I’ve lost track of time. I know we haven’t quite hit two months in shut down but will probably after the 16th of May. Where I live in California things are still shut down until the end of May. As a parent, all my thoughts are turning to the summer and how to handle social distancing. I suspect I’ll be back at my office in June while my daughter will still be doing school at home. My husband is probably going to be the lone parent at home when that starts as his work is more conducive to being done from home. Also the business he works for encourages that. Mine does not. They are allowing it because of the circumstances. I am truly grateful for a job, but time will tell what that job is.
I really am anxious to get my child back to playing with at least one friend. While I feel as an adult I can deal with the isolation from an intellectual vantage point, my daughter who is 10, doesn’t have that luxury. Mind you she has adapted in an amazing way, but a whole summer without other kids would be brutal.
Most camps we know of have cancelled. I’m still holding out hope for one in June but who knows. We have all shelved any summer travel plans. We hope things may ease enough to take a short road trip somewhere for a week, but that would purely be a change of scenery. We aren’t looking to eat out as we normally would. It would be a lot of self-prepared meals and hopefully travel with another family. But of course those are a lot of ifs.
My in-laws are back in New York and I don’t expect to travel back there this year at all. I don’t really want them to travel here either even if they want to. It just is something that can skip a year. Maybe I’m paranoid and maybe things will change significantly but as of today, I don’t see much travel before mid-2021 at the earliest.
Maybe a road trip but for the time being, that is all I can think about. It seems to be a bit silly to be concerned about travel right now. I know many are out of work. I’m fortunate that both my husband and I still have jobs. This is not lost on me. I know it is going to take years to recover from this economically, but I also realize if we didn’t do this “shelter in place” our state and country would be ravaged even worse than we have been. That too would effect the economy. I also fear for a resurgence of this virus, potentially in a different form in the Fall and Winter. I’m still concerned about my mother who is 95 and is in an even greater restricted lock down at her retirement community. My Aunt with dementia as well. They are both more vulnerable and more bored than I am.
Mostly it is the not knowing how this will play out. I see people protest that they want things opened up. Part of me just says, let them go out there. The rest of us will stay put, thank you very much. You can be our canary in the coal mine. But that is selfish too, as there are those who don’t have a choice. They have to work on the front lines but it in health care, grocery stores, or the post office.
We as a society though need to get our shit together. These white boys with semi-automatic weapons? They need to be arrested. Fine, protest. But you don’t need guns. If you were a person of color you would be locked up. Unemployed? State governments need to call on somebody to let people get through. We can’t go to the offices, and people can’t get through on the phone. I have no idea how it works online. People need to get paid so they can eat.
I know the road ahead is not going to be easy. But we need to get it together as a society. Help each other out. But I fear, the last 3.5 years have pulled us apart more than brought us together. Therein lies the true problem of our current situation.