2020 proved the biggest challenge of my entire existance.

It shoveled a fair amount of benign shit my way…mostly situations that involved delaying major life events costing thousands of dollars, navigating complex teenage emotions, and aging parents in the time of COVID, which, all told, claimed zero lives so we’re gonna call that a win.

There was good, too. I spent an inordinate amount of time with my family, specifically regularly disrupting my son’s nightly online gaming shindig with his virtual buddies with a big HELLOOOOOO, a’la Mrs Doubtfire, minus the cool whip on my face (sometimes, because who DOESN’T love a face full of cre…ah. Nevermind…) to check in. Or, redecorating my daughter’s room to clear the massive clutter she’d accumulated, and to reflect her new found obsession with roller coasters, to make up for our summer vacation to Cedar Point, aka the coaster capital of the world, ruined by the virus that shall remain nameless. Or, gathering the entire family, usually via a group text message (our family group is called Jam-A-Lama-Ding-Dong…a play on our other family group, the FamJam…because we’re nerds and proud of it), to assemble at the dinner table for some culinary experiment gone right. I do few things really well in my life, most of them I can’t talk about here, but my cooking skills? They are mad. We spent a lot of time outside, enjoying our pool and surrounding yard, utilizing our three season room, typically just a transition from the house to the deck, it transformed into a second office, a therapy room, a drawing oasis…a chameleon changing its colors depending on the need.

Mostly, though, I spent the year, roughly mid March through the very last second of December 31st, watching Instagram stories of friends and acquaintances, starring mask-less faces in bars, restaurants, and at family gatherings, Facebook posts of others on planes destined for vacations, or weddings. I read (both past and present tense) stories that ripped my heart out of my chest, put it through a blender, and shoved it back down my throat…stories from those working in ER’s, helping patients Facetime loved ones before realizing their fate of proning and a ventilator and almost certain death. My ex-husband, losing his father to heart failure back in April, unable to travel across the Canadian border to say his last goodbye. Canada refused to let anyone from the US into the country back then because we couldn’t get our collective shit together. A very close friend, calling us from the ER, gasping for breath, terrified, and COVID positive, confiding in us his fear, and regretfully wishing he hadn’t “been so cocky.”

He was lucky. He survived. 350,000 others weren’t so lucky.

I mostly distracted myself from the pandemic details by avoiding social media, and with bread baking and rearranging my bathroom closet and throwing myself into work and ALL THE AMAZON SHOPPING. (who else bought a Dustbuster to vacuum the errant hair in their bathrooms? Just me?) But that waned around the time the holidays hit, and reality struck close when my bubble made the difficult decision to forego gatherings with any extended family. Here’s the thing…I like my family. A LOT. We have fun, eat a lot of delicious food, cuss, carry on, and it’s glorious. We agreed the risk of creating our own mini super spreader event outweighed the benefit of spending Christmas and Thanksgiving together, and that was perhaps the most difficult decision I’ve ever made in my whole 45 years on this planet. I cried and yelled and wrung my hands about it for days, because never in my life did I NOT spend the holidays with my family. I clung to the only life preserver I have, the hope of resuming normal holiday functions and operations once this pandemic wanes.

Until then? We do the needful things.