The Reason Post-Pandemic Life Should Not Be Romanticized

Some things will be easier, but some may be harder. Whether society will be wiser is another question altogether. JL

Courtney Martin comments in Medium:

When the pandemic is over, I hope we will all be wiser about some things (like investing in common goods, including public education and health care) and some people (like who we elect to lead us and tell us what’s dangerous and what’s safe). But even then, we will not have transcended the mess of who we are, alone or together. We aren’t on the other side of Covid, but we will be someday. And our days will still be multidimensional, easier in some ways and harder in others.

For months, I’ve been playing school with Stella, my four-year-old daughter. Usually, this involves difficult homework that must be checked, a class pet that must be fed, and the teacher eventually adopting the student because her parents have disappeared. (The teacher was looking for a kid to live with her anyway, so it all works out.)

As such, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the first morning that we took Stella back to her little home-based preschool in real life, she was psyched. As we drove, however, I noticed Stella becoming quieter and quieter. We rode along in silence, both of us starting to feel the strangeness of this transition sink into our bodies.

When we got there, she clung to me like a baby monkey. All of the giddy energy was obscured by a palpable sense of terror. Going back to school had seemed like such a good idea. And now, faced with the sight of her old teachers and her old friends — one who had new glasses, the other who had grown at least a few inches — she wanted to crawl back inside the strange cocoon of our family that we’ve been ungracefully weaving these five months of sheltering in. It’s claustrophobic in there. It’s filled with the groans of her sister, who is so sick of her breaking her Legos, and the frustration of her father — why must she always go up the carpeted stairs with her filthy feet? It’s lonely sometimes. It’s boring sometimes. But it’s hers. It’s ours.

 

Her teacher took her temperature at the gate, just as we’d discussed she would, and then led Stella by the hand, back into the fold of her little preschool.

As I was driving home, I kept searching for my own elation, but it wasn’t there. I finally had a break, for a few hours, from that frenetic, four-year-old energy. It was a moment I’d dreamed about often while taking a rage walk around the block. I needed time away from my child. She needed time with her peers. Where was my 159-day exhale?

And then I thought of Stella — the giddiness and the clinging, the exuberantly packed backpack and the quiet ride. She was imagining a perfect future, and so was I. But when we arrived at the thing we’d been anticipating and idealizing, the situation was complex — like life has always been. We aren’t on the other side of Covid, but we will be someday. And as moments like this show me, our days will still be multidimensional, easier in some ways and harder in others. Life on the other side of anything is still just life, in all its duality. Clinging to the comfort of the past or romanticizing the future keeps us from embracing all that is here right now.

Seeing Stella’s layered emotionality for what it was — normal and real — helped me be gentle with my own. When I returned home, I made some weird egg carton art with my older daughter Maya, who basked in my undivided attention. Ah, there it is, the relief next to the sadness of Stella’s absence. I’ve so longed not to feel torn in a thousand directions, satisfying no one fully — most profoundly, myself. This was different. We did a thing and only that thing. And it made us both feel so edified, so fulfilled.

We researched when googly eyes were invented (1919!). We read Ramona and her Father (surprisingly heavy themes!). We wrapped our limbs around one another on the couch. We were very quiet — which is more our style than Stella’s. We luxuriated in that quiet. And when she came home, full of the noise of her day — They ate noodles! And had a talent show! And there’s a new girl! — we loved that, too.

As humans, we can have more than one emotion at a time. In fact, we mostly have more than one emotion at a time. Especially during times of transition and trauma. We are grateful to be free and weirdly miss our confinement. We are in love and filled with loathing. We are generous and selfish, independent and so needy, wise and dumb as a box of rocks. Growing and regressing, empowered and resentful, so brave and so scared. All at once.

When the pandemic is over, I hope we will all be wiser about some things (like investing in common goods, including public education and health care) and some people (like who we elect to lead us and tell us what’s dangerous and what’s safe). But even then, we will not have transcended the mess of who we are, alone or together. Our task is to learn how to feel many things at once and keep moving forward anyway. I was reminded of that this week, by my scared, brave child.