Our lockdown started a solid six months before the rest of the country’s. In October of 2019, my 6-year-old daughter was diagnosed with leukemia. By the time the rest of the nation began to close schools and work from home, my daughter and I had been living the pandemic lifestyle for quite some time. While the rest of the family still went to work and school, overall, we stayed put beyond the necessities. COVID-19 simply brought another layer of protection for us: now we had a “nobody in, nobody out” policy. A bubble of five people.
When September 2020 rolled around, and people were fraying at the edges — half a year removed from their normal lives — we were approaching the anniversary of the last time we had any social contact at all. When the new school year starts, two years will have passed since my daughter has seen a classmate in person, eaten in a cafeteria, raised her hand to answer a question or picked out an outfit for school. In addition to all the fears and anxieties that come with reentry into a “post COVID” world, I am terrified that my children won’t know how to be people.
I often say that nuclear families have their own shorthand.
You know the people who surrounded you growing up so well that certain things can always remain unsaid or simply assumed. I know that my father will not choose apple pie for dessert on Thanksgiving, so I never offer. Just as I don’t need to remind my sister that I prefer text messages to phone calls. I know that brother will almost always be 20 minutes late for any gathering, and that my mother interrupts everyone without meaning to, but she’s also always listening.
In the nearly two years that my children, partner and I have spent cloistered off from our friends and neighbors, I worry that the familial shorthand has become the only language we know. Since our lives have been almost entirely centered around my daughter and her care, I doubly fear that the shorthand is primarily that of childhood illness.
Once upon a time, in The Before, the kids had school friends I hardly knew, lunchtime routines that didn’t impact my life in any meaningful way.
They developed important relationships entirely independent of my influence, their worlds consisting of many bubbles that only occasionally intersected. But for two years now, there has not been one lunch that their parents didn’t participate in, not one art project we didn’t orchestrate. My kids don’t have a favorite teacher’s aide or librarian. They have us. While we have done our best to make life safe and healthy for her, striving to curate a pleasant childhood that she will remember fondly in between the chemo treatments and hospital stays, the unpredictability of her immune system means that long-term plans are difficult. Heck, even short-term plans change at the last minute, so we simply don’t make any.
How am I supposed to send us all back into the world? I worry that we have forgotten how to communicate in the ways that once came naturally: water-cooler chitchat, playground compromises, preparing for a birthday party week or two in advance. Those are skills that need to be practiced, and we have not been rehearsing.
I can’t help but feel like the children have become the opposite of feral in isolation.
They have become far too tame, too careful, too used to the safety and proximity of their parents to venture off and create their own worlds again. I hope to find a way to inch us all toward the inevitable emergence from home.
I have made appointments for my daughter to speak with her therapist about the transition. We are brainstorming ideas to get the kids used to being more independent this summer, even if that means the adults take shifts sitting in the driveway just to be “out of service” for an hour.
Maybe in another month we will be ready to make tentative plans with a few family friends, just to practice making small talk, if nothing else.
I wonder if I have failed them in this regard. Should I have started nudging them from the nest earlier, or allowed more socially distanced visits? I always come up empty when I try to imagine how we could have done better and still maintained our peace of mind. While I wouldn’t trade this time that we have spent cold, flu, and, mercifully, COVID-free, I am concerned that our bubble, once so very necessary, will make a big boom when it pops.
I hope that we will be able to return home to our comfortable, wordless understanding each night, that it will serve as a sort of Rosetta Stone, so that together we can begin to translate what it means to be part of separate bubbles, to be immersed as native speakers of the world outside our door once again.
