Tag: pandemic dispatches

All Those Defiant Sparks

On By Janni Posted in generalTagged , 3 Comments

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.

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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

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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?

There’s no pandemic in the universe next door

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Some days I feel like I’m living in a parallel universe.

I’ve seen the data, data showing that my community, like so many communities, has yet again reached high levels of Covid transmission. I’ve heard the pleas from those at high risk, begging others to care about them enough to try to protect them, to try to help slow this thing down so that one day they’ll have a better way of protecting themselves than staying locked in while their friends—the people they thought were their friends—go out and party.

And I’ve seen those around me ignore these things, utterly.

When friends and colleagues talk about being excited to be return to in-person events, without a trace of hesitation, often without seeming knowledge that Covid is still here at all, I’m baffled. The best of them wear masks to protect themselves. No one talks about protecting others. I’ve heard otherwise kind, compassionate people talk about how others at these events are responsible for their own decisions, about how those at risk should just stay home.

I haven’t heard anyone talk about those who might caught up in the chain transmission that begins at these events, people who never even attended them but have friends, or friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends, who did. People who could experience long term disability or even—yes—death as a result of the actions of people they’ll never meet.

So many people seem unwilling to avoid doing anything, anything at all, to slow this virus down. So many insist on attending not just small gatherings but conventions and conferences (and concerts and plays and basketball games) with thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people. They say we can’t stay on lockdown forever, as if lockdown or a 100,000 person indoor meetup are the only options, no middle ground.

And—this is where I get to feeling like I really am in another, neighboring universe—so many don’t even seem aware these issues exist or need to be considered at all anymore. Those around me say they’re thrilled to be back in person, and then—maybe with a mask added for good measure, maybe not—they carry on as if attending these events, no matter how large the crowd, no matter how lax the safety measures, is perfectly normal, even admirable. They share feel-good group photos about how wonderful and heartwarming and healing it is to be hanging with others again.

If there’s a slight edge of desperation to some of these posts, some hint of trying too hard to prove that life is good and the cool kids are together again, well, no one talks about that either.

They do talk about going out for drinks and sharing meals at these events as if that’s perfectly normal too, as if it’s just what one does, as if it doesn’t undo so much of the good of whatever safety precautions they are taking—never mind that any safety precautions only go so hard in large enough a crowd anyway.

When pressed about this, people talk about the need for professional connections and professional collaboration and professional knowledge exchange. In the writing community, they also say that they have no choice because they have to sell their books, their work. And sure, that’s always a real and pressing and ongoing concern, but can’t creative people get creative? Can’t we re-imagine how we reach readers and viewers, and search for ways to sell our work that don’t require attending huge events, or doing all the other things we did Before simply because we’ve always done them?

But no one really wants to talk about that either.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve imagined we’re still in a pandemic at all—but then I look at the data again and I listen to those at risk again. I accept that vaccines, while they’re so important and do help so much, aren’t the perfectly impenetrable wall we hoped they’d be. I remind myself that my mild case of Covid could become someone else’s serious case of Covid, because that’s how contagious diseases work.

Call it gaslighting, call it cognitive dissonance—but something strange really is going on here. The depth of denial is frightening, and isolating, and honestly kind of lonely.

I wonder why so few people seem to understand how much and how deeply we’ve stopped caring about each other, when it comes to this infectious disease, even as they keep caring about each other in so many other ways. It’s as if Covid exists in it’s own little box, separate from all the many things we care about. All the many things we allow ourselves to think about.

Many events have been ending with Covid outbreaks, outbreaks large enough to affect not just attendees but also their communities. But then the next event comes around, and somehow nothing changes—everyone is still thrilled to be back in person, back with their friends, back in business, as if the examples of the gatherings right before theirs just don’t count somehow.

Maybe it’s all just denial in the end, denial and desperation. Or maybe I do just live in a parallel universe after all.

But there’s something going on here that I don’t fully understand, and that I’m still grappling with as the pandemic—because yes, there still is a pandemic—goes on.

[May 31 CDC Covid Community Transmission Data]
Current CDC Covid community transmission data from this universe. Data from other universes may vary.

Infecting an Entire Elementary School with Covid Is My Personal Choice

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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

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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.

Welcome to CityFest, a totally Covid-free celebration of fried food and the arts

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Welcome to CityFest, our annual celebration of the art, music, and fried foods that make this city great! After last year’s Covid hiatus we’re thrilled to announce CityFest will return in person this fall. 

No, our Covid numbers aren’t any lower than last year. But the community needs this festival, and we need this community. We especially need the money this community spends on parking, downtown dining, and festive souvenir travel mugs.

Your belief that we care about your safety remains our number one priority, however. With that in mind, we proudly present this year’s 10-step Covid mitigation plan.

Step 1: Hand sanitizer. There will be so much hand sanitizer at the festival this year. You won’t be able to take a half dozen steps in any direction without bumping into a CityFest branded bottle of the stuff. Sure, Covid is airborne and not actually spread by touching things, but we won’t let that stop us from implementing this cost-effective, tremendously visible, and utterly useless safety measure.

[woman with bottle of hand sanitizer]
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Step 2: Advanced porta potty protection. We’ll clean the bathrooms. A lot. Paying people to scrub toilets 24/7 is way cheaper than losing another year’s worth of vendor fees.

Step 3: Masks. Masks are required. Of course they are! We don’t plan to enforce this requirement, but that’s okay, because asking people to wear masks is mean and might start a fight. CityFest is all about community, not about protecting one another from a highly contagious, potentially lethal virus.

