Wednesday, we were back home, back to our routine and back to normal. It’s the first official week of summer break for the kids, so that is going to take some adjusting. Henry had his therapy in the morning, and Amelia had a big nothing going on all day. In a move reminiscent of last summer and other points of the pandemic, she never changed out of her pajamas, because…well, why?
Erin and I both had busy days and lots of work catching up to do. The day rushed by, each of us fought off about 20 requests for snacks from the kids, and we got our stuff done. I grilled out some burgers for dinner, and the kids treated us to a sweet concert after dinner.
Yup, it was all pretty regular stuff. When I look back on the last year and a half, so much has changed, and we endured so much instability and stress. But now, a year ago, and a year before that, working, making some burgers and playing around with the kids…well, that has been a constant.
In the end, I’m a believer in the idea that the word “normal” is kind of an apparition, because really, what is “normal” anyway. More than anything it feels like a forced conformity or something. Sure a little status quo is comfortable, but life is always changing. The last year just a hell of a lot more than usual.
I don’t think things will ever be quite the same moving forward. I was reading something the other day that talked about our societal and psychological tendency to focus on “the before time,” what we feel like was normal life before COVID, and also on the post-COVID world, which is some attempt to rebuild that first thing. Lost in this is the actual age of COVID, which everyone seems pretty anxious to forget.
Look, that is understandable. It was a difficult and terrifying time for all of us. It’s natural to want to just look past it, but is that healthy? At some point I think we also have to absorb the fact that what we all just went through was traumatic, and it needs processing and remembering.
And, as I would also attest from having written this blog for 443 days, there were also moments of brightness in the dark, and I think that is important to recognize too. That reason, more than most anything else, is why I’m glad I’ve done this.
So this is a long preamble to my main point, which is that I’ve decided to put an end date on Ps and Q. This was never intended to be a forever thing, but instead was meant to tell the story of our family’s experience and my own struggles balancing things through pandemic quarantine. As the world begins to open up, bit by bit, the quarantine part of the story is coming to a close.
To be clear, I am not in any way saying COVID is over. It absolutely is not, and I expect we will be living in its shadow for a while. As I’ve said here before, Erin and I are vaccinated, which is great, but the kids are still waiting so we are still taking appropriate precautions.
But we are moving into a new era now. The “normal” we build now is not going to be the same as the
“normal” we think we remember from a couple of years ago, but it will at least be different than the blazing tornado of insanity that was 2020.
I am not signing off yet. Next week, I am taking my first work trip since March of last year. It’ll be the first time I’ve been on a plane in all that time. I’m going to Las Vegas for the World of Concrete trade show, which will be the first major convention in the United States post-COVID.
It will be unbelievably surreal and strange. I have no idea how it is going to feel. But it is step back out into the world and out of quarantine. So it feels like a natural place for this particular part of my own story to close.
Day 450 will be the finale of this blog. I still don’t know exactly how to think about that or what I’ll say, but I know it feels right. I feel ready to move onto some other projects and building the new life beyond. I’m sure I’ll get all sappy, and I’ll forever be thankful for everyone who’s been reading and for all those who have been so encouraging throughout this journey. This has been a big piece of personal growth for me, and I never could have done it alone.
Anyway, that’s the news of the day. I figured I should at least give a heads up instead of just doing an abrupt mic drop at the end. Still a bunch more posts to go and a week to figure out a conclusion. I hope it goes something like, “and we all of us, everywhere, lived happily ever after.”
Then there will be some shocking post-credits sequence that will tie into some Marvel movie or something.
