We're Doing Nothin' From Christmas
I can say that we've officially wrapped up the holiday season in the Bruns household. This is typically a stretch of time that starts the weekend before Thanksgiving by celebrating our eldest's birthday (and my wife's when I remember) and closes after we finally get around to scheduling a birthday party for our middle daughter. Her birthday is on December 30th, which was over a month ago, but we're usually at least two-three weeks behind on the party scheduling. We finally got around to it a week and a half ago, which I've come to view as the closing of our "holiday" season. Obviously sprinkled into the mix are Thanksgiving itself and the Christmas and New Year festivities. Oh, and our youngest's birthday on Christmas - can't forget about that one....
The two month stretch of parties and presents can be a whirlwind and certainly stress filled. In effort to combat some of that (self induced) stress this year, we kind of de-committed ourselves from any Thanksgiving plans. It was nice to have a day when we didn't get out of our jammies, and the leftover bacon-cheeseburger pizza was a welcome change of pace from the traditional turkey dinner. But we also experienced a small bout of illness with one of our children, and some weather woes that turned one day of laziness into four. By the end, I was certainly ready to come out of hibernation, and have our other family members do the same.
In the lead up to the Christmas festivities, and the various travel plans we had scheduled, we braced ourselves for what curveballs would potentially be thrown our way. We had been healthy, but the flu had been wreaking havoc on our girls' school and dance studio, and we knew it would only be a matter of time. And, as if on cue, when we transitioned into the winter break, and geared up for three Christmases, our oldest caught it. The writing was clearly on the wall, as when I picked the girls up from school on their last day before break, our oldest inexplicably sat down in the middle of the school hallway and began sobbing uncontrollably. It was time for a break, but who knew what that would entail.
It ultimately entailed her running a fever for a week - something we heard was commonplace by other kids getting this particular strain of the flu. So we spent our waning days of Advent, the season of waiting, in waiting. We waited for her to get better - which she did, until she got worse, and then better again, and then a little worse. We waited for our other kids to get it - which our middle daughter eventually did, but not as bad and not as long. My wife and I waited for us to get it - thankfully neither of us did, thought we constantly felt like we were just on the verge.
We derived up scenarios in relation to our various holiday gatherings; if she is fever free by Saturday morning, we can go to a Christmas that afternoon, if she is fever free by Tuesday morning we can head out for that family Christmas later that day. Neither of which happened. In all we made it to one of the three family Christmas gatherings we were planning to attend, which, had we been playing baseball, would have been hall of fame stats. Our plan to take advantage of a few unexpected days off my wife received around Christmas were dashed, and we settled for a makeshift Christmas celebration and excessive amounts of TV. The week felt like equal parts stay-cation and house arrest.
At First I Was Afraid, I Was Petrified
I wrote the above four paragraphs at some point in January of 2020. I completely forgot that I started a post, that obviously didn't get finished. I figured I should try to write at least one in 2020, but of course that didn't happen either. Given that I just realized that I actually did write something in 2020, I figured I should at least incorporate that into this one - if this one actually ever gets finished.
In re-reading those four paragraphs, it's interesting/comical/depressing the similarities between the 2019 Holiday Season and the 2020 Holiday Season, albeit for different, but also kind of similar reasons. Thankfully, we were not battling flu-like symptoms this Holiday Season, but given the prevalence of the - insert scientific or derogatory name to your liking - flu, we kept a low profile as it seemed like the appropriate thing to do. In effort not to play favorites or set precedents we could have a hard time rationalizing, we opted for the continuity of cancelling our Holiday plans across the board`.
The first four paragraphs that date back to the pre-pandemic era clearly show that this wasn't the first time we'd had to make adjustments to our Holiday plans. We've had other documented instances that have required calling audibles on what we thought would fun Holiday festivities. It most certainly won't be the last. With a widened breadth of parental experiences, more and more plausible scenarios have entered my purview of reasons you might need to make adjustments to your plans. I've commented before that as a parent you will find yourself in situations you never thought plausible before you became a parent. Needing to cancel Christmas for a global pandemic was likely not on many people's radar, prior to 2020 of course. Dr. Michael Osterholm probably being the exception.
It's Fine, We're Fine
That's my stock answer when people ask me how things are going these days. I think that has become a go-to response for many. In reality, and I've voiced this aloud before, we are undoubtedly faring better than most. Having been a stay-at-home parent for 5+ years when schools abruptly shut down last March, it didn't create the storm of chaos that it did for many two working parent families, or single parents who were also trying to work will "home school" their kids. My wife kept her job, unlike millions who lost them, and transitioned to a mostly work from home arrangement, which created its own positive and negatives. It added a certain amount of tension as we navigated the intimacy of everyone being home together all of the time (and unable to escape to warmer climates). Ultimately though, our day to day stressors, like a need to upgrade the bandwith on our WiFi, were #uppermiddleclassfirstworldproblems.
