COVID: Eighteen Months Later

Here is a fun fact about me. I remember my dreams. And by remember I mean I remember them vividly, pretty much forever. I'm sure not all of them, but a lot of them. This means that a large chunk of my brain is filled with images that my subconscious has quite literally dreamed up for me. These run the gamut from lovely meetings with loved ones that have passes away, where I get to update them on my life and share a beautiful hug, to multiple different scenarios of my children drowning and me not being able to save them. It's a lot to unpack, most of that stems I think from growing up with the constant, and ever present, risk of our house being washed away in a flood. But that's not the point. The point is I remember my dreams and they frequently aren't difficult to unpack their meaning. For instance last Wednesday I woke up, on my children's first day of school for 2021 and shared my dream with Zach. (I'm sure he loves the constant replays of my horrific dreams.) The dream was, I had loaded up my three beautiful boys, and drove off into what appeared to be the Irish countryside. (It was a lovely start, maybe we should move to Ireland.) Then I pulled up in a car line and proceeded to drop my children off, masked off course, into a field full of angry wolves. I waved at their sweet faces as they walked away into the crowd of wolves and then I drove off. This is exactly how I felt on the first day of school and everyday of school as I drop them off. Then I spend the rest of the day with a constant string of questions and worries running through my head. "What have a I done? This is a bad idea? What can I do? How do I make it better? What if they get sick? There aren't any hospital beds! How can we, as adults in society, be so incredibly reckless?" Rinse repeat everyday. Then I pick them up, hug them tightly and ask them my normal post school questions, that now seem completely trivial. .

I have no answers to any of the questions running through my head. Eighteen months later my brain is done. I cannot come up with one sound thought. I cannot make one more hard decision. I cannot come up with one more way to make the most of this situation. I am mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted from the past eighteen months. I feel defeated. I think everyone feels this way. What makes me feel like I am actually going insane is that I think a lot of people's response to these feelings are to pretend that the pandemic is just magically over. They pretend everything is fine, ignoring the giant increase in number of children being hospitalized due to COVID. They ignore the death toll, ignore the guidelines, ignore the huge risk of sending our children to school without masks and without doing any of the things we did last year. They've just stuck their heads directly in the sand and plow forward, posting cute back to school pictures and talking about how everything is back to normal.

To some extent this is what it feels like schools are doing. I've received countless emails about being back to normal, going back to five days a week, planning field trips, dances, pep rallies, and assemblies. There has been zero talk of mitigation methods, social distancing, or quarantine protocols, beyond the tiny blurb at the bottom of the district wide emails. No mention of potential virtual school days or how those will work. It is business as usual, as my children are one of just a handful of kids masked in their classes.

I know that I'm an inherent pessimist. I blame it on my job description, which is caring for people during their the worst case scenario. The things that most people would say, "oh well that would NEVER happen to me," have either actually happened to me or I've watched numerous families experience. They are not beyond the realm of possibility. Also, sadly, during these stressful situations the worst in people can be brought out. So a year ago when people were saying, "we just have to hold on and make it to a vaccine," "We just have to get to the end of the year, then people will get vaccinated and we can return to normal," I was saying, "It doesn't matter if we get a vaccine if we can't get people to take it." Eighteen months later I am devastated to have been correct about this statement.

So here we are and I just don't know what we're holding onto at this point. I guess we're holding on until the pediatric vaccine is approved. I'm holding on until all my children can get vaccinated. Which the earliest that could possibly happen is the middle of April 2022. That's two years of living in a constant state of flight of fight. The brain is not meant live in that state for years at a time. After chronic traumatic stress the brain actually changes, rewiring your neuropathways to in fact remain at a heightened state of fight or flight all the time. It rewires itself because, to use my favorite "your body doesn't know the difference between being attacked by a bear and being stressed about COVID" analogy, your body thinks you have moved into a bear den and are now, for whatever reason, constantly under bear attack. This all happens on a subconscious level and will take lots of time to recover from. I keep thinking any day now I will be able to start doing the work to undo all this trauma, in myself, and in my children. Sadly we are not there yet. So instead I spent a large portion of my day emailing the principles of all three of the buildings where my children go to school, as well as the superintendent and school board members begging for them to reinstate mandatory quarantining of students with known COVID exposures. How is this even a thing up for debate? I do not know, but it is, and I've emailed all the people, which will most likely do exactly nothing. Did I mention I'm exhausted?