When we follow a Saviour who calls us to turn the other cheek, we can probably, at a bare minimum, cover those cheeks with a mask.
My small, peaceful hometown has been home to a number of anti-lockdown protests in recent months, including a march of 2000 people on November 7th. I wrote a bit about what’s happening there for the Christian Courier, as well as some thoughts on what it means for people of faith to respond to COVID-19.
‘Recently my very attentive three-and-a-half-year-old overheard me booking our flu shots over the phone. As I hung up, he blurted, “Are we all going to get shots?” His memory of the needle is distant, but his imagination of it is powerful. His lip began to quiver as I bent down to talk to him.
“Yes,” I said, “because it will help us be healthier.”
With tears in his eyes he said, “But why does being healthy have to hurt?”’
The Christian Courier is a Canadian Christian newsletter where I began my practice of spiritual writing. In October CC celebrated 75 years of publication. I wrote some of my reflections about writing for them, about starting as a timid columnist, and the gift of working with the late editor, Bert Witvoet as well as the current editor, Angela Reitsma Bick.
You can read that article published in the Christian Courier here.
I’m a bit behind in posting this, but in September I wrote an article for The Banner entitled “Churches Need Hugs and Consent, and They Can Have Both.” Church is an important source of physical contact for many people. I think we often underestimate how deeply many of us need these points of connection. In my own life, outside of family, the church has been the biggest source of physical affection. However, sometimes that affection is not offered in ways that make people feel safe and comfortable. You can read more of my reflections on this here.
“The ways he is changing remind me that time is still ticking on,” my husband says about our infant, “when everything else seems to have stopped.” Our lives have slowed considerable since the pandemic started. In our province, we are in “Phase 1,” encouraged to remain in the protective enclosure of our own home with our own household, to keep all others at a distance of six feet.
Time is a floating bubble that never pops. We are constantly asking each other what day it is. I mark the days of the week through watching my multivitamins disappear in their daily pill compartments. There are no events, no visits, no outings except for walks and fortnightly shopping trips. Everyday there are chores and books to read and noses to wipe. Our baby grows, our toddler learns new words and we watch the leaves slowly start to form on the trees.
The toddler looks at the clock. “It’s fifty eleven-teen hundred,” he says at 5:11, and his answer seems sufficient. The clock is nonsense right now. Freedom from it has it’s advantages, as well as losses.
Since self-isolation has started, the baby has learned to grasp and hold onto the toy he wants, to wiggle his body in a circle on the ground, to do the worm, and can almost sit up unassisted.
Milestones and special dates, while harder to celebrate in isolation, become more important. My husband told me of his colleague’s even-keel five-year-old who said a few weeks ago to her mother, “It’s Easter in three days.” “Actually,” her mother said, “it’s in five days.” The daughter said nothing more until three days later when she woke up and said, “It’s Easter!” and her mother said, “Still two more days.” Then the little girl threw a fit. When children have so little to do, there is so much invested in our special events.
May
“I can’t believe it’s garbage day!” my three-year-old yells over and over again. This marks one of the only regular events in our lives. The other is virtual church on Sunday morning, which ends with a Zoom coffee hour, during which we all wave awkwardly at each other from our Brady Bunch squares on the screen.
We’ve had a few socially distanced visits now, but how do you convey six feet to children? “Imagine there’s a force field around everyone!” one friend calls to her three-year old as he runs up to my son and grabs his hand. We are all enclosed in both real and imagined ways.
Our foray into socially distant gatherings coincides with the baby’s development of stranger anxiety. Unfortunately everyone but his immediate family is a stranger now, and this whole socialization thing is foreign and overwhelming to him.
My husband tells me about a conversation he had with a woman fully dressed in a batman costume while walking her dog. He is confused about why she was wearing it. “She can’t be going to a costume party.”
“She’s wearing it because she can,” I tell him, trying to explain that when we go stir crazy, we throw some inhibitions to the wind. Or perhaps costumes provide an escapist, protective layer.
“But where was she going?” he asks.
“Nowhere,” I say, “that’s the point.”
While pushing the children in the stroller through downtown, I see a person turn the corner in an ornate duck costume. They are wearing an orange unitard and an oversized, sculpted and sparkling head of green. They walk towards us, and stop six feet in front of us on the empty street. They bend over, hands on hips, to eye level with my toddler and give out a loud “quack” from what I guess to be a duck whistle inside the costume. My toddler seems unimpressed. It is the highlight of my day.
They pass us with a wide birth and continue to walk in the anonymity of the bobble duck head.
June
Now the baby is crawling and learning to stand. I have accepted I can no longer call the three-year old the toddler, and finally others are able to see him and attest to his transformation into big boyhood.
