All Those Defiant Sparks

All my life, I’ve believed that no matter how dark this world gets, there’s light behind that darkness, light that always shines through in the end.

This belief has been fundamental to my writing, to the sometimes-dark stories I tell and to all the stories I tell. Terrible things happen. But light—something within humanity that generates light—finds ways to fight that darkness.

This belief has been fundamental to my life, too, helping me see my way through the challenges of childhood—bullying by my peers, growing up in a home with a share of love but also a share of chaos and yelling and strife.

Things might look dark, but no darkness is absolute. Light finds a way through, one way or another. For so many years, I believed that. I was never sure where my belief came from: The stories I raised myself on? God? Some mix of these things or some other thing entirely? Whatever the source, I’d always been grateful for this conviction, always known it for the gift it was. 

Until the pandemic—and the years leading up to the pandemic, too—challenged all that.

Not because of the virus itself. Because of the many people—not just outwardly problematic people, not just actively hateful people, but more people than not out of all people—who’ve decided that in the face of the virus, they’re just not up for caring about each other anymore. At least not when it comes to slowing the spread of a contagious disease that even now kills thousands of people a day and disables a great many more.

Not if they have to do it for more than a handful of months. Not if they have to be inconvenienced or change habits or rethink how they live and socialize over the long term.

Not if they have to make real sacrifices.

Some people are out and out vicious about their lack of care for one another, bursting into hateful screaming and abuse and occasionally even violence when asked to do something as simple as put on a mask. A great many more people are merely indifferent, though, and in many ways I think this is worse. These are the people who shrug and say if mitigation measures like masking and testing and contact tracing are no longer required, they just won’t go to the trouble. The people who go with the flow and wear masks and get vaccinated and avoid indoor dining when other people are doing it, but when other people stop, they stop too. The people who say they care, but also that they miss concerts and conferences and indoor sporting events too much to do without them.

The people who instinctively reach for the “normal” they know and miss, and don’t think twice about the cost.

And then there’s the most indifferent, most immoral, and most common reason for pursuing that normalcy of all: 

I’ve evaluated my personal risk and decided it’s low.

My risk. Not the risk posed to others, even though during a pandemic no risk is truly “personal.” Our actions affect other people; that’s how contagious diseases work. We’re all more vulnerable than we think, but beyond that, the infection that’s mild for one person becomes part of a chain of transmission that could kill a vulnerable stranger they’ll never meet.

Yet more and more people are saying, with disconcerting directness, not just, “I’m taking care of myself (a good and necessary thing),” but “I’m only taking care of myself.” Everyone else is on their own.

Everyone is on their own. That’s the part of the pandemic that has broken me. We’re denying our connection to one another, denying it so deeply that we’d rather see strangers die than admit the world has changed without warning and might never change fully back.

Everyone is on their own. Where did all that light I saw shining through the darkness even come from, if it wasn’t from people finding ways to connect with one another, to care about one another, to in some small way redeem one another, even in dark times?

These are dark times, not because of the virus, but because of what we as humans have let the virus turn us into. (And because of other things too. If I’m honest I have to admit all of this began long before Covid, and that I bear a fair amount of privilege and responsibility for the fact that I’ve been able to avoid fully feeling and facing it until the past few years.)

But how do we come back from this? How do I come back from this?

How do I find my way back to believing in a world where light can be hidden, sometimes for a long time, but is still always out there, waiting to be found, waiting to shine through once more?

How do I find my way back when all around me are people so scared of the dark that instead of trying to light one another’s way they’ve turning their own small lights off entirely, because their personal risk is low and they no longer know how to think beyond that?

The fact that I want to believe such a world still exists is a start, I suppose.

Now I just have to figure out whether I really do still believe in it—and where to go from there.

I was ready to end this essay here. Yet even as I wrote the lines above, something inside me spoke up and said:

Start by focusing on your light—the light you yourself have to offer, the light you’ve defiantly refused to let gutter out, even now. Focus on that light and what you can still do with it, rather than on the light others have forgotten they even possess.

That sounds hard, honestly. It sounds lonely. 

