I was sitting at my desk last Friday while all three kids were at school, a rarity the past several weeks, and I was avoiding writing, because paradoxically this is what people who call themselves writers do. I decided to hop on a vaccine finder website and work my way down the list, an effective way to kill ten minutes, knowing I would encounter rejection after rejection, “No vaccine appointments available near you.”
Except, this time, when I clicked the first link for a random Walgreens, a green notification popped up.
“Appointments available near you!”
I sat for a second in disbelief before clicking through, certain they would all be gone in the matter of seconds it would take to select an appointment time and click through from one page to another.
But it worked. It worked enough that I was able to log myself out, create an account for Tyson, and log back in under his name to create an appointment for him, three days later but still with several time slots available.
I didn’t expect to feel the euphoria I did in that moment.
I called Tyson. (Who was two floors beneath me working in the basement, please let’s bemoan the laziness of our society and the general perils of cell phones. Kidding, it’s freaking fantastic.).
“Guess what I just did?” I asked him excitedly, my voice full of exclamation points.
“What?”
“I got us vaccine appointments!”
I sat back, mind buzzing, and what little productivity I may have had left vanished. I couldn’t sit still long enough to focus on words or the screen in front of me. Instead, I possessed a restless energy, which led me to wander around the house to tidy the kid’s desks and organize the mudroom.
I felt excitement tangled with anxiety in my stomach and marveled not for the first time at this strange new world.
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The post-pandemic world fills me with almost as many questions as answers, almost as much anxiety as relief. Though I primarily identify as an ambivert, my introvert side totally and completely took over this past year. The idea of regularly meeting up again with other people sounds daunting, unnerving, draining. It sounds like a lot.
Honestly? My biggest challenge the past year was the sheer amount of time the kids were home. If only I could have quarantined at home, by myself, with stacks of books and cups of coffee, tea, and Moscow mules at the ready, I feel as though I could have sailed through. (This was my pandemic daydream, during day 482 of togetherness with the kids when one was crying, another shred scraps of paper all over the floor, and the third raided the panty for the 38th time that hour. I understand those who flew solo during the pandemic experienced their own challenges. Please leave me alone with my flawed-yet-idyllic pandemic fantasy.)
As I celebrate each and every vaccination card photo in my social media feed, I can’t help but wonder: what does re-entry look like, anyway? I see so much about not returning back to normal. How this past year—socially, politically, racially, psychologically—has affected us all so much that it would be impossible to return to our normal of the Before Times.
I agree I don’t want to go back to normal. But I’ll also admit I don’t even know what that means. What was normal before? The kids going to school and attending activities—give me alllllllll of that back, please. The ability to meet up for drinks on a whim, to hire a babysitter for a date night, to get a pedicure, to plan a trip without any guilt: these are the norms I’d like to return to.
I think, at least sometimes, the more progressive wings of my internet bubble mean they don’t want to return to the norms of society, of mass shootings, systemic racism, sexism, and general oppression. Please read: I don’t either. And also: radical change of the criminal justice system, paid family leave, gun control, and healthcare for all aren’t exactly going to happen overnight.
So I’m not sure what the new normal looks like, what this new normal is that people want to enter into. I do want a new normal. To dive back in and dismiss the entirety of the past year would be to have missed the whole entire fucking point.
Maybe a new normal does include kids attending school and playing baseball and taking vacations. But maybe it also includes more intentional family time. Maybe it continues to include making homemade pizza every Saturday night. Maybe it includes getting more involved in our local communities. Maybe it looks like getting more involved in politics, in door knocking or phone banking or emailing our representatives or attending meetings. Maybe it includes shutting myself away from the world for awhile because sometimes that’s actually really nice. Maybe it involves, decades from now, a conversation where we say, “Remember that year we all stayed in our homes?” and instead of dismissing it with some sort of, “Yeah, that was wild. Remember all the toilet paper memes?” we actually remember what it felt like, the amount of pain and lives lost, the ache of broken systems that left us without childcare and education and healthcare and the time and space to grieve.
Maybe a new normal means we actively remember what happened, that we hold it deep in our bones. If March showed me anything, it’s that my body is holding onto the trauma of the past year whether I want to or not.
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I received my first shot on Saturday. I imagined my vaccine moment to be the type I’ve heard friends and others on social media talk about, with tears and a collective “look at us we’re doing it” sort of vibe. In a large, communal room with appropriately spaced chairs and some sort of quip-y banter, perfect to post on social media, with the nurse.
My experience...was not that. Please remember I was at the most random of Walgreens. The pharmacists, probably because it was noon on a Saturday, were overwhelmed with people who were there to pick up their prescriptions both inside and out, as well as with people like me who had made vaccine appointments.
After abruptly receiving my vaccine, no quip-y banter to be found, I sat in a chair at the end of an aisle to wait my 15 minutes. The vinyl on its padded seat was peeling and I faced a display of wart removal options. The soundtrack to this historic moment was listening to one of the pharmacists continually shout “What’s your name?” to someone in the drive-thru who I hoped had better eyesight than hearing, what with the fact that they were driving and all.
I tried to work up some emotion in this anticlimatic environment. Instead, I scooched out of the way for people walking by, found a place in my wallet for my vaccine card, and scrolled my phone. Maybe the getting out of this pandemic and into whatever new normal there is to be found is going to be as unceremonious as it was going in.