A few weeks ago I got sick with Influenza A. Apparently I haven’t had the real flu since middle school. How’s that for staying healthy? I get the flu shot every year as recommended for diabetics and I’ve been able to avoid great illness… until 2021… which saw my return to a classroom size larger than one. Let’s just say that I witnessed a LOT of snotty noses at school. I’d often ask a 2nd grader if they’d like to go blow their nose and the answer was usually, “Nah.” I’d sit pretty close to 1st graders as they practiced reading and, despite my mask, I knew whatever was virally floating around their own homes was also floating around my office. Towards the end of the semester I got lax with masking. And then… hello, flu.
I have a wonderful team of people around me urging me to rest and push fluids while sick. So grateful for them. But I had forgotten what it’s like to be sick when you have diabetes.
KETONES.
Damn those ketones. I’m no scientist, but I do know that illness can stress a body with Type 1 diabetes, which then produces ketones. You ended up with too many ketones in your blood and you can go into ketoacidosis—your blood is literally too acidic.
So to review: when a person with diabetes gets sick they can’t simply sleep and wake up and drowsily drink Gatorade until they pass out again. That’d be too easy. There’s a lot of monitoring that needs to happen to avoid diabetic keto acidosis (DKA).
I feel like Influenza A was a timely reminder for me that I cannot mess around with not masking right now. Much of our population can get sick and tough it out at home. Meanwhile I’ve got that little thing called ketones that can swoop in and kill me if not handled immediately.
Our hospitals are full. They’re so full that people who need quick care may not receive it. On a good day when I visit a hospital it will involve entrusting my care—my very specific and detailed diabetes regimen—to a team of doctors and nurses who know far less about my situation than I do. Let’s just say that I do everything possible to avoid visiting hospitals.
At this point in the pandemic, with omicron knocking down people left and right, I have to stay vigilant.
(You can see how easy it is to be anxious! Working hard on that, too.)
God filled in the hole a teeny bit today, with a request that didn’t come from me. I felt like I had been holding my breath for two years now and today was a slight exhale.
Sometimes love looks like friends who feel like family, a warm fireplace, an orange cat, and the willingness to physically and emotionally be laid bare in front of one another.
I went digging in my phone’s photo albums for a picture of a tree changing colors. My shots from this morning didn’t turn out well as the sun is hiding behind a Nebraska-sized sheet of gloomy clouds. Quickly my thoughts veered from a very new, still nebulous consideration of Winter as Necessary Rest–a new thought because I am stubbornly settled in the Seasonal Affective Disorder camp—to what happened last year. The images on my phone flashed before me… Livia with reading glasses on. Liv studying in my office. Liv studying on the back deck. New Covid masks. Liv studying in the basement. Homemade meals from Livia. So on and so forth.
So what happened last year?
Homeschool.
I TAUGHT MY HIGH SCHOOLER AT HOME.
That wasn’t in the game plan, folks. It wasn’t in the game plan due to our personal dynamics and our desire to preserve a loving mother-daughter relationship rather than attempt the teacher-student one. And yet! And yet we. freaking. did. it. We homeschooled for Livia’s entire sophomore year. Yeah yeah, we didn’t learn as much that fourth quarter as I wanted us too, and yet that was the reality of the 2020-2021 school year. WE HOMESCHOOLED.
What in the world?!
We are now back to our regularly scheduled programming, the kind where Livia is taught by other educators and I am delighted to find myself within a classroom setting, teaching my own little pupils at Lincoln Homeschool Academy. The turf is now familiar and our year of homeschooling plus dealing with a worldwide pandemic has passed. Oh yes, we’re still in that pandemic, but the heightened fear I breathlessly held is no longer present. The political turmoil has returned to a murmur. We’ve gotten more comfortable—somehow—with a ridiculous death rate due to this virus. We mask much more easily, and I’ve learned to value grocery pickups, Covid swabs, and daily emails home from our public school with illness notices.