But light sparks light, after all. Somewhere deep down I still know that. And shining our own light can make us more aware of all those other defiant lights out there sparking, too. 

Maybe, just maybe, that can be a start, too.

There is no “back to normal.” There’s only forward to whatever comes next.

The trouble with talking about getting “back to normal” is that time doesn’t run backwards. It runs forwards.

We can no more return to a pre-Covid world than we can return to typewriters or gas lamps or steam trains or diplomacy without the threat of nuclear weapons.

The fact that Covid is likely to be with us for a while yet is not a reason to pretend it isn’t here anymore. It’s a reason to evolve and adapt and find better ways of managing and existing in our changed world. 

Whether it’s learning new ways of socializing outdoors or improving ventilation indoors, learning to live with masking, getting better at quickly developing vaccines that respond to current virus variants instead of long extinct ones, or countless other things we haven’t thought of yet because we’ve been so busy trying to go backwards instead of forwards that most of us haven’t really stopped to think, haven’t really tried get creative, haven’t put in the hard work of finding new ways of being and doing—as well as the hard work of finding new ways of communicating the need for change, too.

If we keep trying to go “back,” we pay the price in human lives, all while grasping for something that’s well out of reach—grasping for a time and a way of life that are no longer ours.

But if we let go of what was and instead try to move forward—well, then maybe we can find our way through where we are now to something new. Something that works better. Something that costs fewer lives.

Something, even, that makes us feel hopeful about the future, instead forever sad that we can’t reclaim the past.

And maybe, just maybe, once we’ve done that for the pandemic, we can also do it for all the many other looming challenges we face together, as well.

Broken windows

I always thought personal responsibility meant not just taking responsibility for how your actions affect you, but also how your actions affect others.

I mean, if you throw a ball and it breaks a window, you don’t just check whether any of the glass shards cut your own skin and then move on. You also apologize to the person whose window you broke. You especially apologize to the person whose window you broke.

You definitely don’t say the owner of the window is to blame for not using safety glasses or putting up shutters or for having the bad luck to live in a house within easy shot of a playground.

And okay, sure, there will always be people who hide or run or deny that ball was theirs. But they’re the ones who are failing to take personal responsibility. We all know that.

So how did we come to believe that, during a pandemic, personal responsibility instead means just taking responsibility for whether our actions cause us and our loved ones to become sick, disabled, or even die? How did we come to believe it only matters if the glass cuts our own skin?

That’s not how it works. If I willfully act in ways that increase my chances of infecting others, I’m personally responsible for that.

Even if the people I infect choose to be around me of their own free will. Even if they’re high risk or have comorbidities or are just in poorer health than me. Even if they seemed “healthy” but got hit hard anyway. I’m personally responsible.

Even if no one else around me was acting to protect others, either. Even if there’s peer pressure not to protect others, and I don’t want to speak up or say no or be the only person in the room wearing a mask. I’m personally responsible.

Even if the people I infect are fine but they go on to infect strangers I’ll never know and never meet and never hear about who aren’t fine. I’m personally responsible.

Even—yes, even—if they failed to get vaccinated, failed to protect themselves as fully as they could have. I still threw that ball through the window. It doesn’t matter if the window should have had safety glass in place. I’m still the one who broke it.

If we remembered what personal responsibility meant in other contexts, would we act to protect others during this pandemic, instead of mostly only acting to protect ourselves and those closest to us?

Or is that too much to ask, in any context? Have the stresses of an ongoing pandemic broken somehow inside us, making it too much to ask?

Leaving us unwilling to be personally responsible for our actions after all?

Infecting an Entire Elementary School with Covid Is My Personal Choice

Hey, it’s me, the brave local mom who went viral for defying the city’s mask mandate last year. As you know, I suffered lots of persecution for that, including dirty looks from my fellow shoppers at the Grab and Go and that one cashier who snapped, “Lady, just take your Diet Coke and Twinkies and go!”

But when it comes to personal choice, I don’t compromise. I only have one face, and I choose what does and doesn’t go on it, even when that face is shedding airborne particles of a potentially lethal virus. I declined the Covid19 vaccine for much the same reason — I choose not to inject unknown substances into my body. Except for Diet Coke, Twinkies, and the cheese sauce on the fries at my favorite poorly ventilated dining establishment, of course …

Read the rest at Frazzled.

