Hope

As moms, I believe we are somehow taught that the busier we are, the more productive we are. If we are stay at home moms, we are meant to believe we are failing our children if they are not in every sport, every musical class, every scouting group or playgroup. As working moms, we are meant to believe that by earning a paycheck outside the home, our children are somehow neglected. 
This virus has upended life for every parent. What was once up is now down, what was once left is now right. Working mothers are now experiencing life at home, and stay at home moms are now experiencing the crushing weight of the feeling of having to provide for a family when the chips are down. 
In a week, or a month, or a year, there will begin a new normal. Perhaps concerts and movie theaters will have gone by the wayside, germophobia running rampant. Perhaps families will begin a great stockpiling of goods as they did in the days of the depression, with an ever looming second foot waiting to fall. 
But here are the ways I hope life will change. 
I hope that we, as parents, will all start to understand and empathize with each other more. Each of us is doing the best we can, regardless of income or job situation. This is a large village and it’s one whose tasks we all must share. 
I hope that the uber busy parents, the ones who claim they have no time to read, no time to socialize, no time to be anything other than always “on”, will be able to step back occasionally to recognize that their children need them more present than they do behind the wheel of a transportation device. 
I hope that those of us who have an unnatural predilection to phones and other technological devices will find a way to step away from this devil we’ve come to know to embrace the simple ways. 
I hope that we continue to take walks and revel in a nature that we’ve betrayed in a myriad of ways, recognizing the ways we’ve inadvertently harmed it and the ways we can very consciously change it. 
I hope that we look to the friends and family we have been zooming and texting and calling and about whom we’ve been fretting and worrying, and become more cognizant of the role they play in our lives and the absolute joy they bring to us. 
I hope that our children will, in five, ten , fifteen years, look back on these crazy times with a wonderment about how their parents handled it all, and perhaps even a strange sense of nostalgia at the beautiful minutiae of their time in isolation. 
I hope that teachers who may have become jaded and calloused at an ever evolving system will have a renewed vigor to be with their students in a hands on environment, and the parents who lacked the empathy to recognize the exhaustion and passion in their children’s teachers will come to an understanding about the difficulties faced when attempting to educate and tolerate two dozen children daily for seven hours per day. 
I hope that we will never again be terse or short with the health care providers who stand on the front line of unseen battles every single day, and that we appreciate all essential workers, from nurses to delivery people, who service us for less than they deserve. 
I hope we remember the people we’ve lost, no matter the age, the demographic, the underlying illnesses that preceded their deaths, because every one of them was more than a statistic and more than dollars lost. 
I hope that we commemorate this time in our lives less as time lost but as insight gained and wisdom earned. 
Wars come in many forms and are never won by any side,but these battles are being fought unanimously and with selflessness unlike any I’ve ever seen. No wall is separating us, no color divides us, no language silences us.
We are brave soldiers, with battle scars, and our war tales will be plentiful, but I hope we never again feel unarmed or alone. 
Hope.