School is back in session, what seemed to be a very quick week of vacation over and an inbox full of new assignments waiting.
Besides the math, word study, reading, social studies and all the rest I also made sure that there was time for journal entry, something that my eight-year-old reminded me quite vehemently hasn’t been required since we finished the initial two-week packet and transitioned to entirely on-line learning.
She was right about us having plenty of other stuff to do but I explained to her that this was an unprecedented time in history, that diaries have long been a way for scholars to understand past events. Her excitement was quickly extinguished when I explained that this didn’t mean that she would famous in the future and that today’s world has plenty of other means of chronicling events but she agreed that having something to look back on and maybe show her own kids and grandchildren was a pretty neat concept.
Left unsaid was that nagging fear in the back of my head about how potentially dramatic a change in the world we may now be witness to.
Nobody wants to think about it and I understand that, understand if you don’t want to consider the possibility. Hopefully there will be a vaccine or herd immunity will stop the virus from finding enough new hosts. Maybe changing weather patterns will cause it to fade out. Maybe our brilliant shepherd through these trying times was right when he declared on February 28th that “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
Maybe.
I hope so as much as the next person. For those that don’t know my “real job” is taking X-Rays in a hospital and for those that think that just means I take pictures of bones, ( for real had this conversation this week ) COVID-19 attacks the lungs. This means that everybody that presents with any of the myriad of possible symptoms gets a chest X-Ray and both her mom and I spend a lot of every day looking like this.
But what if none of those things happen? What if the last time you went to the movie theater or a concert or a sporting event was the last time? No matter what happens we’ll figure out ways to make schools and churches and other places of gathering safe, we are social creatures and we’re already seeing the first cracks in people’s willingness to sacrifice for the greater good. Nobody thinks that the current degree of isolation is sustainable and the economic devastation can’t be ignored.
Things won’t stay like this but that doesn’t mean that they return to where we were a year ago. An economy that crashes because people are forced to only buy what they actually need might be due for some correction. A lot of people currently working from home might not need to go back to offices. Those that ate out a lot are noticing how much that cost and many families are secretly enjoying the slowdown and extra time together.
Maybe I’m wrong but I think that no matter what happens we are currently living through history, through a time that in some way or another will be a divisor, a line between a “before” and an “after.”
So I’m making her keep a journal, documenting her eight-year-old thoughts on what’s going on around her, the things that she understands and those that she doesn’t. She’ll protest but those pages fill up pretty quickly, another thing that she may have inherited from her old man. Tomorrow we will wake up to another inbox full of school work to tackle before I head back to the hospital.
She’ll sleep soundly tonight.
I will not.
All of the “what if’s” are going to keep me awake and the only thing that any of us can say for sure is that we’ll do our best, we’ll calm our kids’ fears to the best of our ability and that we will help them navigate whatever this new world of ours might end of looking like. If they look back at this time and that is what they remember if that is what that journal says, than we’ve done a hell of a job, guys.
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Previously Published on ThirstyDaddy.com
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