Kids React to FDA Vaccine Approval: It’s About F*cking Time

The FDA approved a lower dose of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for five to eleven-year-olds today. How do area kids feel about getting the jab?

“It’s about f*cking time,” said Ava Phillips, age nine, speaking from the bedroom where she was waiting for the health department to lift the quarantine on her fourth-grade class

Read More at Frazzled.

For parents, the pandemic’s lesson is clear. We’re on our own.

As a new mother, I struggled with isolation and loneliness, as many new parents do.

I was an older mom, and most of my friends were childless or had older kids. My new-parent schedule didn’t leave much time for seeing anyone whose day wasn’t structured around naptime and bedtime, and that was hard enough. Harder still, though, was the way everyone, even those who’d once had babies at home, seemed to have forgotten just how hard caring for an infant or toddler really was.

How else to explain the way they told me I should enjoy these precious years, when I wasn’t yet sure how I’d survive them? How else to explain how they kept saying everything would go by far too fast, when all I wanted was a break from days that never seemed to end?

How else to make sense of the way they insisted motherhood looked so good on me, that they could see the happiness shining through on my face, when I was exhausted and drowning?

From the very start, I loved my daughter. But I didn’t love the loneliness and the disconnect that seemed an inescapable part of early parenting. I didn’t love how many people outright refused to remember just how rough the early days of this journey could be.

With time, things got better. I caught up on sleep. I met new friends who had littles of their own and so hadn’t had a chance to forget yet. My schedule became more flexible, letting old friends back in. By elementary school, surrounded by an entire cohort of parents in the exact same place I was, the memory of isolation had faded into the background.

Until the pandemic hit.

Until schools closed, cities went on lockdown, and my family and I were once again on our own.

All of us parents did our best to support each other, in the beginning, through that first impossible spring of remote learning — while our kids had screaming fits during Zoom sessions; while the spark left their eyes as they stared, glazed over and depressed, at computer screens all day; while we fought our own depression and fear as we tried to get our own work done and support our children at the exact same time.

By the end of the school year our cheerful text threads fell silent, though, as we all focused on the same single critical question: Would schools reopen in the fall? Schools had to reopen, didn’t they? None of us could imagine doing this again.

During the endless summer that followed, everything else reopened instead. Bars. Restaurants. Gyms. Disneyworld. In Arizona, where I live, early lockdowns had kept Covid case numbers in check all spring, but now, one reckless reopening at a time, our numbers rose, and rose again, and rose some more. Like most of the US, by fall Arizona’s Covid cases were so high that schools couldn’t reopen. Somehow, we were going to have to get through another season of remote learning after all.

Yet once again I found little empathy from non-parents for the challenges ahead, because once again, adults not actively parenting their own kids had forgotten what parenting was really like. They had to have forgotten, because how else could they sleep at night knowing bars were open but schools were closed? How else could they be good with letting families struggle just so they could go out for dinner, or see a movie, or have a drink with friend?

But they were good with that. More than good with it — far too many people convinced themselves that overwhelmed parents were the selfish ones for wanting it any other way. Friends whose children had left home years ago told me how happily they would have homeschooled during a pandemic. Grandparents who hadn’t seen their grandkids in months insisted those grandkids were totally happy with remote learning so my kid should be too. Strangers on social media insisted parents were self-centered for needing child care, for caring about our children’s mental health, for wanting to hang on to our jobs, for not having the skill to more cheerfully teach our kids, in social isolation, about subjects we didn’t fully understand in a format they weren’t developmentally wired for.

Too many people still seemed to think that parents could, through a simple act of will, choose to be glowing with happiness instead of drowning from exhaustion.

Again, things eventually got better. Covid case numbers dipped enough that schools opened again, with far better Covid mitigation plans than most of the businesses that only briefly had to close. Mine and my child’s mental health — along with the mental health of most families I knew — improved dramatically, and whatever the social media forums said, this was not a trivial thing.

