COVID Chronicles - 1 Year

In the United States it has officially been one year since our country shut down because of the pandemic.

One year ago, my husband and I were driving to Texas, looking forward to an extra two weeks of spring break because our school district closed. We were simultaneously anxious that roads would close while we were traveling, or that we’d contract the virus and bring it back to our family. Plans had already been made, a wedding was to be had. Restaurants had closed to indoor dining. Grocery Stores were limiting the number of people inside and taking temperatures. If you weren’t deemed “essential” you weren’t working. Masks were suddenly required everywhere, so much so that you couldn’t find a single piece of material anywhere because all had taken up sewing them for the cause. Make sure you don’t leave your house, especially if you have a headache, cough, fever. People started dying at an alarming rate. The old. The young.

“Only a few weeks, a month tops...” we all thought. A month or two later it was still insane. The number of cases rose and fell. Some people thought it was absurd, others dawned two masks. Weddings and baby showers were postponed. Husbands couldn’t attend ultrasounds. Mothers couldn’t attend the birth of their grandchild.

“Maybe in the fall things will be back to normal...”

Indoor eating opened temporarily. They started letting more people into the stores. Things were looking up.

“New Mexico is going back into lock down...”

Here we go again.

It’s been a year. A year of fear and loss and hopelessness and loneliness. A year of strangeness, really. Nothing felt normal or okay. Children missed a lot of school, many people lost their jobs and businesses. Churches had to shut their doors and convert to online services.

For me and my husband, at first, the “quarantine” was kind of welcome. My husband had had an extremely stressful first year as a 3rd grade teacher. The fact that our district closed and we didn’t even teach online was a welcome reprieve for him. We are also homebodies, and we enjoy just being at home with each other. Honestly, to this day, we haven’t felt like we’ve missed out on *that* much because of the restrictions. We didn’t eat out much, or do many activities besides shopping and hiking. It wasn’t that hard for us, and we were blessed enough to have a steady income through it all even though we weren’t actually working.

For me, being told to stay home was especially welcome. In April I found out I was pregnant and the fatigue was extreme. I could hardly do anything because I was exhausted, so not having to work was a blessing.

(Last year, when I made my first mask, which I have since lost).

Yes, we were sad that we couldn’t go camping at our favorite campground. But no rules were set against hiking, so hiking we did. It was a disappointment that we couldn’t have our baby shower, or that Josh couldn’t come to any doctor’s appointments with me. But we just did what we had to do, because there was no choice.

Another interesting change I have experience because of COVID is a personality change. I am an ambivert, so I am fairly equally introverted and extroverted. I used to be a little more introverted, I used to avoid running into people at Walmart like the plague. I would literally see someone I knew from a distance and try to quickly walk to another aisle to avoid a conversation. Now, however, every time I go out I think to myself, “Man, I hope I run into someone I know!” It’s been a long time since I’ve seen people I knew that weren’t related to me.

Now that it’s been a year, I’m weary. I’m weary of every conversation centering around numbers or precautions or vaccines. I’m weary of the, “we should do this!, if it’s open of course...” I am tired of not being able to make any plans because we don’t *really* know what summer will be like. We all hope and pray for the best, but we just don’t know.

I’m also tired of not going to church. I won’t lie, at first, it was very okay with me. I serve in a lot of different aspects at my church and I was glad for the break. Sit home and watch church online? Okay! I was so preoccupied with growing babies and preparing for parenthood that I never really had the time to miss it. But now, one year later, I long for the ability to go to church and meet together with fellow believers. I am so spiritually dry because online church just doesn’t cut it. I’m ready, though it will be 10000x more challenging to go to church with twin babies, I am ready. Ready to be spiritually revived again. To get back to normal life.

It’s crazy that we have all lived through an extremely significant year in history. Our stories will be read about in history books. I will tell my children that they were born in the midst of a global pandemic. One year of this...mess. What a year it has been.

I pray that the time is up. That as summer and fall and winter roll around once more that we can go on with life as we used to, that we can say “remember when we were in the middle of a pandemic and couldn’t do this?” Instead of “I can’t wait for this to be over so we can do This...”.

One year. Let’s pray that one year is all it will be.