At first the newness of the situation created opportunities. We appreciated that the kids didn't have to get up before the sun to catch the bus for school. I enjoyed the fact that most of my afternoons didn't become an uBer-ing of children to and from various activities. We had virtual game nights and happy hours, did online drawing sessions with Mo Willems, and like many others, watched a lot of movies (the kids) and consumed a lot of alcohol (the adults). We tried to keep our kids as engaged in school work as we felt reasonable, and when it became apparent that they would not be returning to school in the spring, I chalked it up to being an extra summer for them.
The transition to summer, and out of "trying to pretend to be home schooling" meant that we had nothing on our hands but time as all of our kid's summer activities were cancelled. While enjoyable at first, the lack of structure had its drawbacks, and when our girls restarted dance class in July, I was ready to have some anchors in our day of things we were actually supposed to get to. We were fortunate to be able to make a few in state adventures and temporarily leave behind the all-consuming-ness of the pandemic The summer itself though felt like both the longest and shortest summer ever, having seemingly started in mid-March, but being devoid of most all the typical summer rituals.
Fall brought on a notion of taking things week by week, which was a juxtaposition to the summer when everyday seemed the same and no day seemed the same. "Blursday" I believe it was coined. We were excited and nervous for our kids to return to school, even if only part-time. We never felt a strong desire that our kids either needed to be at school or at home, and my wife, the medical professional, would acknowledge that her personal opinion on what she thought was okay or not okay would vary at times by the minute. Thank you social media.
When school actually started, we found ourselves anxiously awaiting the Thursday announcement of the seven day rolling case averages for the four counties our school district was in to learn if our kids would get another week at school or if we'd (I'd) be back to full time "home schooling support". I briefly came out of retirement and did a little bit of substitute teaching, as was my initial plan before the pandemic. At times it was a nice change to be yelled at and ignored by children who were not my own.
Then, as expected (by the public health experts at least), the virus ramped up and everybody came back home and went back into quarantine mode. Our kids' school actually had to go to a distance learning model two weeks prior to the rest of their district moving online due to a lack of teachers. This meant our kids were home for two weeks, back at school for four days, before returning home until after the Winter/Holiday break. We figured that would get extended at least a few weeks, which it ultimately did. Since then though their planned return to in-person learning has actually been expediated with a decrease in cases in the state and optimism surrounding the vaccine rollout - even as deaths nationally hit an all time high.
As Long As I Know How To Love
While there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel, we're obviously still in the tunnel, or the woods, or as ultra-runners like to call it, the pain cave. I'll admit, it seems like the attitude around things getting back to some version of normal, while still a ways off, has started to creep into me more and more. My birthday last year fell on the first weekend after things went into full shutdown mode here in Minnesota. I've used that as a marker for my perceived COVID year, and I will be interested to see where things are at come the middle of March. I've suggested that everyone should have to experience at least one birthday under COVID, while recognizing that some people won't make it to their next birthday because of COVID.
Obviously we're all itching to get back to normal^, whatever that might look like. In a way, I feel like my last 10 months under COVID have been a microcosm of my last six years as a stay at home parent. There have been ups and downs, excitement and mundanity; and lots and lots of quality family time - both good quality and poor quality. When I wrote a piece a (long) while ago about nearing the end of my tenure as a stay at home parent, I quipped about having earned a PhD in parenting, if such a thing existed. Parenting during COVID feels a bit like my dissertation. If we all make it out alive, I'll consider that a passing grade.
As challenging as this year has been, there have obviously been some positive things that I hope we take forward into a post-COVID world, if and when we every get there. For all of the negativity that has blown up your social media feed over the past ten months, I'm sure there have been just as much positive clickbait as well. Hopefully you were able to find at least some small amount of joy in 2020 - even if just in the little things. The notion of hindsight being the same as the calendar year number of what has likely been one of the most memorable years for most of us seems a little too ironic. Yeah, I really do think.
When things started to shutdown in the spring, and that shutdown dragged on into summer, and then came back this winter, a common sentiment I heard was people indicating that they weren't going to survive. Not knowing their own personal circumstances, I assumed this meant that if things continued on in a similar fashion for the foreseeable future they were ultimately going to lose it. I realize that's very vague, but I think you get the picture I'm trying to paint (pick your protest turned riot from the last nine months maybe?) . What I couldn't help but consider, was the want to survive versus the will to survive. And I realize that if you are faced with circumstances completely beyond your control, like a terminal disease or a lack of basic life necessities, you can't just will yourself to survive. But for many of these observations, that didn't seem to be the case they were trying to make*.