There were ups and downs after that. Covid numbers spiked again in the winter, spiked alarmingly as people bought plane tickets, visited family, traveled for the holidays, and traveled some more just because they really needed a vacation, all while still happily shopping in person and eating out as well.

When Covid numbers finally fell again, it wasn’t thanks to anyone’s good behavior. It was because the winter holidays were over and there was less time for traveling. It was because vaccines had become more widely available, at least in the US.

Even so, for the first time in a long time, I almost felt hopeful. I got vaccinated as soon as I could. I watched as the age for vaccine eligibility kept dropping. I outright cheered when the FDA approved the first vaccine for kids 12 and older. A few more months, a few more trials and approvals, and kids under 12 would be eligible to be vaccinated too. With Covid numbers still dropping, with mask mandates still in place, I began to think that maybe even before then my daughter and I could venture out safely come summer.

I should have known better. I should have remembered that my child — that any child — was the last thing most people cared about.

The CDC decided, reasonably enough, that vaccinated people were safe without masks in most settings. My city decided, not reasonably at all, that this meant it was time to completely lift public masking requirements. In response local businesses put up meaningless signs saying masks were “strongly recommended” for the unvaccinated, made it clear they had no plans to enforce this recommendation, and declared they were good to go. If half the adults in my city remained unvaccinated, if those unvaccinated adults were surely taking off their masks along with everyone else, if all those unmasked unvaccinated adults caused another spike in Covid cases? Not the businesses’ problem.

If my city was suddenly a more dangerous place for everyone under 12 — a huge group of children who couldn’t get vaccinated even if they wanted to be? That wasn’t the business’ problem, either.

And once again, most adults not raising children just didn’t care, maybe because they were too busy celebrating their newfound “right” to take off their own masks.

Try telling them that lifting mask mandates puts kids in danger? They say it doesn’t matter, because they personally are vaccinated so can’t possibly be part of the problem. Try telling them their unmasking encourages the unvaccinated to unmask too? Well, they can’t possibly be responsible for anyone else’s behavior, and besides, by unmasking the unvaccinated are only putting themselves at risk anyway. Try telling them that rising Covid cases, even among the unvaccinated, threatens my child and countless children like her? Again — they’re vaccinated. They’re officially not responsible for anyone but themselves.

Never mind that the first lesson of any contagious disease should be that we’re all responsible for each another, that our actions affect not just ourselves but others too, because that’s how contagious diseases work.

Other local venues are opening here now, too. Public pools, where masking isn’t even possible, opened Memorial Day weekend, while the whole country is talking about getting back to “normal” by the 4th of July. Never mind that kid vaccines aren’t expected until September. Everyone is so, so glad to be moving on.

Everyone except for children and their parents. We don’t get that luxury.

So here I am. Facing down a long, isolated summer where every trip out is a renewed exercise in risk calculation. A summer spent worrying about which public places, if any, are safe for my daughter, all while around me others celebrate the end of the pandemic and look for more restrictions to lift. After all, why should anyone let the existence of a few million children under 12 get in the way of their personal happiness?

I know, I know. It will get better. Probably. Eventually. But until then, the message from my community and my country is painfully clear: this summer, I’m on my own, as surely as any sleep-deprived new parent.

The only difference is that this time, it’s going to be a lot harder to forget how much all those around me refused to see, when one day normal catches up with my family and all the other families like us at last.

Life isn’t a story. That’s probably a good thing.

Life isn’t a story.

This is, for the most part, a good thing. Stories need conflict. Stories need drama. Stories need, more often than not, for the worst possible thing to happen at the worst possible time.

No one wants to live in a well-written story.

The pandemic isn’t a story. But if it were, I think we’d be at the part where it looks like everything is about to wrap up and wind down at last — but it isn’t, quite.

Vaccines are here and widely available, even if not as many people as hoped for are taking them. Covid case numbers are down, at least in our country and at least in certain communities within our country. Some of the time, for some of the people, things are beginning to feel almost … normal.

Which is why this would be the part of the story where readers begin flipping through the pages (physical books) or checking out the status bar (ebooks) to see if we’re really as close to the ending as we think.

