I had a baby in December 2019. It was flu and RSV season, so I had planned on hunkering down at home with my newborn for a few months. Just the winter, I thought. I wanted to get through the worst of virus season and let my new baby get a little bigger and stronger.
“It’s been kind of nice just staying home,” February 2020-me said.
On March 8, 2020, we took our new baby to church for the first time. We left him in the nursery, confident that the worst of RSV season was behind us. LOL.
As you know, things got wild later that week.
Schools were closed, and we were under executive orders by the governor to stay home. These happened on specific dates. You can look them up. In Tennessee, a State of Emergency was declared on March 12, 2020. Stay-at-home orders went into effect on April 2, 2020. Schools were officially closed for the remainder of the school year on April 15, 2020.
For all of us, the pandemic had a shared start date. We all experienced these things at the same time. The next few years, however, were a bit fuzzy.
I think most of us can agree that the pandemic feels mostly behind us. I hesitate to even write that sentence because I know we all have strongly held opinions that were formed by our personal experiences during the pandemic. One common thread among people I know on every end of spectrum is that we feel time got a little lost. Time itself feels warped.
I find myself thinking something happened two years ago when it was really four years ago. Someone recently asked how long I’ve been living in Knoxville, and I answered “Three years.” Except that’s not true. We moved to Knoxville in 2017. I’m consistently two years short when calculating dates.
I don’t think it’s just me. As I mentioned earlier, I had a baby in December 2019. Just last week, a friend of mine was in absolute shock when I told her about his third birthday. Neither of us could really articulate how time has been such a weird construct during these years.
I think it’s because we had a definite beginning of the pandemic, but we did not have a definite ending. By nature of pandemics, we were told to pause. We paused our businesses, our routines, our schools, our churches. I think we naively thought it would just be a short while. Not too many of us counted on 2+ years. Our opinions were many, and so were our reopenings. Slowly, a few things reopened. Then more. There were mask requirements and timed entries, making reopenings even blurrier. Slowly, slowly, we have returned to normal. But no one ever said, “It’s over! You can all come out now!”
So time still feels a little frozen. We’re carrying on with life, of course. We’re celebrating holidays and big events. We know in the logical side of our brains that the calendar keeps flipping forward. But it’s not at the same time?
YES! Me too. I’m glad I’m not the only one! My first child was 2 when the emergency orders hit, and my second baby was born in 2021. I have a hard time fully understanding at which point in the pandemic my second baby was born. Of course I have memorized 2021, but it’s a time warp. I don’t know how I feel about the “missed” years. I don’t like the phenomenon of the time warp and blur, or the sadness and isolation, but my whole body and soul needed all the overscheduled lifestyle to just stop. I think a lot of us needed to pause to take inventory. I bonded the best I ever have with my child during that time, and it informed how I bonded with my second. We created a family routine of catching fireflies every night before going to bed, for example. I never had time for that before. I hugged and cuddled and slept with my first born, because for the first time ever, I had a little wiggle room in my schedule so that it was okay if I woke up a few times during the night. It was also very sad, scary, isolating, and there was a lot of conflict and divisiveness. People in my family died or had permanent health issues. Friends said hurtful things about our reopening decisions. Our childrens’ life trajectories changed entirely because we have a different primary friend group—so they will have different peers, adult mentors, etc than they would have had if no pandemic. There are empty seats at family gatherings. It is all hurtful and sad! Wow I wrote a lot in response! Love to all. We all did our best.