place sooner, but I'm not sure that would have been the case because likely a lot of people were saved by delaying infection until there were better treatments and hospitals were less overwhelmed. People in Italy died because they didn't have the space, people, or supplies to treat them. They had to choose who lived or died for a while. I'm not sure to what degree that happened here early on, but I can't imagine if we hadn't taken measures to reduce infections early on. Could the lockdowns have been shortened? Probably. Was the vaccine push ultimately a bit of overkill? Likely yes. But I think both were important in the short term to keep us in a safer position. We only knew what we knew at the time. We were learning as we went, and could only make decisions with the information that was available at the time. Maybe politics got in the way on both sides, and it made the struggle worse. It was messy. Still is sometimes, because all of those politics have overflowed into our new normal, and sometimes that "freedom over everything" mentality seeps into other areas. I hoped in one of those early posts that we'd come out of the pandemic a kinder, gentler society--one that cared about our fellow man and was grateful for all we have, especially once we had the chance to get back to "normal" life. I pretty much couldn't have been more wrong. I think some people came out of it that way--I feel like I did--but so many other people came out more selfish, more rude, and with zero regard for their fellow man because they felt oppressed and want to return the favor. It's so weird, and very disappointing. It doesn't give me much hope if we have to do this again someday, because people are so polarized now that literally half the country will not comply with whatever restrictions get put in place.
I sometimes wonder what our world would be like now had this never happened. What would our lives be like if I was still working full-time in-person? Would the kids' paths have been different? How would Carter's school experience or Jacob's basketball progress have changed? How would politics be different? Different president? Less polarized? One of the odd benefits of the pandemic at the time was that it interrupted some of the less enjoyable aspects of life that were set to go on infinitely. Sometimes it was a relief to realize I had a break from 20 years of commutes and full office days or the non-stop go-go-go of family life. We had a lot of downtime we wouldn't have otherwise had, and in some ways it felt needed. I found weird comfort not only in the idea that we were getting a break from the monotony, but also that the new normal would evolve as well within a period of time. Sometimes it's nice to not have things super settled and be able to maintain some hope for better days on the horizon. This clearly wasn't the best way to do it, but it was an interesting detour from the world we thought would never change. It came with a price and I think most of us are still dealing with it in some way, but sometimes I wonder if something else would have had to give if things went on as normal for much longer. Why I wonder about something we'll never know, I have no idea, but I suppose it creeps in a little whenever I wonder if there were things we should have done better.
For something we hoped would only be around for a few weeks, four years feels pretty crushing. I mean, I know that lots of aspects of life have been mostly back to normal (or something resembling it) for at least a couple years now, but Wegmans only ditched the plexi guards within the past six months, small pockets of people are still wearing masks, and I haven't had the guts to figure out what to do with the fully stocked mask rack still tucked in our front closet. The reminders are everywhere. Life as a whole has so fundamentally changed that I can hardly tell who "post-pandemic me" is vs. who I would have been anyway. I still don't love crowds and coughs still make me cringe. Every sniffle in our house starts an inquisition. Grocery shopping still feels more stressful than I'd like, but I'm not sure if it's carry-over dread or if it's just because shelves still randomly go bare and prices are through the roof. Maybe both. It's been a weird journey. I worried at the time what would happen if this pandemic went on as long as the Spanish flu did--how would we survive YEARS of this? Turns out it did, and somehow we have. I can't say we've thrived, but we've done pretty well despite the challenges. We've adapted, we've traveled, we've kept the boys active and evolving, and our actual losses were minimal. We're doing okay. I don't know what four-years-ago-me would feel if she could see us now, but I hope she'd have been relieved and even a little impressed that we made it through okay. I'm thankful. Tired, but thankful. And I really hope we never have to do that again.
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