It would be the part of the story where we realize that there are so many more pages left to go than we expected — too many for the story to really be winding down, too many for the resolution to be as simple as it seemed.

It would be the part where at least one more unexpected-yet-somehow-inevitable thing needed to happen. One more threat, one more unexpected twist, one more call for our weary characters to find their strength and rise above their weaknesses, to endure the unendurable and overcome one last overwhelming obstacle.

It would be where we realize the pandemic and its consequences aren’t over yet, that we were in too much of a hurry to think they were, that we need to keep reading for a while yet before we reach the satisfying conclusion and cathartic sigh of relief we’re longing for.

I’m glad the pandemic isn’t a story.

I’m glad those of us who hear those pages flipping have as much chance as being wrong as of being right. Maybe the pandemic still is building up to a dramatically satisfying ending. There are certainly enough unresolved plot threads left for one. But maybe, if we’re lucky, it’s instead just staggering to an undramatic, unsatisfying, mostly meaningless, utterly weary end.

Stories need meaning. Life, thankfully, does not.

But life also doesn’t let us skip ahead, doesn’t let us read the ending ahead of time for reassurance before returning to our carefully bookmarked place.

I hope the pandemic isn’t a story.

But if it is a story, I hope it’s a standalone story.

Because as readers know, if the pandemic isn’t a standalone story, then the end of book one is just a lull. A chance for readers to catch their breath — right before all those unresolved plot threads come crashing down, with all the force of a world that extends far beyond our own borders and a tale that was always, always more complicated than it seemed.

From Spring to Spring: A Pandemic Year

It’s been more than a year since I last believed in normal.

A year since the ordinary spring afternoon when we left our jobs and our schools behind for the weekend, not understanding, yet, that on Monday we wouldn’t return.

From the start, even as I settled in to remote learning and remote working, I knew, deep down, that this was going to last longer than we were admitting, but I didn’t know just how much longer. A month? A season? Surely by the end of summer, the beginning of fall, we’d be able to get on with our lives.

We all settled in to remote learning and remote working.

Summer and fall seemed such a long time to wait, back then. Three months. Six months. A lifetime. There was so much that we didn’t understand. How this new virus spread. How we could stop it from spreading. Whether the entire food supply chain was about to collapse, or whether a few short-term pasta and toilet-paper shortages would be the worst of it.

I tried not to think, in the beginning, about just how much there was to fear. I tried to laugh at it all, and sometimes I even succeeded.

I also hunkered down, because there wasn’t much else to be done. I went for walks. I painted rocks. I planted vegetables and learned to make sushi. I struggled through remote learning with my child.

Painted rocks and painted bricks.

I dreamed of escaping into the mountains for the summer, until the mountains began to burn.

Really, wearing these things just isn’t all that hard.

I learned to wear a mask and despaired as others refused to learn. I met friends outdoors, in socially distant lawn chairs, and worried even that was a risk best avoided. I watched as businesses closed, then opened too soon, then closed again and opened too soon again. It seemed no one wanted to admit that normal wasn’t coming back any time soon.

I watched as the cost of that denial came to be measured in human lives. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. I watched as too many people kept eating out, kept gathering with family, kept talking vacations, all for no better reason than that they’d always done these things before and couldn’t bear to live without them.

I’d always done these things and couldn’t bear to live without them, either, but somehow I lived without them anyway.

It wasn’t enough. Those who followed the rules still died because of those who ignored them. There was no longer any such thing as an action that affected only the person taking it. Everything we did now affected everyone around us, affected strangers we’d never meet, affected our entire community. That’s how pandemics work.

That’s how life works. It’s just that when everything seems normal, some of us have the luxury of forgetting that, some of the time.

Some of us have the luxury of forgetting all sorts of things.

Maybe normal was always an illusion. But illusion or not, too many people kept insisting on doing too many things, just to prove that no one could tell them which things to do. Our Covid numbers rose, then fell, then rose again and just kept rising.

Time blurred. A blistering, wildfire-fueled Arizona summer. An autumn overwhelmed by more remote learning. A careful, careful return to learning in person.

