I lost my the first draft attempt at writing this blog post close to 4 months ago. I won't blame that on the coronavirus, or anything at all, but rather I'll stick to being gracious for the time that I've had to digest the world we are living in today. It amounts to a little more than appreciating the fact that my family is happy and healthy and relatively self-sufficient in this time of uncertainty, and a little less than being to the point where we can work on the plans we had on the back burner for our little family.
This post began on Day 17 of being a father. At this time, the mother of my child is chilling with her feet up, and our dear son is stretched out in his bassinet with his hands up by his head. We 3 have been especially close -- maybe even moreso than new families in January or February, as government officials from around the world have been urging people to stay home and keep social distance stave off the spread of infection.
Needless to say, we have the interest of our son at heart, so we do not need much convincing.
Before any of this stuff had any steam, Kayla and I were enjoying her pregnancy, living our lives as normally as possible. This included hitting some of our favourite restaurants, going to a couple of concerts, checking out some movies in theatres, watching the Golden Bears play hockey, studying for an RN exam, and working. We had already accepted the a whole bunch of the whacky stuff in the world, like the fact that Trump would likely be the POTUS when our son is born (despite attempts from US congress to have him impeached). We watched with sadness as major world events like Australia's forest fires devastating millions of species across the globe and 82 Canadians dying when commercial flight AF752 was shot down in Iran, killing all 176 people aboard. We also watched with passive interest as a place in the middle of China saw cases of this coronavirus continue to climb through December and January.
It seems like forever ago when we watched with joy as friends came to our home to celebrate my wife finishing her RN program while incorporating a lovely baby shower for her.....We celebrated when good friends emigrated 12 thousand kilometres across the globe to start new lives in Auckland. We enjoyed spending time at The Buckingham watching good bands and getting to know good friends' girlfriends just a little bit better. It seems like forever ago when I took my wife out to The Rec Room to watch Teenage Bottlerocket and eat pretzels and wander completely carefree to yummy places like Whyte Ave's Continental Treat, or make last minute trips to watch Saoirse Ronin star in Little Women at the Princess Theater, since we knew that when our child was here it would be just a little bit more challenging to do these things.
We never knew it would be quite like this though.
Man o man. In May, government officials began talking about tentative phasing plans to get things "back to normal", despite no real confidence that these plans might work. After all: the world has never seen anything quite like this before. People talk about the Spanish Flu from a hundred years ago. Well today wikipedia describes the 4 waves ranging between 1918 and 1920. The only thing that people ever really know are that there indeed are vulnerable populations, and that there are sure-fire ways of avoiding contracting and transmitting the novel coronavirus. This has become acknowledged as especially important as carriers are frequently asymptomatic. Having a newborn being brought into a world in the state it's currently in makes it a little bit sad, it's true. These aren't the 1980s where our parents mostly had to worry about the recession, or the 90s where our parents mostly had to worry about whether those Michael Jackson allegations might be true or not. Us kids born before the internet that are having kids now have a slightly more complicated, competitive world. The sheer #s of people striving for a place on the path to success is nothing we could have ever imagined. We can only hope to be as cautious and thoughtful about the best way to achieve that for our progeny in this dog-eat-dog world! Not only that, but guess what: people all around us - including some dear friends - are continuing to have babies too, so there is at least some thought that hope remains...
So here we are. August. At home, isolated. Quarantined. Safe. Together.
We will be continuing to do our part in keeping safe and minimizing risk, as there is nothing more important to my wife and me in the universe than the health, safety, and happiness of our little boy. It may indeed all go back to normal, though perhaps not until a time where COVID-19 cases drop to nearly non-existent levels or a guaranteed 100% effective vaccine is found. Until then, it will likely remain a relatively solitary life for my little family. And I will continue to love every single minute of it.
For the sake of my son and countless other, let us pray for the wisdom of the scientists and government officials that the right decisions are being made and the resources are being made available to give us all a chance to live in the world we all once loved.
