Been a long time, occasional reader.
I’ve been a bit preoccupied lately. My 17-year old has COVID and the last thing on my mind is writing. It looks like he will be OK, so I’m going to try not to worry too much. He can’t taste, he’s congested and a little short of breath but that’s about it so I believe we have been lucky. His brother and mother are negative and I suspect when my results come in next week I too will be negative. So he’s in isolation for the week ahead, but this isn’t a bad time in history to be stuck in one’s room with all our many creature comforts. He’s still in there shouting at top volume to his multiplayer computer games, so as long as I keep hearing his boisterous ass I know all is as well as can be expected.
I am doing my best not to blame myself as a parent for the freedom I allowed him while this pandemic raged. In a sense, it’s not completely my fault because our government has been utterly unresponsive to this crisis, encouraging the reopening of society while the pandemic got exponentially worse. But anyway, it’s been super hard to continue time and time again to say no to the things my nearly grown kids want. It took me close to three months from the lockdown in March to allow visits with his girlfriend, whom he is in love with. I could not bear to stomp on his heart any further so I let it happen. Turns out that wasn’t wise, as she is more than likely the vector from which he caught the virus. Her fucking family members are Trumpers so you know they didn’t believe this thing is real (oh but I guess now they have to, huh?). I also allowed him to go to work at Waffle House, where he was slated to be off training wheels when he got sick so that’s shit timing. It could be worse, I guess-he could have needed to isolate at Christmas and that would be a drag and a half on everyone here.
So clearly, mistakes have been made and I want to say that just because my kid will likely get off easy doesn’t mean anyone should be running around like COVID’s nothing more than a sniffle. 270,000 dead people would beg to differ. I have been irresponsible and now I am paying. Perhaps not quite as irresponsible as the thoughtless people who continue to walk around maskless, but nonetheless I have allowed COVID to spread because I didn’t stick to my guns. If you are a parent, you know what a struggle this has been but please limit their exposure so you don’t have to fret that you’ve done something monumentally wrong. Knowing your kid has COVID doesn’t feel good at all and it is probably better to protect them presently by curtailing their contact with the outside world wherever you can. They don’t have to completely understand. That’s the hard part.
Don’t go willy-nilly thinking like I did that nothing’s probably going to happen because for eight months nothing did. It’s an inevitability you will have a COVID case in your family otherwise. And you or your loved ones may not get off as easy as we here have.