An actual view from my backyard last summer.

An election. A riot. A transfer of power that no one called peaceful, because free and fair elections had become one more thing to deny in spite of the evidence.

A winter spent feeling angry and helpless, despairing that it didn’t have to be like this. But it was like this, and nothing I did could change the fact.

When the first vaccines came, months and years ahead of schedule, I should have felt hope, even joy. But I was suspicious of hope by then, and scarcely dared believe in it. If this was hope, it was literally in short supply, anyway, as hope too often is.

So instead I argued with strangers who refused to wear masks at the post office and insisted on holding birthday parties in the park. I yelled at family members for eating out. I lost friends when I told them they had no business going on vacation, not now.

Yet in the end, despair had no more power to change reality than denial did. Spring came, because spring does, whatever we do or fail to do. Arizona’s Covid numbers started to fall again, first slowly, then faster. My backyard irises bloomed—a gift from a stranger I’d never met, the stranger who owned my house before me.

No matter how badly I treat them, they come back every spring.

I began going for walks again, and wondered when I’d stopped. I planted more vegetables. I volunteered at a local vaccine clinic, and kept volunteering even after I was vaccinated.

My vegetables are less forgiving than my irises, but sometimes, they grow too.

I started to believe that maybe, just maybe, this hope thing was real after all.

I struggled–still struggle–with forgiveness. All the restaurants and other businesses who opened or re-opened too soon, because the rules said they could and they decided their economic survival mattered more than other people’s literal, physical survival. All the individuals who refused to wear masks or shelter in place because they decided their personal struggles mattered more those lives, too. So very many people who just decided they couldn’t or wouldn’t follow the same basic precautions I’m weary from following, and who with their refusal made this all last so much longer.

I tell myself their decisions came from weakness. not malice. I tell myself that carrying so much anger only hurts me, not them. Yet I wonder—how do we forgive when no one is sorry, when so many have made clear they would do it all the same way again? This isn’t over yet, and some days it seems that even after so much time, no one has learned anything after all. Even as I write this there are Arizonans pushing to relax the rules, too soon, yet again.

Still, it is spring, and there is hope, and I’ve finally come to the part of this story where at least I believe these things are real.

Now I just need to push through a little further, on to the part where I learn, once more, how to trust them.

Kids are awesome, pandemic edition

Can we take a moment to recognize the strength and resilience of elementary-school-aged kids during this pandemic?

They’re putting on their masks and their backpacks and walking into school on their own every morning, even the littlest ones, whose parents couldn’t follow them on campus for their first day of kindergarten this year. They’re learning how to learn at a distance, no more hugs from their teachers, no more sharing a pencil or a snack or a high five with their classmates. Even so, they’re still finding ways to have fun with their friends. They’re still growing, socially and emotionally as well as physically.

Or else they’re booting up borrowed laptops at home, working their way through packets of worksheets on the couch or the bed or the kitchen table or a quiet corner of the closet. They’re learning surrounded by the noise and chaos of their families, or else in the silence of a home where everyone else is busy working, too, even the grownups. When they’re missing their friends, they bring their cats and their dogs and their stuffies with them into their virtual classrooms. They’re learning how to learn on their own, even as they keep their friendships alive through video chats and outdoor play dates and shared Minecraft worlds

Or else they’re simply hanging in there, day after day, while learning and friends become increasingly distant memories. They’re caring for themselves and their even-younger siblings full time while their parents work, or they’re struggling to survive on their own, in homes where emotional or physical violence are—or have become—the norm, without the option of escaping into a classroom for a few hours a day.

For some kids, the victory is that they’re continuing to learn and grow and connect with their friends. For others, the victory is that they’re surviving at all.

They’re heroes, every last one of them.

As adults, facing so many of our own real challenges right now, it’s easy not to notice this. Let’s stop and notice it now. Remember how, when you were a kid, summer seemed to last forever? For today’s kids, Covid-19 has been three summers long—so far. But they’re still here, still surviving and, on good days, even thriving. They’re handling an impossible situation, if not perfectly, still with more strength and grace than many grownups.

And I think that’s pretty amazing.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash