The phone rang the night before Thanksgiving, just as I was about to plop my turkey into a 5-gallon bucket of brine. The woman on the line introduced herself as the supervisor for my son's preschool.
Instead of hello, my first words were, "Oh, no ... "
Because I knew what she was about to say.
I had just gone through the same scenario two weeks earlier with my third-grader. The first time around, it was the school nurse telling me a "close contact" in his class tested positive for COVID-19, and that my child would have to stay home for a week and a half.
We had just made it to the other side — my kid rejoined his classroom, I danced a jig — when I got the news that we'd have to do it all over again, this time with his little brother. And now I was expending energy on the mental calculus on whether to cancel Thanksgiving with my parents.
When I talk to other parents wrestling with these kinds of disruptions nearly two years after the start of the pandemic, they describe an out-of-body experience. The tank carrying all of that early COVID spunk has been depleted. Whether they are caring for family members sickened by the virus or kids shut out of classrooms because of raging case counts, they feel like they're a shell of their former selves.
When the pandemic hit, we rallied. Adrenaline bought us a way to cope with the unknown and move forward in crisis, as did the promise of a vaccine. But as one of my friends observed, we're not writing on sidewalks with chalk anymore, spreading messages of hope and solidarity. There are no teddy bears in living room windows. We are exhausted.
My tremendous privilege of having a partner and a flexible job that allows me to work from home helped our family power through the disruption. Still, I had almost forgotten the absurdity of trying to do any work while staying on top of remote instruction for a young child.