When to open up

“Developmentally Inappropriate”

lynnmorstead4 Comments

“It’s like Chinese New Year every evening at dinner” reflected one of my Singaporean friends. The surprise gift of time with our young adults seems to be felt across the globe. They’ve returned to the nest during COVID-19, and those who were still living with us are suddenly spending all their time at home — rather than treating us like a free AirBnB.

Here in the US it’s rather similar to Thanksgiving. You know you can count on everyone showing up for a family meal together. There are no competing anythings to draw them away. We can check in with each other more deeply, catch up, and continue conversations from the night before. We even go for evening strolls after dinner and watch a TV show together occasionally. It’s a throw-back to earlier family life. It’s cozy. I’m getting used to this. I already know I going to really miss this on the other side of the pandemic.

“It’s developmentally inappropriate” is how my 25-year old positions this after prefacing her comment with “no offense or anything, but ….” I guess she does have a point. This would not have been my definition of a daily choice of fun when I was in my 20’s. I get it.

So many young people are locked up in isolation with their parents. It was tolerable — more or less — while everyone was going through the motions of online schooling and young professionals zooming into work, AND we thought it would all be over by the summer. But now, we’re into summer, there’s no end in sight and the troops are getting restless.

The generation that we thought subsisted on texting, Snapchat and Instagram turns out to have a greater appetite for face-to-face contact with their peers than we had thought. How re-assuring.

How will the youngsters on the stair steps to adulthood be changed by 2020? Are they going to miss some steps along they way and get tripped up in the future? Or worse yet, fail to make it to the next step?

A missed prom or walking the stage at graduation won’t change anyone’s life trajectory. But what are they missing by not being able to venture out into the world and cut their teeth on real life experiences without a parental blanket covering them?

They’re not taking those first self-organized and self-propelled adventures – either near or afar. They’re not figuring out their own plans for the fall season, be it school or new jobs. Many have lost employment opportunities to help fund next years tuition. And none are they off on last-chance carefree trips on shoe-string budgets.

They’re frozen in time and place.

They’re waiting to be told what the boundaries will be within which they can operate. Will they be sitting in classrooms together and if yes, when and how? Will they be able to take the necessary national tests required to move to the next step? Employers are moving the start date or withdrawing offers.

How can this generation get out the door and get launched?

If “adulting” was already a “thing” that was hard, won’t it get that much harder?

Generation “Z” will surely get some new nickname a few years down the road, just as I’ve been labelled a “Boomer”. The story has not yet been written – we’re still in the first chapters. Who knows what the impact will be. Will they be the locked-ups, the mollycoddleds, the zoomers, or simply the pandemics?

They’re not on the trajectory they had imagined for themselves. Their ideas about how the world would unfold for them have shifted. The old model has been discontinued, but the new one hasn’t yet evolved.

At a certain point they will stop waiting and begin to define the new reality for themselves, so they can live into their potential. We need to make sure that we are willing to let them leap and start taking the risks that will be needed for this to happen.

And it will not be risk-free for any of us.

For me this will be hitting very close to home in a couple of weeks when our medical student leaves the safety of online only classes and ventures into the heart of the Texas COVID epicenter. Our protected bubble will be compromised, our risk level goes up, and at the same time we need to support this next step forward.

When you kinda wish you were wrong

lynnmorstead1 Comment

Ever since May 1st, we’ve been angst-ily deliberating the do-or-don’t we break out of our bubble question. On May 4th I put a stake in the sands of my daily journal declaring “wait 3-4 weeks to see what happens in Texas, and then start tip-toeing out“.

The May stats remained unremarkable here. Things trickled along at a steady pace. There appeared to be a glimmer of light at the end of this dark Rona-tunnel. We didn’t do it, but a visit to a restaurant no longer seemed as outrageous – at least for outdoor dining. We could imagine a gradual return to more contact with people. We actually let a social distancing visitor enter our home to use the restroom. Gutsy. That felt like a bold move in our own ‘opening up’.

Then, poised on the edge of a shift change in our movements … the death of George Floyd brought thousands into the streets and Memorial Day gatherings enticed large crowds to beaches, parks and barbecues. On May 28th we plugged into a special vaccine update by Dr. Peter Hotez where he spoke of a potential Texas surge coming as late as July and no vaccine until 2021 at the earliest.

