Groundhog Day 43
It's stay-at-home day number forty-three at my house.
What day is it for you?
Something changed for me around day thirty. Up to that point, the evening news was a not-to-be-missed event. Also, the daily White House Briefing. Press Conferences by Governors Hogan and Cuomo. I left the television turned on, muted, in the background throughout the day to watch the scrolling notices, eager to see whatever constituted "Breaking News" at the beginning of each hour — still believing the arc of this experience would be recognizable: an acute ramp-up, a sudden onslaught of the worst, and then a collective sigh of relief as we came together to reflect, mourn, and move forward into post-pandemic life. Part of me knew it wouldn't be that easy; this isn't a sudden outbreak of extreme weather. Even a cursory reading of historic pandemics provides a grim accounting of the short and long-term impacts. Early on, FEMA may have compared the pandemic to fifty hurricanes simultaneously striking the U.S., but recovery phases after natural disasters don’t fit the shape of this crisis and it still isn’t clear when the storm will end.
Earlier in the week, on my morning walk, it occurred to me that other than the fact that the trees are slightly more in bloom, the day could have been any other day in the last week or month. It feels like my life is on an endless repeat loop, like in the movie Groundhog Day. Walk in the early morning. Feed the dogs. Eat breakfast. Dial in for my first teleconference. Try to provide meaningful input, to be cheery, to encourage the team to bring more energy to their work than I personally feel. Dial in for the second teleconference. Try not to get distracted by emails piling up, some of them from the very people with whom I’m speaking. Prioritize the work that needs done, work that will require thought and care, mental energy above and beyond what I’ll have available during the next four to six hours of meetings where important questions will be asked, answers will be attempted, tasks divided up, uncertainties acknowledged. Two weeks ago I cared about the answers much more than I do today. The potential for burn-out is real. I hear it in colleagues’ voices, read it in-between the lines of gallows humor in text messages, feel it in my own mental fatigue.
Over the past week, as my household moved closer to pandemic day number forty, I found myself anticipating the date as if something momentous would happen when we crossed that threshold. As if we are living in a biblical story where floods recede on day forty-one, or we find ourselves no longer facing trials in the desert. Maybe part of my apathy this week came from suspecting day forty-one would be no different from day thirty-nine, that this particular plague is not aligning to a neatly demarcated time period. How long can this continue? How many more days will I repeat the same schedule before the rain ends, sunlight breaks through the clouds, and a stretch of land grows visible on the horizon? If someone could just tell me when, exactly, all of this will end…
None of us know. Even as some of us are in states resolutely marching toward a new-normal, we all continue to live with profound uncertainty. Will the re-openings give new life to the virus? When will it be safe enough to ease social distancing so we can see our friends? When can we resume the activities that drew us out of our homes in a way that now seems like a distant luxury? When can we relish sitting in a space that is not our own kitchen, living room, or bedroom? How much more strangeness must be endured in the name of the greater good before we start to feel like ourselves again?
Philosophical musing aside, many of the days this week were simply miserable. No, we aren't facing unemployment at my house, or the loss of a hard-earned and deeply loved business, or the sickness and death of those nearest to us. We are not confined to prison cells or a refugee camp, or any of the truly horrible circumstances that other people have endured, and still endure, for weeks, months, years on end while somehow maintaining their spirits and ability to survive. My children are not going to bed hungry. We sleep safe in our own beds at night and have the luxury of 2.7 rooms per person, except for weeks when my husband is home and then it drops to 2.0 (laundry room not included — no one has claimed that particular space and teenagers who live in pajamas generate far fewer dirty clothes). Under no definition of the term is our current life experience a tragic hardship. But it is still growing so very tiresome. Major events we’d anticipated for months are now officially canceled: my trip to Birmingham to spend a week with Mike and see Brittany Howard perform at the Sloss Furnaces, our Memorial Day vacation to Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks, and, most heartbreaking, the cruise to Alaska in July with my parents to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. Each one a fresh loss, a new opportunity to cycle from denial to acceptance while adding one more disappointment to the growing list.
And on the most mundane level (humor me, please, while I indulge in a moment of personal pettiness): I’m tired of cooking. The kids are tired of eating what I cook. l want a full day off from work. A mindless trip to the mall to buy something one of us really wants, but which no one actually needs. A Saturday morning spent over coffee and a pastry with a friend. A date night at Tersiguel’s French restaurant in Ellicott City, which is closed again for the third time in four years after enduring two devastating floods in 2016 and 2018. I'm tired of walking circles around our neighborhood instead of figure skating, annoyed that running hurt my knees too much to continue, and that stress alone does not appear to counter the inevitable effects of stress-eating.
By nature, however, I’m a pragmatic optimist, so wallowing in self-pity is a time-limited activity. My daily aspiration this week was "equanimity". Can I greet what today, next week, or next month, will bring with the steadfastness of a weather-beaten stone wall on a windy hillside? Can I embrace reality as it is? Can I accept that I am unable to single-handedly fast forward to a time when schools are open, when my children spend most of their days in the physical presence of their friends, and when I return to the luxury of over-planning our schedules? Can I approach the next forty days with deliberation, deleting May calendar events from the pre-pandemic era so they don't provide reminders of everything we aren't doing? Scheduling, instead, activities we can do during the weeks that stretch ahead: family movie nights, carry-out Wednesdays, FaceTime dates with family and friends. Can I incorporate this period of disruption as part of the story-arc of my family’s life and imagine it in the context of our future? Not as an endless do-loop of repetition against a backdrop of being thwarted from living the lives we expected, but as a twist in the plot: where things that no longer serve are left to earlier chapters, and the story turns in an unanticipated direction so that, by the end, what was once unimaginable seems both necessary and inevitable.
Such reframing is possible, but it will mean letting go of Groundhog Day. Letting go of passivity, of the willingness to let the story be written around me. It will mean breaking the cycle of repetition and leaning in to the next phase of this rolling crisis to find moments of personal meaning. It will mean finding time, even in small ways, for rest and for rejuvenation. It will mean transforming the next forty days from a period of fearful waiting to one of engaged hope. Because the future will come. Time will not wait for us to reflect and mourn what we’ve lost. When the calendar finally turns over and we begin again, it will demand that we’re ready to step into whatever the first day of new normal brings. This was a difficult week for me. Maybe it was difficult for you. But as I cross the threshold of the first forty days, I hope we’re that much closer to the end of the beginning, and to the beginning of the end.
