changes in covid

Becoming a parent during the pandemic is not easy. So many people tell me about their views about parenting centered on their war stories with the attitude of the mouse gearing up with a helmet. It is the unusual person who talks about how much they love being a parent especially in the whiplash of Covid on family life. 

I loved this story as an antidote to other people's trauma about a neighbor who observed a family welcome a new little one during Covid all from the vantage point of their balconies. Her final paragraphs were so touching. (Click the link below to read the whole story.)

Did the Pandemic Make You Want to Make Any Life Changes?

"Perhaps these last years of isolation — of unfiltered sameness — have made us reckon with the choices we’ve made in ways that nothing else ever has before: to have a big family or a small one, to settle down in a city or on a farm, to live far from family or close by, to marry this person or another or no one at all. Never have our biggest life choices — partner, children, job, location — been seen in such stark relief. And also in such a skewed manner. We don’t make decisions in a vacuum. And yet that’s how our decisions have appeared, the background — like a set piece — pulled away. We are left simply staring at each other. Oh, hi. This is our life.

And yet, to be the ambivalent mother to an only child is to see pairs everywhere; it is to make endless and useless calculations — if we’d tried again when she was three or four or five; it is to worry that she’s getting both more and less than she should; it is to fear you love her too much and fear losing her too much; it is to play pillow fights and slime and to paint your own face along with hers because who else is she to do it with? It is to worry about where you’ll put the reserves of love you knew you had for another; it is to hope that you are doing what all parents do: the best we can with what we’ve got, knowing that it is often too much and not nearly enough.

Abigail Rasminsky is a writer, editor and teacher based in Los Angeles. She teaches creative writing at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and writes the weekly newsletter, People + Bodies. She also written about marriage, motherhood and bagels from the neighbors.

via {cup of jo}