Everyone has COVID stories. Some are sad; others ridiculous. And still others, truly tragic. Mine is a mixed bag of a bunch of stuff. None, thank God, rises to the level of tragic. But since I rarely let my emotions sit still, and I've lived at a high stress level for so long, it's highly likely that I just suppress--or just blow past--things that might catch others up short.
Back in the early days of COVID, my eldest contracted the virus. That was in March 2020. He lived in a different state, so the whole process of figuring out if he was sick, how sick he was, whether and when he needed to get to a hospital, and so on, was all done via text message. Which is a special brand of maternal torture. Then of course there was the bald fact of having a very sick child (turns out he had a COVID-induced case of multi-site pneumonia) two states away, alone in a hospital. The most I could do was wrest a photo or two out of him so he could hold a medicine label over his head and I could see what the doctors were giving him. Since he couldn't breathe well or consistently enough to speak with me, I read the label. And of course it meant nothing to me. I focused instead on my son's glassy, feverish eyes, and his sweaty face. My mother's heart really, really hurt. But there was nothing to be done. We could only let him know we loved him, remind him to use the oxygen left in his hospital room if he needed it, and put our full faith and trust in the doctors and nurses treating him.
Fast forward seven months and we're about to turn our son over to another bureaucracy, one in which whatever faith and trust I might have had has been shattered. Not completely, not irredeemably. But badly shattered nonetheless. On October 11th, my husband and I will drop our son off at Officer Development School, a Naval facility where he will immediately go into a fourteen day quarantine, along with everyone else there to learn how to be an officer in the United States Navy.
This past year and the three before it have made me wonder if this country deserves my son's service, his commitment, his patriotism. I know that the pustule masquerading as Commander-in-Chief does not. And I openly asked my son if he had any reservations about serving this CiC. "No" came back the firm, immediate reply. I am actually glad that my son can see past the time-limited person at the top of the American military pyramid to the greater purpose the military serves, and the ways in which it can and has represented the best of America. Not because war is a meritorious enterprise, but because the military has managed--perhaps better than any institution, corporation, or other collective enterprise in America--to represent something as close to a meritocracy as we might ever get in this country. So following his Army cousin's advice, my son signed up, because if good people don't serve, who will?
This first phase in the Navy is about six weeks, and will be followed by a more task-specific training in how to be a Navy JAG, in understanding the Uniform Military Code of Justice and all of the other requirements of being a lawyer on either side of a case, viz., representing the defense or the prosecution.
I joke that the apartment I once thought of as spacious has come to feel like a studio, with five adults and two dogs living in it full time. My son has been sleeping on a trundle bed all these months, in his younger brother's room, stashing his clothes on the window ledge or floor. His autistic brother routinely climbs over him at all hours to come into my bedroom and wake me or my husband
so being woken at 5a.m. to start his Navy days might not feel so bad. At least during quarantine, he'll have a room all to himself, and he'll be obligated to do all kinds of physical fitness tasks. For a workout nut like my son, that probably sounds like fun.
But I'll miss him terribly, even for these forty or so first days. He'll be at ODS during his birthday, but home in time for his brother's birthday and Thanksgiving (which fall on the same day this year). My husband will miss having someone to drive him to work, to chat with, to make the commute less lonely. In their months of commuting together, my husband felt like he got to know his son all over again. He's an older child now, with college, a couple of years of full-time work, and grad school under his belt. We haven't seen this much of him in probably a decade. It's nice to meet him all over again and to realize that the person we've liked and loved mostly at a distance, is someone we still like and love up close. No, he hasn't learned to pick up after himself at home, and he still needs to be asked to do things like walk the dogs and load the dishwasher. But I never expected that much change. In fact, I kind of liked the lovable slob he always was. And still is. But I will have some hearty laughs thinking about the quarters he'll be trained to bounce off his bedsheets, having barely figured out how to throw a comforter over his sheets in his shared room in our crowded studio apartment.
so being woken at 5a.m. to start his Navy days might not feel so bad. At least during quarantine, he'll have a room all to himself, and he'll be obligated to do all kinds of physical fitness tasks. For a workout nut like my son, that probably sounds like fun.
But I'll miss him terribly, even for these forty or so first days. He'll be at ODS during his birthday, but home in time for his brother's birthday and Thanksgiving (which fall on the same day this year). My husband will miss having someone to drive him to work, to chat with, to make the commute less lonely. In their months of commuting together, my husband felt like he got to know his son all over again. He's an older child now, with college, a couple of years of full-time work, and grad school under his belt. We haven't seen this much of him in probably a decade. It's nice to meet him all over again and to realize that the person we've liked and loved mostly at a distance, is someone we still like and love up close. No, he hasn't learned to pick up after himself at home, and he still needs to be asked to do things like walk the dogs and load the dishwasher. But I never expected that much change. In fact, I kind of liked the lovable slob he always was. And still is. But I will have some hearty laughs thinking about the quarters he'll be trained to bounce off his bedsheets, having barely figured out how to throw a comforter over his sheets in his shared room in our crowded studio apartment.
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