What We're Losing: Ruminations on Reopening, or Not

The thing about sourdough starter--what you use to make the bread--is that you constantly throw away most of it. Every few hours, you toss the majority of what you've made, and add new materials (flour, water), so that eventually you will have something worth baking with. To move forward, you have to get rid of most of what you have.

Maybe that's the reason sourdough is so popular right now (mine is cooling on the counter). It feels like we are tossing out most of what we've got in this world. My question is if what we're left with will be worth keeping, or not.

The other day, I took my kids out for a walk within the bounds allowed by law. We wound up seeing one of my older kid's classmates--she's not someone he's especially close to, though he likes her and pretty much everyone. After just a few minutes of talking with her  and climbing a homemade fort the way five year-olds do, he was GLOWING.

As we walked away, he said to me "what a great day, Mom!" because he got to play with a kid his age. She's a lovely kid, but not one of his closest friends. And no more than five minutes with her absolutely made his day. 

He's a happy kid, he's been mostly ok throughout this period, but it broke my heart that he was so desperate for time with kids his own age.

All he wants is to play with his friends. And he's 5. I should be able to give him that.

He will only get to be in kindergarten once, and he is losing that, day by day. 

For weeks after this started, my three year-old would ask "is there preschool today?" and we'd have to tell him there wasn't. I'm not sure what was worse--hearing the question, or hearing him simply stop asking.

I know kids are resilient and they will be ok, but this feels like a lot to ask them to recover from.

In the debate about when and what and how to try to maybe reopen our society, there seem to be two extremes: OPEN NOW and KEEP CLOSED. The thing is, no one is actually at the extreme. None of us think we should shut everything down and go to military lockdown for months (or years) until we have a vaccine. What kind of society would that protect? What would it do to us, and to our children?

So it's a question of how we reopen. And none of us think we should just go back to the way things were, because we can't bear the consequences. We need only read what has happened in Spain, Italy, or New York to know that we must avoid that, too. Movie theaters aren't an option right now, for even the most optimistic (or ignorant?).

We're talking about our jobs, and the economy. Those things are important--critical. We need to be able to pay rent and buy food. But the thing is that in all of this, we are losing some calculation of the other things that matter, too--the soft things that make us live, rather than merely exist.

Five year-olds playing tag and running in the park with their friends. Three year-olds singing songs with their friends. Family dinners beyond the nuclear family. Nights sharing cocktails with friends. The long weekend I was supposed to have with my Dad, across an ocean. Are we tossing too much of the world that we've built--accidentally throwing out too much of the sourdough?

I don't know what the right way is to do any of this. No one does. But our kids--even the happy, well-adjusted ones with two loving parents and enough of everything--even they are starting to be Not Ok. And at some point soon, even for the science-lovers among us, that might just outweigh the fear.