Step 4: Vaccination requirements. Everyone attending CityFest must be fully vaccinated. Since this is a huge, open-air event spread across multiple venues, we have no way of checking on this, but you vaccinated people all know who you are, right? Everyone else can just stay home. Especially the immune compromised, because culture and community are only for healthy people anyway.

Step 5: Outdoor venues. All of our events will be outdoors, except the ones that aren’t. Science says you can’t catch Covid outside, not even when crammed so tightly together in front of a rickety music stage with poor acoustics that you can taste the powdered sugar from that funnel cake your neighbor had for lunch.

[outdoor crowd clapping and raising fists]
Photo by Tim Toomey on Unsplash

Step 6: Social distancing. Thanks to the crowds, you won’t be able to see the pavement markers telling attendees to stand six feet apart, but we assure you they’ll be there.

Step 7: Food trucks. If a food can be deep fried, there’ll be a food truck deep frying it. This is important because everyone knows you can’t catch Covid while eating. If you could, our city leaders would be morally culpable for not shutting down all restaurant dining, and who wants to believe that? Nobody, that’s who. So just keep some cheesy fries or a turkey leg with you at all times and you’ll be fine.

[Food truck labeled "Rainbow grilled cheese experience"]
Photo by Shari Sirotnak on Unsplash

Step 8: Children’s craft area. We’ve expanded our children’s activities this year. We’re not sure why, since kids can’t be vaccinated yet and so according to our own guidelines shouldn’t even be here.

Step 9: Virtual options. We’ll livestream video of all our events, so that those uncomfortable attending in person can be utterly horrified by those who aren’t uncomfortable at all.

Step 10: Signs. We’re printing thousands and thousands of signs, and every one of them will contain a complete list of these mitigation steps. Does it get any safer than that? We certainly don’t think so.

So there you have it. With these measures in place, we’re confident everyone will have a fun, safe CityFest while buying out our entire supply of souvenir flash drives, LED keychains, and sandstone coasters. But even should everything go horribly wrong, rest assured that there’s no way to contact trace events like this anyway, so our lawyers assure us that we—we mean you—will be just fine.

Meet Bob, our pandemic spider

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We first noticed the spider sometime in summer of 2020. He was long-legged, but not long-legged enough to be a daddy longlegs. Fuzzy, but not fuzzy enough to be a wolf spider. Startling, but clearly not one of the poisonous varieties that need to be removed from the premises immediately.

[Spider on the ceiling]
Just a spider hanging out.

He wasn’t doing any harm, hanging out there on the ceiling of the family room. He might even be doing some good—spiders eat bugs, after all. So we let him stay.

For about three weeks the spider alternately hung out on the ceiling and walls or else hid somewhere in the cracks of the house. Then, at some point, he just disappeared. My husband, daughter, and I assumed he’d either moved on to better habitats or made his way to the great cobweb in the sky (though he didn’t seem to be a web-spinning sort of spider), and we mostly forgot about him.

That fall he was back again, though, or else a spider that looked very much like him and that had also grown slightly bigger was back, hanging out on the ceiling again, eating more (we assumed) bugs, and slipping in and out of view. Again he stayed for a few weeks, then disappeared until spring.

He was braver by spring, hanging out in not just the family room but also the kitchen and my daughter’s bedroom. We’re a bug-friendly family, so we were happy to have him back. Though it was startling to one day open my child’s underwear drawer—and see a spider crawling out.

We were all briefly more wary of him after the underwear incident. But we didn’t want to evict him, so instead we did what any sensible family would do. We let our daughter give the spider a name.

[Spider on the wall]
Hi, Bob.

Meet Bob, our pandemic spider. We admitted when we named him that he might well be female, but still, Bob seemed like the right name, so Bob he was.

Bob wasn’t disconcerting at all, once he had a name. He was a known entity, a member of the family, almost, even, a pet. We all smiled when we saw him after that.

One day, Bob got brave and moved down from the walls to the family room floor. We realized he’d moved from the walls to the floor when our cats suddenly became very, very interested in something moving on that floor. “Bob!” we all shouted and, with the help of a stiff piece of cardboard, helped him skitter out the front door, away from curious teeth and claws.

We figured once he’d seen the outside world, Bob would move on to the nearest viable outdoor habitat, but only a couple of days later we found him cheerfully hanging out on the wall of our daughter’s bedroom again. The world is a large place, if you’re a spider, and we hadn’t even really expected him to be able to find his way back inside, especially after the stress of having so recently fled for his life—but there he was. He might be an indoor-outdoor spider, but apparently this was his home, and not just some place he’d conveniently landed.

I finally sent Bob’s picture on to a friend who works with insects at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, and she identified him as Olios giganteus—a giant crab spider, also known as a huntsman spider. She also identified him as definitively male, something the other Olios giganteus pictures I turned up on the web also made clear.

[Missing spider poster]
Have you seen Bob?

Bob spent another few weeks in our house and then, in his Bob way, disappeared again.

My daughter posted a Missing Spider poster on the front door. But male spiders don’t live all that long. In the giant crab spider world, even females usually only last two to three years. Weeks went by, and we took the poster down. At some point in this story, after all, Bob will disappear for good.

But this is not that day. Because this day, more than two months after he last disappeared, Bob showed up again, calmly chilling on the kitchen ceiling, once again a little bigger than the last time we saw him, but otherwise the same old spider we now knew.

Welcome back, Bob. We’re all glad to see you again.

[Giant crab spider closeup]
Oh, there you are, Bob.

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

On By Janni Posted in generalTagged , 1 Comment

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.