Pandemic Reflections
A source of support.
When the first Bay Area shelter-in-place started March 16, 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it felt lonely and disorienting and pretty awful having no childcare for our 3yo with 2 full time working parents. In week 2, I sent an email to people with whom I worked closely, honoring this feeling and sharing some coping strategies I was using to create a sense of solidarity and support. This became a weekly ritual that grew over time.
In the emails, I shared a little bit about what was happening in my household as a way of normalizing the massive changes, shared strategies we were using to cope, and things I was grateful for despite everything. I invited people to reply for support and connection and to aid with professional accountability and motivation. Slowly and sporadically I invited others to join the list. Eventually, I decided the simplest way to allow people to join as they found content useful (or to opt-out if content did not resonate) was to create a newsletter and website. For the archived letters from 2020, I’ve done some light editing to provide additional context, or to remove my weekly goals. Not all have been uploaded yet, but I’ll get there eventually.
In 2021, the weekly letter has evolved into aggregations of many of my mentoring and peer-mentoring conversations. They still touch on methods I’m using to remain a whole, semi-balanced person amid parenting, grieving, and being an early/mid-career academic researcher.
In 2022, the weekly letter became a little more sporadic, but still shared reflections on things happening locally and broadly.
Week 71
I didn’t know quite what I wanted to talk about this week. Or rather, I have a few nebulous ideas that haven’t coalesced. One that’s been floating in my head for a bit is the idea that I don’t strongly associate most of my learning from a single source, so sometimes feel like I’ve learned by osmosis, or feel like I’ve always known it. That’s ridiculous, of course. It’s more like being in a pinball machine, where with each rebound I pick up another spin, another idea. Another metaphor is feeling like my self is constructed and reinforced by the network of people around me, or a web-like tunnel over the years (and given Theo’s love of spiders, I now have funnel-web spiders on the brain, ugh).
Week 60
The fog has rolled in, there are reports of small fires, and this week has felt a bit like September. I felt like I had a pretty good amount of patience and resilience all week until I hit a wall Thursday afternoon. Too little sleep and too many things my brain was trying to do. Thank goodness the weekend is nearly here.
Mother’s Day is Sunday. For those of you grieving, I hope you are able to protect yourselves or make space for feelings. Among other things, I’m looking forward to a break - a few hours alone in the house while Sam takes Theo to Cal Academy.
Week 57
The collective grief and trauma in the Black community this week is just so heavy. We need accountability and change. #dauntewright #adamtoledo
I hijacked some of my designated writing times this week to support colleagues (peers and trainees) who are struggling for a wide variety of reasons – racism, grief, pandemic parenting/caregiving, out of whack brain chemicals or hormones, and of course, the intersection of these things and others. I’m proud of this work, not least of all because I feel it is a way to pay forward the support I received.
Week 56
Change in the pandemic remains hard. It’s been lovely to have my mother next door and honor all the events of the weekend…and we are, of course, still working on finding a new rhythm to life. Hard things are happening in the live of people around me. I have completely neglected all my usual self-care this week – exercise, meditating, journaling. I am trying to be patient with myself, not judging, and remember that each day I can make different choices.
Week 52
Thursday was not my father’s 71st birthday. I had rough plans for how I wanted to honor the day. …This is approximately what I was doing a year ago, when WHO declared the pandemic and a few days before the shelter-in-place started. I haven’t yet watched the UCSF DOM Grand Rounds honoring the anniversary. But I remember those first few weeks feeling a bit like the shock after sudden loss, the sense of being unmoored and wanting reassurance.
Week 51
Saturday morning at breakfast, Sam casually said, “let’s see if we can get a campsite at Pantoll”. We periodically did this pre-pandemic because it’s ~20 minutes from the house so we can drive home to let the dog out if we don’t have a dog sitter (we never do, our dog is … special). I suppose I should be grateful that it’s been over a year since we had to pack to travel. Then again, I read a few pages of Bird by Bird by the campfire, and there was a line about a character saying “I could resent the ocean if I tried”, and now the phrase is resonating in my head, like an accusation.
Week 49
Stormy weather over here. My emotions have just been all over the place. Lots of anxiety, anger and grief. Funny reaction to a Friday afternoon work meeting that led to a rare bout of sleeplessness and subsequently demoralization. I’ve also been texting/talking a lot with close friends who are anticipating or grieving parental deaths – I’m trying to normalize the awfulness of their experiences and help them feel less alone, as others did for me. We try to take turns with Theo on the weekends so that the other person gets some alone time (not for working or doing chores). I used mine on Sunday for exercise and actually feeling feelings (hard with a kid around unless they are totally overwhelming). Theo and I had Monday off while Sam worked – there were tantrums, getting soaked in the rain, and a giant pretzel at the zoo. Theo and I have been overly stubborn with each other lately, leading to many tantrums and opportunities to repair the relationship (e.g. “I’m so sorry I expressed my big feelings that way. I will try to do better next time. What do you think we could do instead?”).