Today Livia is home. I can hear her writing in the room next door to mine, my heart busting with mama pride to know that she is a writer much like myself. Sometimes the words just have to come out. My girl can’t smell today and she has a headache that a bunch of medicine didn’t touch. She’d rather stay home for the next 10 days than get the nose swab I’ve scheduled for her this afternoon. Ha, nice try, mija. I know other friends whose children are home with Covid, home with sniffles, and home with every symptom in between the two extremes. This is 2021. The virus continues, but now we fight with booster shots and masks and social distancing and frequent handwashing. And lots of missed school. The “and yet” here is that school continues. And yet, life continues. I’m impressed with my little homeschooling school and with our bigger public school system. Despite the radical changes and difficulties faced last year, so many educators and school nurses keep showing up, determined to teach in this crazy time.
I taught my kid at home last year.
Huh.
I’m teaching new little ones at a different school this year. And Livia’s days in high school are dwindling rapidly. Soon she’ll move to a different life stage and we’ll look back at this time with what? Will it be grief for all the changes and losses? Will it be joy for that fast-and-slow year of togetherness at Prairie Box High? Will it be surprise that we weathered this better than expected? One day at a time. That’s it. Grace for one day at a time.
Any discussion of Covid-19 must begin with this: in the United States over 600,000 individuals have died due to this coronavirus outbreak. By any stretch of the imagination, even with faulty numbers and misattributed deaths, the devastation of this virus is far-reaching and heart-breaking. For many people this conversation involves great loss and grief. My heart goes out to these people.
My life, while looking like a game of Fruit Basket Upset, was less touched by death than I had imagined in March 2020. I remember telling Livia that people we loved would die from this pandemic, and largely this was not accurate, thank goodness. Still, we were a hairsbreadth away from tragedies. A grandpa of our nephew succumbed to Covid, and we certainly experienced our share of heartache throughout the 15 months of pandemic distancing. We grieved the deaths of a husband and church brother, the wife of a pastor friend, a groomsman from our wedding, and most of all our cousin Paula who is vibrantly alive in our hearts still.
How long will it take to process what happened between March 2020 and the days we declared ourselves fully vaccinated and thus emerged from our cocoon of relative safety? I don’t know. There are the pat answers we give to others we greet in the pews at church and in chatting on our front sidewalks, and then there are the deeper explorations of the heart that I fear will be lost amongst the busy-ness of life unless I record them here. This is my attempt to start working through the pandemic—the good, the bad, and the confusing of it all—and today I’ll start with The Good as I’m beginning to process it.
THE GOOD
It’s only in hindsight that I’m starting to recognize the good that came from a 15-month hiatus from life as we knew it.
I like life. I like productivity. I like people a lot. I like to leave my house, experience things, then come back to home base. And ALL of that changed due to Covid. When I write about the Bad of it all, I’ll cover my initial shock at the loss of status quo. For now I’ll state that it was a fast and hard departure to life as I knew it and I was extremely uncomfortable at first. What does that kind of disruption do to an extrovert? Well, 15 months later I can tell you that it was a gift. And I believe it’s a once-in-a-lifetime gift. It’s certainly a gift I never would have sought or taken on my own. Seriously, 15 months at home? No traveling. No gatherings in our home. No opportunities for me to go sit in others’ living rooms. No church! Church has been the center of our weekly existences throughout our adult lives (and mine as a child) and then… nada. Nothing. No greetings in foyers and shared worship, study, meals with friends. It all came to a halt. And it was absolutely a gift in terms of the bigger picture.
The bigger picture is that Covid-19 allowed me to detach from familiarity and then sink into the four walls of our home with my man, my girl, and my dog. That was it.
I took a year long sabbatical from my deaconess position at church.
Livia detached from Lincoln Public Schools for a year of being homeschooled by her mama.
Jeremy detached from meeting in person and conducted all group activities by Zoom. (He has long worked from home, so his Covid experience was not drastically different from normal life.)
We settled in. I settled down.
I learned to be quieter, to think my own thoughts, to read perspectives outside my usual circles, to seek counsel from previously untapped resources, and to delight in nurturing only the souls in this home. Around 4pm everyday I would have a simple decision to make: do I want to read a book or start something creative for dinner? I wasn’t entangled more than that. I lived. I slept to deal with stress and I didn’t scold myself for it. I made massive amounts of coffee and realized how superior it is to Diet Mountain Dew. I stood over the hot stovetop and stirred onions and carrots in olive oil while listening to whatever podcast sounded good in the moment. Beyond educating my kid, I had few tethers for the first time in my life. I was forced to untether.
