And we’re off. Earlier this week, my children stepped foot into a school facility for the first time since March 13, 2020. Donned with their favorite masks — Yoda for A and rainbows for G — and bellies full of nervous energy, they finally did what they haven’t been able to do for over 18 months now.

At my departure, there were no tears, no last-minute-reconsiderations, just nerves and gratitude to be able to more safely do what they couldn’t for so long. When I picked them up on the first day, by the mid-afternoon, their early morning nervous energy had transformed into joy and exuberance, huge under-the-mask smiles that made it resoundingly clear that there was no place they’d rather be than there, finally, at long last. They liked distance learning and all, but there’s nothing like the real deal.

Speaking solely for myself here, it’s a complex dichotomy to work through as a parent, sending your child to school when there is still a respiratory pandemic raging in the world at large and a virus variant out there that’s worse, in practically every definition of the word, than any other that we’ve encountered in the past 18+ months. I say all of this but also temper it with the acknowledgement that the state, the district, and the school sites are employing tons of mitigation efforts, including mandating masks for all — vaccinated or not — inside school buildings, so it’s not as though our children are stepping foot into the fire without so much as an extinguisher to defend themselves.

What’s different right now is that my kids are in the company of “strangers” every day — people with whom we haven’t played or spent any amount of time with for 18+ months (or people whom we actually truly don’t know) — and the best we can do is hope that everyone is being thoughtful in their decision-making outside of school hours and not reckless and irresponsible. 

It feels like our tightly-held, uber-controlled vectors have just expanded a thousand-fold, and it’s jarring.  

We all want our kids to be in school; that’s why we’ve elected to allow them to return, in the first place, instead of opting for another year of independent studying/remote learning. It is incredibly difficult to *not* worry right now because we can’t possibly know what everyone is doing beyond school hours or otherwise. We can’t and won’t know whether people are vaccinated or not, whether they’re being irresponsible and taking unnecessary risks, nothing. Not everyone has the privilege of working remotely (at all or anymore), and with kids under 12 still ineligible for vaccination — combined with the insidious contagiousness of this delta variant — the risk feels more profound than ever before. 

It’s like the biggest trust fall ever, the biggest group project ever, where all we can do is hope that nobody fucks it up for the rest of us because so much is on the line. I guess we have to put our trust in numbers and hope that the 80% of us 12+ who have been fully vaccinated (or the 86.1% of us 12+ who have had at least one dose) is enough. 

We really can’t overstate the gravity of the situation we’re all in right now.   

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Between the seemingly never-ending COVID crap and the week’s most recent travesties (looking at you, Afghanistan, Haiti, the seemingly never-ending Dixie Fire here, responsible for today’s disgusting skies, and in the running world, the death of Abby Anderson, the late Gabe Grunewald’s sister), the world, yet again — but maybe even more so? — feels really heavy. It feels somewhere between oppressive, suffocating, and nauseating, or maybe at some junction among the three. I surely can’t be the only one. 

So how are you doing? How are you dealing? 

For me, what feels best is what I’ve been trying to do the most of lately: plunging headfirst into volunteer stuff (between the kids’ school and GS), a lot of which got scaled back considerably last year, given the pandemic, and running, of course. It feels good to begin to have a semi-full calendar of stuff going on for the first time in nearly a year and a half. We just have to wait and see, and hope, I guess, that it all happens.