What strikes me first is how little they are. Their cheeks are plumper. They’re shorter, more miniature. As I scroll through photos from the spring of 2020, I spy Nolan running in his monster shoes. Those ridiculous shoes place this in the landscape of time; I bought them when he started preschool in the fall and he would wear those shoes and only those shoes. I’d forgotten about them. Time passed, life felt like survival mode, and somewhere in the tumult they were outgrown or scuffed beyond wearing before they were discarded.
He turned four and the twins turned six not three weeks before the world shut down. Two Kindergarteners and a preschooler. Old enough to understand that things were weird. Young enough that it was hard to explain why. They were so little.
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My first pandemic purchase was a printer.
“They’re not going back to school,” I said to Tyson matter-of-factly. It was dark, evening. Most likely we’d gotten the kids to bed and I’d been staring into my phone, scrolling through social media, looking to other people to try to make sense of everything. What were other people doing? Was I the only one feeling this sense of dread? What did the New York Times have to say? Which resulted in me ordering a black and white printer from Amazon so I could print…worksheets? For the kids? I guess? Because Spring Break had just been extended and I was positive, had this gut-level feeling they wouldn’t return to the classroom.
My second pandemic purchase was the Anne of Green Gables books. The same set I had when I was a kid. Because $47.92 buys you comfort in the form of books.
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I wrote snippets during the first few weeks of the pandemic.
March 18: “Just 10 days ago it was over 50 degrees outside and we bought ice cream from the ice cream truck that rolled through the neighborhood. From a stranger. In a truck. Who handed us food and we handed him money. With our unsanitized, unwashed hands. In a crowd of neighborhood kids.”
March 25th: “Caden and Brooklyn’s school sent out a video with three of the teachers singing a parody of ‘Some Things Never Change’ to the kids today and I cried.”
April 3rd: “I seem to roll with a cycle of ‘this isn’t so bad’ to a big ol’ ‘meh’ where I exist without feelings before plummeting to ‘everything is terrible let’s burn down the house and start over.’”
April 6th: “I’m so entrenched in this now it seems like this is how life always has been, is now, and shall be forevermore.”
April 15th: “I wake up and think, ‘Oh. Here we go again.’ And it takes every ounce of strength I have to pull myself out of bed. Even though I just throw on my glasses and some sweatpants and walk downstairs to get coffee. The monotony of our days is its own brand of exhausting.”
Bright little ray of sunshine, wasn’t I?
There’s a song going around on TikTok. “Do you get a little bit tired of life? Like you’re not really happy but you don’t want to die? Like you’re hanging by a thread but you gotta survive?”
If that song had been around two years ago, it would have been our pandemic anthem. Even now, this side of the pandemic, it hits different than it would have before.
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Recently, Beth from Pantsuit Politics said “I’m stressed because what else would I be?”
I’m not sure I’ve heard a truer sentence
If I were to make a list of stressors—and you know this Enneagram One loves a list—there wouldn’t be anything surprising on it. March 2022 is almost nothing like March 2020, when we woke up to new news every single day. We were all home all the time. We thought vaccines were years—plural—away. We actually wiped down our packages and groceries with bleach, bless our little early pandemic hearts.
My days are largely back to the ordinary of life. We need to eat dinner. Again. The kids are on break and Tyson and I are both working now and what do we do with them? My body is stiff because I haven’t been doing yoga. We need to solidify our summer plans.
But my corner of the internet keeps reminding me that the body keeps the score. And mine is tighter, tightening more as Spring Break approached; the week two years ago that marks the time life changed forever. I’ve had these unusual, near-constant headaches. I feel unsettled, though I can’t put words to emotions. Something inside me is busy keeping score, remembering what happened two years ago.
And really, what else would a millennial be but stressed? What else would we be but a little bit tired of living our unprecedented lives?
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I wonder if the coming of spring will ever be normal again. It still feels hopeful—when you live in a state with five solid months of winter, warm weather and budding trees will never feel anything short of miraculous. Dread follows that feeling of hope, though. At least for me. My body still keeping the score.
Sometimes it feels like the kids should still be four and six. Their very early elementary years feel misplaced. Nolan’s preschool years were completely lost in the shuffle. Can they really have just turned six and eight? How did they get so tall? What happened to those monster shoes anyway? Can’t we just rewind two years? Aren’t we in some infinite 2020 time loop? Aren’t we all, still, just a little bit tired?
They were so little. We all were.
This post is part of a blog hop to share our pandemic stories. It's hosted by www.laurapbass.com and you can read the next post in the blog hop by clicking here.