This week, my daughter finally got her license, a month and a week after the intended date circled on my calendar. I took her birthday off months in advance, but when April 6 rolled around, all the government offices were closed. School was closed, the sleepover was weeks beyond cancelled. Life felt cancelled. We spent the day instead celebrating her existence any way I could think to do.

As Missouri and the world cautiously peeps out from behind closed drapes, I'm vacillating wildly inside. Part of me looks at those around me cavalierly chatting an arms' length away without a mask or apparently a care in the world and wonders if I am punishing myself and my family unreasonably. The other part keeps clicking on horrifying tales from Queens hospitals as if to remind myself why I'm home. We found this fawn in our yard this morning. Animal Control thinks he may have been born last night. I check on him every few hours to see if his mama has come back yet. His pose is my mental state during the pandemic. 

At the beginning of all this, I bought new novel-writing software and dug out the novel-in-progress I started multiple years ago. I, like many, thought I'd be so productive without commuting or being able to socialize outside my yard. I misestimated how much mental effort it would take to keep myself grounded from day to day. The level of effort to keep my anxiety from spiralling out of control has ebbed and fallen. I never know if tonight I will wake up at four am unable to find my way back to sleep, or if I'll hit my alarm five times with the feeling of dead exhaustion I haven't experienced since my vitamin D levels dropped dangerously in 2016. Or if I'll pop out of bed hungry and ready to smell the flowers. I have so many thoughts every day of ideas for short stories and novels and blog posts and advice columns that I know I should write before I forget them. ("I used to be funny," I said not that long ago to a new co-worker.)

Today I dragged my laptop outside to see how much our money we gave to Instacart this week and saw a post from my friend Deborah Siegel in my inbox. It had been there for a while. Getting myself to read my personal email is as hard as getting me to log into social media. The post talked about writers not writing during the pandemic. I wanted to cry. The way I have dealt with every scary thing in my life has always been to write about it. So I'm making myself put at least a few paragraphs down so I won't forget what this felt like. I write to remember, so I can remember later what it felt like to live my life.

It's shocking how easy it is to forget your own story.

Easter 2020.

It's the day my daughter was due, exactly 16 years ago. She came a week early. We named her Lily, anyway.

I just watched the filmed-from-home version of SNL. At the end, they paid tribute to a crew member who passed away of COVID-19. 

And y'all, it just broke me.

We sit here in our houses, trying to make fun of Zoom meetings and not wearing pants, celebrating the Tiger King and carbs.

Trying to ignore the fact we're stacking corpses in refrigerated trucks in New York City. 

Most days, I can play stay buoyant with the rest of America. 

Something about the raw reality of watching comedians try to be funny from walk-up apartments while paying homage to the sound guy from afar just got me.

I want to go inside a place other than my house.

I want to hug my friends.

I want to hug my parents.

In the wee hours, I'm scared of my daughter getting intubated.

I'm afraid of my loved ones dying.

I know we're all terminal, but not all at once.

The hard bit of this is to not lean in to the fear. To embrace the boredom and the weight gain and the exhaustion that comes from being on video for eight hours straight rather than the real human terror of a global pandemic, something that used to be the stuff of sci-fi pulp fiction and streaming third-rate thriller films.

Tonight, I cried for the sound guy. And for spring 2020. And for the seniors who don't get prom or graduation, the families who unexpectedly said goodbye to someone important, to the exhausted medical workers and Amazon warehouse workers. For the hair stylists and dry cleaner owners who face bankruptcy. 

I hope we never have another Easter like this one, ever again. 

So I've lost track of the days. I remember the Friday - how many weeks was it ago? When I stood in the parking garage elevator clasping my computer monitor, prepared to work from home for however long it took. I thought it would be like a week.

I was so wrong.

Now I think it will be until at least the end of April.

I just left a ten dollar bill under a rock for my Door Dasher. It'll be the first food not prepared by us we've eaten in two weeks.

The little angel hasn't spoken in person to anyone her age in as long.

Today I saw some week-old kittens. We went to the barn, where there were considerably fewer humans than lambs, goats, cats and horses. We kept a six-foot distance from the humans.

Oh, but it's spring, and it's warmer, and it's windy.

It's terrifying to not be able to plan for a week, a month from now.

The news every day is awful.

I've become too paralyzed to write. I've almost decided to delay my next novel until the little angel goes to college.

I almost wonder if it will take that long for the world to right itself.

My incisions sort of burn. They will heal soon. It's weird to think that I've finally achieved my breast cancer door prize. That it's over, as incredibly bizarre as the surgeries were.

ONWARD.

It's been a while since I've been any sort of regular blogger. But hello, 2020! What a nice surprise to remind us that sometimes journaling is important.

So ... my second surgery to end the breast cancer reconstruction experiment 2020 is scheduled for Wednesday. 48 hours from now. And I'm not sure at all that it will actually happen at this moment. Life is that fluid.

I left work on Friday, huge monitor in hand, kind of in shock. We were told we'd be working from home for the near future. Some friends left for spring break. I thought about my daughter's sweet 16th birthday sleepover. Life felt pretty normal.

Monday. Bars, restaurants shut down. Co-workers on spring break domestic and abroad all but stranded. New normal all Microsoft Teams meetings. Meanwhile, industry charges on.

My surgeon called me. Told me as of this minute, I'm still having my procedure on Wednesday.

Cried twice today.

Co-worker's wedding just got cancelled. Multiple people on my team worried about being single parents having to homeschool their elementary school children while also working.

Nobody has toilet paper, milk or butter.

I write young adult novels. I read all these stories in the late 2000s. 

WHAT IS HAPPENING?

So, I decided to come back to blogging in this bizarre social experiment called COVID-19. 

Today, we contemplated cancelling my little angel's sweet 16. Today, a co-worker had to cancel her damn wedding. Today, I have friends flung wide domestic and abroad, and I'm actually worried about them getting home. I don't recognize my country or my world.

And at the same time, my world has shrunk to the less than 2k square feet of my home. The three people and one cat who reside here.

For the next eight weeks - is this it?

What the hell happened to us?