In the last few weeks, I started to breathe again. I stopped and I noticed the way the flowers emerge from the trees in our front yard. We took the kids to the beach and Asher and Anya saw waves for the first time. We built mud pies and buried the little people neck-deep in sand. The smell of pollen is so thick in the air that it's palpable and everything is absolutely humming with life and vibrant with the buzz of a tomorrow I did not dare dream of existing even just eight months ago. It has been a long stretch of surviving, of keeping everyone safe, of making sure there are enough masks in the house, and of late nights worrying about the patients for which I feel responsible.
And in spite of the burden of this period of mourning, grief, and loss, something stirs. It is something deep and guttural and human and it is something like hope. But it is more than that because it is a sense of peace and wellness and contentedness and calm and a million of the emotions there was not room for because I was utterly consumed with survival, with motherhood, with the obligations of a job that often takes far more than it gives.
It is a recognition of myself, my own desires, the person I was before the nightmare of the last 15 months began. I have been up nearly every night since whispers of Covid became serious in the late winter of 2020, trying to convince myself to calm down, listening to anti-stress apps, trying to dial back my sense that the world was unrecognizable. I would wake with a startle in the dead of the night and stare for interminable minutes into the dark wholly unable to shut off my mind. I would think of Ray Bradbury from Something Wicked This Way Comes and remember vividly the line about 3am being the longest stretch of night because it is so far from the sunset and so interminable until the sunrise. I would listen to the deep sleep of my family and check on the kids and wonder, with a faint memory, what good sleep feels like, how the mornings are when you awake wholly refreshed and satisfied.
It is only now with the stirring of a thing that feels like hope that I dare breathe. That I crack jokes with my kids or chase them around the living room. That I have felt, spontaneously, like reaching out to someone to foster a connection I once valued that was tossed to the way side in all the chaos.
Just before Covid began and schools shut down, I started a tradition at dinner where I would ask the children what their favorite thing about the day had been. In the weeks prior to the pandemic, the kids would talk about some adventure we had taken, some pool we had visited, or some moment with friends. As we visited the same group of five parks, playground equipment was marked off limits, and my kids mastered riding bikes and scooters, their replies became monotonous, tired, and unenthusiastic. Their favorite thing became watching television or chatting with a grandma on the phone or reading by themselves in their room. After a month or two of repeating the same litany of activities over and over and over with no social interaction outside our family and living in a bubble of fear and absolute monotony, I stopped asking my children what their favorite thing was. Everything was gray. It was all the same. There was nothing to look forward to except a glass of wine in the evening and perhaps Fargo, Ozark, or Ted Lasso.
But now it is June and something that is not-quite-hope stirs. It is, perhaps, the collection of small pleasures which have been so absent in the last stretch of life. It is watching young children dance in the waves and shout with glee as a large one breaks late and threatens to topple them. It is planning a trip with your best friend after months of desperate missing. It is sharing space with strangers without masks and daring to inhale. It is sleep, uninterrupted, through the night. It is falling in love with my husband all over again because in the chaos and the melee he bravely stood beside me, holding this world together despite the personal cost of doing so. It is something that is not quite hope, but is utterly bursting with the possibility for joy, quiet moments of stillness, and infinitely deep connection with strangers who, not so long ago, we crossed the street to avoid. It is, I think, the return of humanity, not just my own, but the collective welcoming of the memory that we, above all else, belong to one another.