In a way, it seemed to me like we didn't want to survive. That if the COVID world was what life was going to look like for, well maybe forever, we didn't want any part of it. Can't drink at a bar, see a movie in a theater, visit my grandparent in a nursing home? Not a world I want to live in. I'd agree to a certain extent, but I think it is also worth recognizing that we historically haven't always been able to do those things. Prohibition existed for almost four years in the 1920s, which ironically coincided with the opening of the first air-conditioned movie theater. And while nursing homes have existed for centuries, many grandparents of previous generations never made it to an age where they would be in a nursing home. Normal is always relative to what we know, and nearly all of us haven't known life in the midst of a pandemic.
It's also important to point out as a collective, we don't have the infrastructure that lends itself well to survival during these unprecedented times. People have experienced the challenges that came along with a pandemic in the past - job loss, death and disease, social isolation, etc. We just haven't had many, if any, times when we've experienced them en masse and at the same time. And even while we've been experience the pandemic at the same time, we've certainly experienced it in varying levels of severity. Take whatever metaphor you want to use, but if we're all in the same boat weathering the same storm in the same ocean, we all have different class tickets with different accommodations. And in particular in the US, with the significant health, wealth, and educational disparities, as Mark Blyth has suggested, we have few good options for dealing with that storm.
Parenting in general, and particularly during a pandemic, is all about dealing with the storm. It requires adaptation, and lots of it. You can't control your offspring, particularly the ones you still claim as dependents. You can only coach them, hope they will make rational decisions, and prepare yourself to deal with the aftermath of the decisions they ultimately make. And when you find yourself in those situations you never could have imagined before having children, or before experiencing a global pandemic, you are forced to react and address those challenges head on. You do this because you love your kids, and ultimately you have no other choice. They're relying on you even though you might feel utterly clueless and helpless. Given the number of people with fully developed pre-frontal cortexes who continue to make suspect decisions, we can't expect those whose brains are still developing to fare too well on their own.
When I transitioned to be a stay at home parent over six years ago, it was in hope of getting to a better place. That place was going to be different, and some aspects of it weren't necessarily going to "better" - like our financial place. And that didn't mean that we were (or I was) in a bad place when I made that transition. We just thought we could make some adjustments to our lives that might provide more of what we were looking for - more time together as a family and more flexibility; less stress in our daily lives and the opportunity to take a more direct approach in our kid's upbringing; and for my wife someone to make her lunch before she left for work each day. We made adjustments and adapted to our new arrangement. It wasn't always smooth sailing, but six years later we've developed a new normal. And we're done with diapers.
Now, I realize that my decision to become a stay at home parent was a voluntary one, and a lot of parents have been forced to become stay at home parents over the past year, whether they wanted to or not. But you may recall that our transition into parenthood wasn't something we put much forethought into. Luckily we were in a place where adding offspring to our life required adjustments that we were both ready and prepared to make. I've commented before that my perceived marker of when someone is ready for children is if they feel like they could be a stay at home parent, should the circumstances warrant it. Again, I didn't have a pandemic in mind at the time.
2020 put us through the ringer, and sadly, not everyone made it out. And many more will ultimately succumb to the linger effects of what it brought in 2021. But for those of us who made it and continue to make it, we have the opportunity to take the things we learned, the challenges we faced and get to that better place. That better normal. We've got life to live and love to give.
`The exception to this being Easter. I started working on this post back in January, and finally got around to finishing it in typical fashion.
^This is purely anecdotal, but I seemed to notice that people who were most adamant about things getting back to "normal" also seemed to be those least likely to do the things that most experts agree will get us back to normal - wear a mask, social distance, avoid large gatherings, etc. After spending a few months teaching elementary school kids, I also got the sense that these people, particularly those who openly defy regulations put in place to slow the spread/flatten the curve/limit the death, are probably the ones who had a hard time following directions when they were in school.
*In our great state of Minnesota, a collective of individuals and business owners came up with a way of directing frustration at our Governor after he issued shut down orders that affected many businesses. It took an oft-quoted line from the movie "The Sandlot" by Hamilton "Ham" Porter, and changed the line to "You're killing us Walz" - the last name of the Governor. While certainly witty, it seemed a little off base, considering that people were actually dying of a pandemic the Governor was trying to address by ordering the closure of those businesses.