Week 48
Happy Lunar New Year! Theo’s daycare/preschool has always done a great job celebrating – in past years bringing in Lion Dancers too – such that I think this is Theo’s favorite holiday of the year (despite us having no family/cultural connection to the holiday). As a white family I usually am more quiet about it, because it seems too akin to cultural appropriation. Yet Theo’s been watching video of International Lion Dance competitions, reenacting them in his lion bathrobe (complete with washcloth “beard”), and unmaking and remaking his Lion Dancer Legos. We will be enjoying the Bay Area and Smithsonian online celebrations this weekend. In a week where my social media has been full of acknowledgements of anti-Asian hate crimes and racism, it seems especially important to teach Theo the variety of global celebrations.
Week 39
“Everything’s fine, we’re fine, it’s all fine”, as my second-choice holiday card said. Things really are fine, and a bit hectic. I’m doing the best I can to take pressure off wherever I can (e.g. my goal is to send New Year cards before March 2021). For those of you celebrating Hanukkah or other non-Christmas holidays, I recognize the ubiquity of Christmas stuff may be frustrating and overwhelming, especially when you’re trying to fit it in without dedicated time off. For those of you preparing for Christmas, best of luck navigating this season of shipping deadlines and mystery packages.
Week 33
I’m about to take PTO to make space for space for all the feelings. Friday is the second anniversary of the car hitting my dad and his three friends while they were cycling (for those who didn’t know), the 3rd is the election, the 4th is Theo’s 4th birthday, and the 5th is the anniversary of my dad’s death.
Week 32
I’m leaning hard on the “tides” analogy right now. There are times in most days I’m feeling great – efficient, centered, curious, resilient (call this low tide because it’s when our house is on mud and stable). And there are times in most days when I’m tired and crabby and insecure and anxious (our house is unbalanced at high tide). This grief season makes those high tides more like king tides – apt to cause flooding. I’m tired of it, but it will pass.
Week 31
This was the first time I took more than 1-2 days off since March. For me, the primary benefits of time off right now are 1) the creativity of thought that comes from unstructured time, 2) space for thinking and emotional processing, and 3) more exercise. The downsides were that the change in routine made family life a bit more difficult.
Week 29
How are you? No really – how are you really? Take a breath – what are you feeling? Some weeks I don’t know what words to use to describe the state of things around us, never mind my inside state. The Glass Fires and threat of smoke has been impacting me. The debate. The extra emails and texts from the groups and individuals I’ve donated to. Wanting to do more for the election and yet not quite organizing my life to make it feasible. The to-do list I keep reordering because I haven’t had the bandwidth for certain types of writing/thinking this week.
Week 28
Another challenging week here. For us it’s been a mix of RBG’s death (may her memory be a revolution) and implications thereof, kid-induced sleep deprivation, work stress, insufficient exercise, plus a few other things. Sunday was my first experience with a zoom funeral, organized by my mother for my aunt (surprisingly nice and satisfying). This week has been trying to prep for Sam’s (my spouse) birthday today. Fundamentally, I’m ok – I know things will even out with time.
Week 27
Reflecting on how this started: Last Friday I joined the Division zoom call about pandemic parenting. We talked about the importance of connecting with others, of helping each other (in part by modeling) self-care, time off, and other methods for managing the mental health crisis that is pandemic parenting amid all these other crises. That is, more or less, why I started these missives six months ago – to connect with others, to share (especially to mentees) what I was doing in that moment to cope, to model that it was ok to not be ok and yet to find ways to move forward with life and work. It was an instinct born from learning resilience with all the losses of the last two years.
Week 25
We are fine but are tired of lack of sun and being stuck inside due to the smoke and the fog. It’s been nice to have Theo back in school this week, even if it’s meant every morning is coming up with 18 tactics to counter the “I don’t like school” narrative. He comes home every day with good stories so I think he does like it.
Week 15
The usual mix of up and down over here. Theo hiked 9 miles over the weekend; I got a lot of downtime on Saturday including a few hours reading a book alone on the deck in the sun; I got blindsided by grief on Father’s Day afternoon; Theo and I tired of tired of the usual hike by Wednesday (we’ve been doing it most days for over a month and the mornings have been foggy cold and windy here this week; I tried to go for a sunset post-dinner run Wednesday night in new shoes and fell and took quite a few layers of skin off my hand and knee, plus impressive bruises. I guess the world is telling me to slow down more. Sam’s headed out on a solo 3-day backpacking trip Friday as a belated Father’s Day present so I’m planning on a weekend of watching movies with Theo.
Week 9
It's been a tough week at our house. A couple days of grey/rainy weather, ongoing tough readjustment, feeling demoralized, etc. Most of our family energy has gone to learning about better/alternative ways to help stressed out kiddos, which includes speed reading parenting books. I'm trying to remind myself we have better tools for our family now and a lot of practice with positive methods of reactive dog training.