Gimme Shelter

Today I went into a bread type bakery store for about 3 minutes to procure an overwhelming amount of carbs. With my son. It felt weird because everything feels weird now and made me think about how little I do outside of the house with my kid now.

A year ago, there were whispers of weirdness but we were still naive enough to not fully comprehend what was coming. However, we’ve been in it for nearly a year now and have we fully comprehend what is happening? I remember hearing on NPR, a big conversation discussing the difference between a pandemic and a epidemic. We knew so little compared to what we know now.

Before all this, my son was my forever date. My husband was often out of town for long stretches of time so making our way through town was our sanctuary. Coffee shops and the Target toy section soaked up a lot of our time. The owner at our neighborhood sushi place often held my son when we would visit. So many random places, we lingered and engaged with strangers.

Now, I can count on one hand (maybe two fingers?) how many times my son has been in a public place in the past year. I’m thankful we’ve been able to pull this off and he’ll be totally fine after all of this because overall, we present that everything is usually OK with open conversations about how this isn’t normal and this is just for now and we need to be grateful for what we have. I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet over the parents that are ranting and raving over how this is damaging our kids. It’s altering them for sure and I’m lucky because mine doesn’t know any different from spending his days with us but this time is an opportunity to cultivate our children’s flexibility and teach them that we really have very little control over what happens to us, yet have absolute control over how we respond. It’s a time of creativity and an opportunity to welcome big emotions and the room to discuss them. This isn’t ideal. This isn’t normal. Yet, it’s happening and we just have to keep doing the best we can.