Friday Writing...

It's day 42 of being at home, where sitting in a parking lot waiting for someone wearing a mask to bring out groceries feels like a risky maneuver. We've become regular walkers, regular chefs, and frankly, I don't care about my kids' academic career anymore. I'm calling this semester a wash. They can read books, play cards, play baseball with me and sleep in, they can eat ice cream for dinner for all I care, not because I don't care, but because right now, the landscape of life is surviving the long seige as we wait to re-open, and hope it isn't too soon, but that it's soon. I'm worried because I'm starting to hear stories, almost one a day; from my doctor, her brother-in-law died, from my student, his grandfather, from a facebook friend, her mom. I wonder, when the degrees of separation will shift and come closer. I worry, they will. We wear masks. We wear gloves. We hunker down, yet life kept going on.

I wonder if one day, when all of this lifts, if we will feel comfortable going into stores, going out into the world, or if every place from this point forward, will feel like a potential threat to all we love. My daughter picked her college (with five days to go). Another child turned thirteen. Five of my kids graduate this year, and one finished her thesis but it won't be reviewed, it won't be vetted, and it won't be noticed. She struggled as the degree itself starts to feel less valuable, with the price tag remaining just as high as it was before the Corona Virus struck, but the benefits now seem transitory at best. How do I help her enjoy and celebrate her accomplishment when what is valuable and what is not, keeps shifting? The losses they have, I can't fix, not the lost prom, the lost track season, the lost confirmation, picnics, field trips, all the extras that make April and May and June so crowded, all of it's gone.

I remember grousing about how busy we'd be, and now, it's all wiped clear. I have a daughter graduating from college, another from high school, another from eigth grade. Will they wear the robes? Will their degrees carry the weight of their work, or only the stamp and stigma of being 2020? I don't know. If there's a lesson from 2020, it's that. We don't know when will end. We don't know if next week, we'll have jobs. We don't know if when we order groceries, if they'll come. We don't know if the degrees will count. We don't know if colleges will be open in the fall. So my daughter has chosen her school, but the reality is, we do not know, we do not know, we do not know. What I do know is, we just have to live with this uncertainty as a constant, and that will change how we respond to everything.