So I moved the goal posts in my journal again: “Revisit release date early July“

2020 feels like it might be a wipe-out.

Starting June 15th, the daily Houston virus stats chart in the local paper began showing a slight increase. A noticeable up-tick followed by a couple lower readings and another higher one. Not yet sure if this is significant – a new trend, or just a blip? The signal that something might be changing became dramatically clear when I opened the newspaper the morning of June 23rd. The jump looked foreboding.

The next day, the paper removed the chart — that was even more scary. I’d been tracking the new cases every day for weeks now. The daily new cases for Houston was replaced with the % positivity chart. Is that an indicator that we shifting into a different level of alarm? We also now have people in our closer circle getting sick.

It’s getting real.

Today, a week later, the positivity % continues to rise and the conversation has shifted to ICU bed capacity and forecasting. Apparently we are going to also argue and cast doubt on these numbers, but I won’t get into that here.

Academic projections are manifesting in real life.

I am comforted that the scientist’s assessments match what is happening. Cause and effect can be linked. This is something I can understand. It makes sense when so much else around me makes no sense at all right now.

I happily pay my flood insurance every year and hope it’s money down the drain. Similarly, we stayed at home after the stay-at-home order was lifted, hoping that would have been an overly cautious complete waste of time. I’m glad we did, but …

I kinda wish we had been wrong about this.

What’s next?

Stuck in No Man’s Land

lynnmorstead1 Comment

The grand re-opening continues unabated. The public has risen up and said “enough”. All the while virus cases are on the rise, letting us know that “it’s not over yet”.

I’ve had enough too.

Yet, I watch and wait for it to be “over”, though I have no clue what that might look like.

The initial glow of a welcome respite from routines, commitments and schedules has long lost it’s shine. Once we had mastered the new challenges of acquiring our basic needs and caught up on a few back-burner to-dos, we settled into a comfortable sameness. I’ts been rather dull some days, but tolerable nonetheless.

Tolerable for a while. That comfortable sameness is now old. My tolerance is wearing thin. I’m done with it.

I’m ready to move on, but not sure what makes sense.

I’m caught between friends who are out eating at restaurants again and others who haven’t even gone to a grocery store in three months.

I’d love to meet up at a noisy restaurant for fancy cocktails and tasty deliciousness served up in multiple complex dishes. My heart is ready — “you go for it girl!”, but my mind says “wait, what about all those droplets spewing into the air?” Feels too risky. I reconsider.

I’m stuck between joining in on group gatherings and life moving on without me. Are we creating even more divisions in our world? Those who meet up in person and those who remain virtual?

I’m conflicted about saying goodbye to family members moving out of state, for forever, without a hug goodbye. Should we take a leap of faith and do it anyway? We all feel healthy. Surely one big bear hug would be fine, but what if it’s not?

Time with our older loved ones is precious and yet we’re trying to limit our visits? There’s something not quite right about that. I’m questioning my efforts to protect my dad so he can stay healthy and yet more disconnected. What if I got tested before I visited? There are too many reasons why a negative test is no guarantee that I might not bring the virus to his door anyway.

What if this situation lasts the rest of the year – into next year? Beyond?

If it’s just a matter of time before we all get exposed, maybe I should just get it over with. But then again, the longer I can delay the inevitable, the more knowledge and research I will benefit from as an eventual patient.

Hang on a little longer.

It’s clear that at some point each one of us is going to take the next big step out into the open. Just like making the decision to get into my car and drive somewhere in Texas, where the rate of fatalities is tracking close to our current Coronavirus deaths.

I don’t stay at home because of car fatalities, so should I continue to stay at home because of the virus? I feel more comfortable with the risk on the freeways because I drive along under the illusion that I have more control over my safety. But I’m not so sure about this new virus.

We will eventually learn to cozy up to this new threat. We’ll integrate it into our daily micro-decisions about safety. A choice to not drive after midnight on New Year’s Eve might become similar to a choice not to go bar-hopping in the inner city. Some will still do it, but many others will choose not to.

STOP PRESS: I just learned that our local gym has reopened with strict safeguards. OH! This might be my moment of daring! I’m not rushing over there yet, but I am doing some serious investigations on their new COVID setup.

Stay tuned …