That didn't go as planned

Like all of you, on Wednesday I sat glued to my tv in horror and disbelief, texting with friends and family who were doing the same. One friend texted me: “I don’t know if it’s the postpartum hormones, but I can’t stop crying.” Her baby is 14 months old. 

Wednesday was a dark day for our country on top of a dark year. It wasn’t the hormones. My friend, like many of us, felt horribly vulnerable at that moment. Confused, angry, and scared. And the thing about feeling that as a parent is that you feel additionally exposed. If you’re feeling that, how can you possibly protect your kids? How do you begin to explain something to your kids that you yourself can’t wrap your head around? Of course, that was not the first time we’ve felt that way in the past months. The feeling was all too familiar, which made it that much more upsetting. 

It’s been an emotional time, to say the least. In fact, the most heavily commented thread on Kunik recently starts with “Is anyone else feeling emotional lately?”. The answer was a resounding yes. As one member said “Some days I feel just fine and go about life with joy and gusto, some days I just feel defeated and sad.” It’s exactly that feeling that made us so eager to end 2020 and move into 2021. 

But as we all know, ending the year doesn’t end the experience or the feelings. That point couldn’t have been made more clearly to me. 

We spent the first day of 2021 in the ER with a broken foot. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, let me tell you, an 18 month old in a leg cast is not fun. A few days after that, I found out that my beloved OBGYN had suddenly, tragically passed away. It hit me harder than I expected. He had, just weeks before, delivered my second baby with him. You rely on your OBGYN in an incredibly intimate, close way during a very intense time in your life. I still can’t believe he’s gone. That was Monday. I was already feeling particularly vulnerable from both of those events, so when I saw what was happening on Wednesday, I had trouble processing it. It wasn’t how I thought the year would start.

You’ve no doubt seen the countless (and honestly, pretty funny) memes writing-off 2021 and moving into 2022. But no matter what the calendar says, we’re still in this moment. There will be the days of feeling ‘joy and gusto’ and the days of feeling ‘defeated and sad’. 

What I can say, definitively, is that in these first days of 2021, when I was feeling overwhelmed, there was nothing that helped so much as talking with others. The cathartic experience of sharing and hearing from others has an incomparable healing power. 

We’ve found substitutes and replacements for many parts of our lives during COVID, but what we cannot replace is human connection. Just because we’ve become more accustomed to not seeing people, not being together, doesn’t make us crave that any less. It might look different today than it would have before, but we still yearn for that familiarity.

My baby is just over a month old now and my parents haven’t been able to meet her yet. It breaks my heart. I know I am not the only one dealing with that though, and I’ve talked to many others in the same situation. Sharing that experience with them has not made me stop wishing my family could meet my baby, but it has helped me live with that current reality. That is the power of human connection. It may not change things, it may not make you stop wishing for something, but it can make you feel less alone, and it can make the current realities more bearable. 

It’s safe to assume that 2021 probably didn’t start in the way that anyone reading this quite imagined. Whether on a personal level or a global one. I was reminded, in these past few days, that the only way to process that is by talking, sharing, and connecting. So truthfully, how’s your New Year starting off?