Parenting in a Time of Pandemics

As I've watched the virus tide rising, and what was just a virus morph into a global pandemic, I've been interested to see how I have--and haven't--reacted.  I'm one of those people who can get undone by something simple at times--like not being able to find those socks I know I put down a minute ago--but give me a real crisis, and I can be weirdly calm.  I think that comes from having grown up with constant complications and challenges on the home front, so my normal has consistently been lived at an elevated pitch.  So much so that I gave up noticing a long time ago.

I dealt years ago with a full time job, a dying father, and a disabled son, all at once.  I'm not sure at the time I appreciated the toll all of that took on me, but it surely left an imprint.  Fast forward some years, and my mom is now dealing with her sixth (or is it seventh?) bout of cancer, on top of heart disease, and the general diminishments of aging.  And that disabled child is now a young man, with ongoing needs and challenges.  One of which is how to explain to him just what a pandemic is.  That one just makes me laugh honestly, because it's so utterly ridiculous.  I talk about germs everywhere, and people being sick, and why we can't travel and no, I don't know when we can take a trip, and what we'll be doing in April or May, and on and on.  I remind him to wash his hands coming and going, and not to touch the elevator buttons with his bare hands, though he can still play elevator operator in our building, announcing floors to everyone or no one, depending on who's in the car with him.

For my child with anxiety, I try to keep the news at bay, and provide other distractions and conversational topics, but real life inevitably seeps in.  It's about not having that seeping become a flood that overwhelms and terrorizes.  In fact, I took the radically opposite approach by taking her very recently to Madrid for a long weekend, slipping back into the U.S. just ahead of the latest idiotic travel ban.  We had a wonderful time.  Full stop.

Then there's my child with a fever, chills, and pounding pressure in his face.  Just a head cold?  Sinus infection?  Who knows, but I had to tell him that he couldn't come home, because his brother is on immune-suppressing meds and that's a risk we can't take.  So I'm trying to monitor from afar, checking in with the university's health services, relaying what they told me to his girlfriend, and hoping that she--being the wiser and more pragmatic of the two--will take good care of him.  And keep herself healthy and safe in the process.

Life has never been uncomplicated for me.  So this feels like an extension of that, with everyone else folded in this time.  I guess it's like going from an all-volunteer military to all of us being conscripts.  It changes everything.  Or maybe for some of us, it changes nothing much at all...