Untethering felt terrifying at first and then it was the deep breath that I didn’t know I needed. If you were on the receiving end of more RT silence, this might explain it. Amidst the swirling news of a world gone mad—global illness, economic ruin, continued and rampant racism, political insanity, online cruelty, formally responsible people becoming conspiracy theorists—I had room to silence the voices when they got too loud, and then turn them on again when my soul could bear it once more. I found space to study the book of Luke with my 16 year old, a real rarity for any mom of a teen. Jeremy and I figured out how to still claim our evening date times where we’d get some time to watch tv and eat snacks together. We surprised ourselves that, despite being home all the time together, there was still quite a lot to talk about and even times where we’d forget to discuss something of note. We fell more deeply in love and were forced to breathe deeply and exude kindness even when the walls closed in a bit too much.
One of the biggest gifts of the past 15 months was the opportunity to embrace who God made me. And the trickle-down effect was that I began to embrace my daughter as well. Being *specific* humans has always been a little hard for me. I can admit that I would like to be everything to everyone. As an enneagram 2 and ESFJ (I promise I won’t dive too deeply into these descriptions!), I really like people. Along with all that liking comes a desire to try to make “them” like me back, and after 43 years it was incredibly healthy to silence “them” for awhile. I’ve written and spoken quite a bit about identity. I’ve studied it and wrestled with it, and right now I’m thanking God for the insights he’s granted me over the past year—and even in the past week. He delights in me. The God of the universe, who created rainbows and the Grand Canyon and the craziest little insects that thrive in the Amazon rainforest delights in me, too. And Jeremy. And Livia. And I’m learning to delight in us as well. I was made with limited abilities. Limited superpowers and limited sins, too, and I’m beginning to embrace that! Even better, I’m beginning to embrace who God has made my daughter to be. Our story is big and winding—much like everyone else’s I imagine. But at the end of the day, we are each one person with one person’s gifting and limitations—and that’s a beautiful thing. We are creatures, created by a really creative Father God. And if I miss that reality then I will always be longing to be someone else. Our Covid break has given me room to value myself and my daughter, with all the beauty God purposefully placed inside us.
Just as there was good in taking a huge breather from life as we knew it, there is also good in re-joining community on this side of [beautiful, life-giving, life-altering] vaccinations. (THANK YOU, SCIENTISTS. I can’t say that thank-you enough.) Our church takes communion each week and we were not involved in that AT ALL during our time at home. It was really hard to not have that physical reminder of the body and blood of Christ each week. I could write at length about the ways I’ve experienced communion, but now is not the time. Suffice to say we felt very cut-off even though we worshipped weekly from our basement couches. The past two weeks that we’ve worshipped in community again have been fascinating. It’s been entirely overwhelming, but there’s one piece that consistently has been the best kind of overwhelming and it is hearing voices sing behind me in congregational worship. There’s nothing like it. Absolutely nothing like it. I let the voices wash over me and it reminds me that when we sing praise, laments, songs of worship, we join with an eternal throng of worshippers. The angels in heaven, the saints of the past and the church of the future, all join in this worship of God. Our little congregation at 9th & Charleston is a small bit of the glory we’ll experience in heaven one day and I. have. missed. it. I don’t want to ever miss it again. I hope to soak it up every Sunday that I am able to!
The good of re-entry also comes in the form of food and drink in restaurants. A margarita and a plate of tacos has never tasted so good. A few weeks ago I had the chance to escape to Nebraska City for the weekend and I ordered room service by myself, an extravagance for sure. And you know what wasn’t special? Eating the amazing food on my hotel room bed while watching a (not very good) HGTV program. It was all the proof I needed that magic lives in dining areas that are perfectly lit, with sangria poured into a glass by a waiter’s hand, with food piping hot from the chef’s kitchen, with the murmur of other happy patrons around you. That’s extravagance. I’ve eaten all the take-out I wanted to during Covid. Now is the time for dining with friends again. Again, thank you, scientists, for this vaccine! Now let’s eat.
