New Year, Same Damn Day
I am watching a show on tiny houses as my daughter sleeps on me. A lady is blathering on about out-of-style cabinets vs. money for her wedding dress. I can tell by her maskless face and over-the-top concern about dated cabinets and her “special day” that this must have been filmed in 2019 or before.
Priorities have changed.
It is New Year’s Eve, the last night of 2020. I just turned 40. The weather is the same stale gray. I am drained from isolation and reinventing the same day again and again.
Let’s bake cookies.
Let’s go jump in puddles.
Let’s go to a restaurant, sit on a wet bench in pouring rain and forget for a second that we’re risking our lives.
I am almost out of “let’s.”
In a typical year, we would have been returning from visiting family in Chicago, thrilled to be home, full of gossip and minor gripes about the flight. Instead, 2020 went out with a whimper and I leave the year with a bundle of lessons that overflow in my arms like laundry.
1. Everything Can Change
I’ve learned this over and over again. I don’t like to write about my childhood (hi family), but let’s just say I am used to chaos and disorder, caused by shit storms that sprung up out of nowhere and kicked our house around for a while.
I am so used to the absence of security and order that when I have it, I am scanning the horizon for the next Big Scary Thing.
Ah, there it is. Bring it, pandemic!
The year started with promise and hope and then began to slide. The virus hit the Seattle area first. We went to a kid’s birthday party. Someone (an adult) coughed and we all made an uneasy joke.
And then someone died, then another then another, then a whole lot of people in a nursing home in Kirkland. Then my daughter got sick with a fever and I paced the apartment on the phone with nurses who kept asking if she had a cough and told us no test unless we had traveled to China or Italy or were in direct contact with someone who had traveled to China or Italy.
REMEMBER THAT? NO ONE COULD GET A TEST!
Seattle shut down restaurants the day before we were supposed to celebrate a close friend’s birthday. Nearly one year later, we’re all going to have had a COVID birthday.
Here I thought we would be done by summer at the latest.
I would leave the apartment and wash my hands, come back and wash my hands, slather my hands with sanitizer, wipe down everything. I frantically searched for n-95 masks. I bought emergency water on Amazon. I started to have check-ins with my family, expecting any moment to wake up unable to breathe.
The illusion of control is what changes.
2. Define Your Own Joy
I have spent most of my life in cities just a ticket away from momentary escape.
I started the pandemic life missing breaks — happy hours with friends, movies, concerts, events, going out dancing, getting a haircut while having a glass of wine. One of the last things I “did” was see a play with a friend and the concept of a small, dark theater seems so foreign now.
When shutdowns began, I fantasized about a fashionable depression, the kind where you drink a lot, lay in bed all day, wear all black, and get skinny.
As a mother, there was no time to get sad or even scared. I had to be a fountain of energy and positivity for my child, who was two and just potty trained at the beginning of all of this. I had to push all of my concerns about life’s upheavals down so she didn’t feel a thing.
When you have a little one, you can’t show fear, under any circumstance.
“Mommy just got her arm taken off by a baler. It’s fine, we’re just going to get this gauze and put it around the part where she’s gushing blood. Oh yeah, the blood is red, wow so proud of you for knowing your colors.”
I started having outdoor picnics and letting her run to her heart’s content. I turned a little creek and park by our house into a secret garden. I let her pick up all the rocks she wanted and we put them in a jar.
We went to the beach daily. We started up movie nights and take out nights. We searched for teddy bears in windows and made noise for healthcare workers. Our Easter egg hunt was a search for pictures of eggs stapled to telephone poles. All the cancellations seemed outrageous and now it’s our daily life. No Christmas travel this year, no seeing your grandparents or uncles or aunts.
Yep, Santa is in a snowglobe and it’s OK.
We’re healthy. We’re together. I can escape with a long walk. I am living the same day, but I’ve given up the external pressure. There was so much of it. My feed was a constant scroll of child-free friends having a better time than me.
2019, me: 2:00 am trying to figure out if I should take my daughter to the ER for croup, my husband out of town on business, what a freaking fantastic Saturday night
2019, them: arms linked, Vegas, little black dresses and cocktails. VEGAS BABY
2020, me: splashing in puddles with the littlest love of my life
2020, them: Who knows? Baking sourdough in a pandemic pod?
All of us being isolated makes me feel less alone as a mom and has made me think differently about joy. It’s fine to feel happy in Vegas (I love Vegas), but spending a Saturday night inside with your kids isn’t laammmee or boring at all.
There’s external pressure on all of us to go out and spend, spend, spend. I am now content at home because I am not subjected to a highlight reel of better times I could be having.
3: BE BOLD. Or Don’t. You’ll die anyway.
I just watched the Red Balloon with my daughter. If you haven’t seen it, picture the cutest French kid ever who carries his own attaché and a gorgeous cherry-red balloon that seems to smile all of the time, even though it has no face.
It’s a beautiful relationship. Until the meanest kids ever pop it with a slingshot. I know it’s an allegory about the death of someone you love and the ending of childhood, but let’s look at the balloon.
It’s bold, it’s big, it’s red. It’s unafraid to love the little boy. It’s not even afraid of the mean old teacher or the group of wild teens. It knows it can be popped at any time, but still it’s out there, running wild with its bestie, delivering happiness to everyone in the city, while completely being itself.
Be less afraid. Love unabashedly. Float around the city, soak it all up, take it all in.
Remember the lessons from the same damn day and live.
