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<small>Article continues below</small>
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<a class="series-aside__link" href="https://grist.org/climate/planning-for-my-grandkids-future/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=grist" >
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I kept reading the news, though, and it was strange to watch the world change so quickly without writing much about it myself. While other people were dying, fighting, protesting for justice, or just working their asses off, I was experiencing it through what felt like a thick panel of glass. My wife would emerge from that outside world, strip down, and shower. I’d try to time dinner for her arrival, then ask for updates from the other side.
Now that’s all about to change. I’m going back to full-time work with a sense of trepidation — do I still have the stamina to sit in front of a computer all day? Can I really keep up with my superhuman colleagues running down stories?
And what, I wonder, are we supposed to do with the kids? For now, the plan is to send them to a day camp that makes some good-faith effort to keep them spread out. Even so, it seems crazy after working so hard to isolate them for months, after telling them they can’t even hug their cousins. And yet, will it make any more sense to have kids congregate when school reopens? Should we stay home until there’s a vaccine, or start South-Korea-style contact tracing? Everything is uncertain. The probabilities keep shifting.
In the old stories, when someone returns through the door in the hedge after spending years in the world of the fairies, their life resumes as if no time had passed at all — they are simply sadder and wiser. Maybe that’s the way it will be with me, but I doubt it. The world I’ll be returning to is still upside down, or perhaps it’s just revealing itself as the chaotic place it’s always been. While part of me is mourning the loss of my bubble, I realize nostalgia is not sustainable. At some point, it’s the same as regression.
Now perhaps the world is simply moving in a different direction. I only hope it’s a better one.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Parenting may never be the same post-COVID. Maybe that’s a good thing. on Jun 26, 2020.