In Ontario, we will soon be given permission to create “a bubble” with up to ten people in total. We joke that we will hold popularity contests to see who gets to be invited into each other’s bubble. “We’ve prepared a portfolio,” my husband tells our friends, “so you can see what great candidates we are.”
I grew up in what we referred to as “the bubble,” an insular Christian community mostly composed of Dutch immigrants and their decedents. We attended private school together and went to church together. Instead of girl guides I went to Calvinettes. Instead of dance classes or figure skating we did catechism classes. Our social lives largely revolved around church activities, and as many of us were farmers, it was possible to interact almost exclusively within the bubble.
The term was sometimes used often with affection and sometimes with derision. People were mindful of the fact that, in order to fulfill the Christian obligation of reaching out, we needed to interact with people outside of the bubble. But the school-church bubble protected us. We felt known and familiar. And yet I think many of us longed for more diversity as well. There was something exotic about the public school kids right beside us, separated from us by a fence. I remember my mother telling me about a wedding she attended where the bride, in her thank you speech, said to her parents, “We are so grateful you raised us in this protective bubble, until we were old enough to go out on our own.”
A friend I met in adulthood referred to the world in which I grew up as a cult. I understand why. But there was also beauty in our community, in our shared history and known-ness. I often feel our inter-human connections have become too large for our psyches to handle. There are too many people we should know.
July
I think often about how isolation must be affecting babies’ development. I’ve been watching the Netflix documentary series Babies, and learning about how the first six months are such a formative time in babies’ ability to recognize and differentiate between different faces. A young infant has the ability, one scientist tells us, to distinguish between individual spider monkeys. By twelve months, if not regularly exposed to a diversity of spider monkey faces, they have lost this ability.
What does it mean for my son to only be held by his parents, to look into only faces that look much like his own?
Restrictions have lifted as we move into “Phase 2” and we are permitted to extend our bubble to ten people. Finally grandpa is back in our bubble. Grandpa, who held our baby so often in his first few months, now cannot walk past our seven month old without the baby bursting into sobs. If Grandpa tries to smile, the baby’s face expands in terror, and he looks for Mommy and Daddy immediately.
What will our way of being in pandemic do, I wonder, to the development of babies of 2020? Will they have lower immunity from lack of exposure to flus and common coughs? Will they be more attached to their parents? Will they struggle socially? Be better able to read faces on video chat? Will they enjoy a slower pace of life? Be more anxious? Less? Better able to entertain themselves without constant stimulation? I hope that someone will do serious research on all these things. I love and hate that my child could inadvertently be part of some important experiments on child social development.
August
It is a struggle to find a mask to fit a three-year-old, let alone keep it on his face.
I have finally begun to take my children grocery shopping with me. It is like learning a new dance to suddenly navigate this trip with two children. When the baby starts to fuss in the shopping cart, I try to cheer him by making faces, and he looks at me with a puzzled expression. It takes a full minute for me to realize he cannot see my face under my mask.
I pick him up and he tries to pull the mask off my face. He does not smile back when I coo.
The baby has taken quickly to socializing. He brightens when strangers interact with him in the grocery store. He crawls towards new people at the park. He is in his element with summer.
In the darkness of bedtime, I crouch beside my baby’s crib and peer through the protective bars to watch his still and perfect face. Brené Brown writes in The Gift of Imperfection about how parents describe feeling great vulnerability in these moment, though she doesn’t say what it is about seeing sleeping children that leaves us so raw and exposed. Perhaps as we stare at our babies’ faces we see our own faces, aging and crinkling, and we know that time is a quick-footed beast dragging us along as we clasp for dear life to its tail. Perhaps it is because the sleeping child allows us that soft moment to meditate on our child in a way not permitted by the daytime busy and chatty child who is trying to eat toilet paper or climb the shelves. Perhaps it is that sleep is a type of death. Perhaps it is the longing to form an impenetrable bubble they will live in forever, followed by the heavy realization that we are so incapable of providing the protection they need. Whatever the case, I join with multitudes of parents and caregivers since the beginning of humanity who stare at their sleeping children in fear, love and wonder and watch them vulnerably in the darkness.
Over the past few years I’ve been on the continuing and unending journey of sorting through stuff I’ve inheriting, as well as some of my own childhood stuff I stuffed in the attic of the family home I grew up in. It’s a bit overwhelming at times.
Somehow the process of sorting through so many things that I’ve inherited–stuff I want and stuff I’d like to just ignore–brought to mind the ways in which we inherit privilege, whether we want it or not, whether we want to deal with it or not. I wrote a piece a few months ago about checking our privilege as spiritual practice, and I think it’s an essential ongoing exercise for white Christians. You can check it out in The Bannerhere.
