Measuring

A COVID-19 Dispatch from Montana 

I teach at a community college, and even though we were given the edict to move all our classes online the Thursday before spring break, the real start of this pandemic came the day after that announcement.  

Because I had to tell my daughter, Margot, that we were postponing her birthday plans. Margot is a planner. We often tease her about taking more joy in the preparation she gives to an event than the actual event itself. She has a birthday binder, with tabbed sections, samples, and clear instructions. She has other binders, too.

The worst possible situation for a planner is to have plans change. 

It was Friday, March 13, and we were supposed to be leaving for her birthday weekend the next morning as soon as she was done with ballet. However, I was having some symptoms—a cough, a runny nose, but no fever—and my husband, as the chair of the local school board, was facing the difficult decision of whether to close all the k-12 public schools in the district. 

The birthday plans involved a road trip to Bozeman, a much more vibrant town than our sleepy state capital. We were going to stay at a fancy hotel, eat great food, go to a spa, shop on Main Street. We were going to spend two nights and come back late on Monday—skipping a bit of school.

With all of the school board business, there was no way Luke could go. And I was sick on the couch—both from a cold and the fear that it might be more. I’m not in a high-risk group, but both of my daughters were born premature. In her first three years of life, every cold Margot contracted turned to pneumonia. Hannah has exercise-induced asthma. They’ve both been fine for years, but who am I to want to test those complications?

Luke picked Margot up from ballet on Saturday, as planned, but that was the last of the regular. He told her we wouldn’t be making the trip to Bozeman (where confirmed COVID-19 cases were then the highest in the state). He told her we’d do everything we could to make it a great birthday at home.

She stormed right past me when they got here, ran up the stairs to her room and slammed the door. 

In addition to being a planner, Margot is a naturally good-natured, happy person. She gets upset sometimes, of course, especially when expectations aren’t met, and we take her bouts of anger in stride. Sadness is much rarer, though, and when it occurs, it feels insurmountable. When Margot is sad, she is so sad. It’s a different level of emotion, and it sweeps everyone up in its storm. 

Twice in the last several months, she’s read something that brought climate change into acute focus for her, and she dissolved into those ravaging, hiccupping sobs that only stop when they’ve run themselves out—when the crier is spent. 

Most of Margot’s tears are for things other than herself. She is desperately concerned about polar bears and ice caps and the havoc super-rich hikers are wreaking on Mt. Everest. She is painfully worried about the world her grandchildren will inherit (she just turned 13). Those continents of garbage in the sea literally keep her up at night. 

What I’m saying is: she knows how small a change in birthday plans is.

And when I went up to comfort her ten minutes later, I watched her wrestle with that added burden. She was disappointed and heartbroken because she’d been looking so forward to this time with us (we are a tight family of four, and Margot rarely chooses to be with others), but she was also disappointed and heartbroken at her own fixation on something so luxurious and self-indulgent as a fancy birthday weekend in midst of a world so wrecked. 

As her mother, I am so proud of her perspective and her enormous, world-centered heart, but I am also terrified for her. We can’t always live in heightened awareness of every disaster, or we’ll be consumed. I have no tolerance for permanent willful ignorance, but—if we are to live our lives with any joy and appreciation—we must at least willfully look in other directions sometimes. 

Birthday celebrations take Margot’s mind off the inevitable, impending doom of unchecked climate-change, as does cooking and baking, walking our three-legged dog, practicing ballet, and intricately folding paper into origami octahedrons (look it up). My husband and I often talk about the importance of these joys in Margot’s life. For someone who feels the enormity of our world’s problems, daily joys are imperative.

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We were in Italy for spring break at exactly this time last year. We were crammed onto trams in Rome. We were pressed into crowds at the Colosseum and Vatican. We were sitting on the tight terraces of small bars in Tuscan villages. 

We celebrated my husband’s birthday, which falls just ten days after Margot’s, in a centuries-old stone home we’d rented with two dear friends in the tiny village of Volpia, high on a hill in Chianti. We met other friends for an incredible outdoor lunch at la Bottega, the only restaurant in town. 

The next day, we went to a cashmere goat farm as agri-tourists. We combed cashmere from several goats; we held and fed babies; we petted the huge guard dogs that resembled polar bears, much to Margot’s delight. We were joined by a Ukrainian couple, now living in San Francisco, and when the man held one of the baby goats, he put his nose to the soft fur, then looked up at us all and said, “It smells like milk and honey.” After the goats, we all sat down for lunch at the ex-pat-cashmere-goat-farmer’s kitchen table, where we ate elbow-to-elbow as newfound friends. 

Back in Rome, we went to a ballet—brilliant contemporary dance set to the music of Philip Glass. We sat in red-velvet chairs in a crowded balcony at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, an incredible old opera house. 

All of those places are empty right now, and we are homebound for spring break. 

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My family is fortunate and privileged enough to be able to travel to Italy, to celebrate birthdays with hotels and restaurants and spas, to pay to comb someone else’s goats and attend professional ballets. My husband and I are fortunate and privileged enough to have jobs that can translate to remote working with no interruption of pay, to be able to be home with our girls while they’re out of school, to live in a place with few enough people and wide enough spaces that we can still go outside for hikes and runs even while under a shelter in place order.

I know we are luckier than most. 

And I know my daughter’s thwarted birthday plans aren’t a tragedy, which is what I was thinking about when I went upstairs to comfort her. 

I found Margot hiccup-crying in her bed, already beating herself up about how small a thing her birthday celebration was in the face of so big a thing as global pandemic. 

I was proud of her for recognizing that. 

I sat down on her bed. I rubbed her back. I told her she was right—her birthday was small in comparison.

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A few days later, everything in my other daughter’s life started getting canceled—senior prom, graduation, the national speech and debate tournament she’d qualified for, possibly even her first semester of college. I responded to Hannah the same way I responded to Margot.

“It’s all so small in the face of this,” I said. I sat by her. I rubbed her back. I said, “Perspective, my love. Perspective.”

And I know that response is right in so many ways, but I’ve found myself regretting it.

Don’t get me wrong—we can’t lose perspective, especially when it relates to our own privilege, much of which we did nothing to earn (my husband and I are the white, upper-middle-class, college-educated offspring of white, upper-middle class, college-educated parents), but my original response misses the individual lives of my daughters. It misses context.

If I could go back, I’d still say, “There’s no question that this is one of those times in history that we will all look back on. Your future grandkids will ask where you were during the COVID-19 outbreak. We will all be deeply affected by this; we will all know someone who dies. Everything is changing, and it’s going to change more.” But I wouldn’t stop there. 

I’d go on to say, “There is no question that this is huge, and we are lucky, but the collective magnitude of this pandemic doesn’t negate the individual magnitude of your life. And we measure our lives in celebrations, in birthdays and dances and graduations, in weddings and funerals. Each of those moments is a notch on the tally-board of your life. It is an acknowledgement that you are here. So, you go on and cry, my loves, and you mourn the loss of those celebrations, because they are losses. Significant memories are being lost before you’ve had a chance to make them, and that isn’t small.”

What I want to say to my girls is: The small has become big because the big has infiltrated it. The big isn’t out of sight; it isn’t in the ice caps or the middle of the sea or on top of a mountain. It is in our quiet homes and shuttered businesses and empty streets.

And we will continue to find joy and distraction in the small pleasures that have become enormous in our current lives, but we must also acknowledge the losses, no matter their size.