It’s been a year.

All right. It’s been about four years.

I recognize that I say this often as my blog posts tend to be few and far between, but I really do want to write more regularly. Writing, for me, has always been cathartic and helped me work through whatever emotion or frustration or hopeful hope I’ve been experiencing at the time.

Today is no different.

Today, I read an article on Axios that said the pandemic is finally under control. I scrolled further and came across an article in the Atlantic, “A One-in-a-Lifetime Chance to Start Over.”

As you can imagine, I got thinking.

This has been the most trying year-plus of my life. It wasn’t the darkest, or even, in some ways, the hardest, but it was, by far, the most exhausting, and the most changing……

Have you ever watched True Detective? Watch the first season and stop. I didn’t and regret it endlessly, except for one single scene.

In that scene, Vince Vaughn’s character is talking to the child of someone he killed (or had killed, I can’t remember). The boy is on a swing and understandably upset. Vaughn’s character says something to the effective of, “Sometimes, a thing happens, splits your life. There’s a before and after.”

Like Vaughn’s character, I have a bunch of those. Before and after we moved upstate as a child. Before and after Columbine. Before and After 9/11. Before and after my grandmother’s death. Before and after my mother’s divorce. Before and after I met my husband. Before and after my daughter was born. Moments that would come to define my life.

Before and after the global pandemic.

The difference is, this before and after has a middle too – a long one. Only now are we crawling out and picking up the pieces. This extended stress has been exhausting.

Thinking back, I remembered sending my kids an email when this all started. Here’s an excerpt of what I said:

Hello my loves,

I wanted to send you a message tonight to let you know how much I love you.

Things in the world are very scary right now. There’s a horrible virus that is making a lot of people very sick very quickly, and spreading in a way that we can’t tell who is ill. Some people may never get ill, despite getting the virus.

It’s scary because people we love like Nana are very susceptible to it. So am I, and so are you.

Things are unlike I’ve ever known them to be. Everything is shut down. The stores are closed. I’m working from home, but many people have lost their jobs. It’s so still outside that we have deer in the neighborhood – something very unusual indeed.

We are doing our best to keep you safe. I’m very scared myself, but never let you know that. Anne you keep calling it “the sickness” and you’re so sweet in how you want to make sure everyone gets well. I love that about you.

Today, we went on a rainbow hunt. Marty laughed and yelled the whole time. Anne, you brought your rainbow colored narwhal and we looked for rainbows in windows and on doors. We found so many! We even have our own though it’s a single line rainbow (we’ll have to make a brighter one tomorrow).

The two of you are the most important things in our world. Your father and I could not be happier. We are so lucky to be your parents, and to see you grow into the amazing people I know you’ll become.

Right now life is so frightening. It’s reminded me of what really matters. I close my eyes and wish for the day this is all behind us. I fear we’re just at the beginning.

I can’t wait until we’re back in the world again, when we can see Nana and go back to gymnastics. I love you both so much my silly beans. 

I cried the night I wrote this. My mom had found out that someone in the school where she worked had tested positive, and my mom was the one I was most concerned for. I lost my breath. I remember talking to Keith about how afraid I was and wondering what I should do, what any of us could do.

Less than a month later, my mom would be hospitalized with COVID pneumonia and I would be faced with one of my greatest fears: losing my mother.

I’m grateful for the excellent, dedicated, exhausted, and selfless medical care that she received. She survived – after 51 days, she came through. More than a year later though, she still feels the effects. I still get that pang in my chest when I think about it and can’t talk about COVID-19 and what it does to people without crying.

I know that we’re all so tired. So very tired. We’ve all experienced this global trauma to varying degrees. For some, it’s been a nuisance. It’s hindered their ability to travel or bar-hop or simply be conveniently unmasked. Yet, for others, like me, it’s a trauma that will live in my heart for the rest of my life.

I remember how much deer poop we found in the yard, and the day that I woke up to see them there. Watching the DOCUMENTARY only strengthened my confidence in climate change science. We saw what happens when we, as a species, simply stop destroying our home.

In more simpler terms, I learned very quickly what’s important to me.

Back to that Atlantic article. In it, you’re asked to draw a two-by-two matrix. The columns are your likes and dislikes. The rows are pre-pandemic and pandemic. The author, Arthur Brooks, asks you to wholeheartedly consider your answers.

Here’s mine:

	Likes	Dislikes
Pre-Pandemic	-Movies -Activities with the kids	-Commuting (i.e. the daily grind)
Pandemic	-Working from home -More time to recharge	-No travel -No seeing friends or family -No restaurants or movies

The pandemic taught me that I’m an introvert. I “recharge my batteries” with alone time. That’s hard to come by when you’ve got a husband and two little kids, and even harder when you’re committed to maintaining so many social and familial connections. The pandemic taught me that I’m happier with a smaller circle – and I’m honestly more capable of maintaining strong friendships that way. That’s not to say that I don’t like having more people around – it’s just that I enjoy a few close friends that I will share every single thing about my life with.

I also learned that the daily grind of a commute was incredibly draining for me. I don’t mean just the driving, but the complete chaos and disarray of always being on the go. Now, I walk Anne to school and Keith takes Marty to daycare. Then, we pick them up. Even on the days when I must manage both of them, it’s still a lot less hectic to manage home-daycare-school-home-school-daycare-home than it is to manage home-daycare-school-work-school-daycare-home. Plus, I can take fifteen minutes to prep dinner or pop the chicken into the marinade before leaving for pick-up rather than chaotically whipping up the fastest dinner humanly possible.

I’m more creative in the quiet. I’m more focused when I can turn off interruptions. My ADHD is much better managed. My stress level is dramatically, dramatically lower despite the workload. While my colleagues may not love me being out of the office, it’s been life-changing for me. Yet, I think all of that life-changing positivity is about to come to an unceremonious end.