I was reading One Piece the other night, and was on Book 89, and it said for the next book, “Coming in 2019”, and I thought, “That doesn’t seem so long ago, but it’s been four years.” And there’s something in my brain where my kids are still 6 and 9, not 10 & 13. We still don’t frequently go to restaurants. We see fewer people. Life is different, and I don’t know that it’ll go back to what I’d considered “previous normal” any time soon, if ever.

And obviously, a lot of people have decided their time worrying about COVID is over. But it’s not. My friend just got it. My mom got it recently. We had to go to great lengths to make sure my dad didn’t get it.

Despite all the precautions, Ei-Nyung, K and I all got it anyway. J didn’t, which is great. But we’d had all the available vaccinations, and our experiences with it were relatively mild. I don’t see it as, “We took these precautions and this happened anyway, what a waste,” – instead, it’s “We took all these precautions, which let us get it late, which meant we got vaccinated and because of that, our symptoms were mild.

Some of my friends weren’t so lucky, got it early, and are still struggling with severe long-COVID symptoms. I have no idea what the long-term health impacts are, and some of K’s classmates have had it more than three times (and because of that, perhaps, are unwilling to take any precautions, I guess).

The reason we took so many precautions was that we didn’t know what the impact would be. Or rather, we could see what the impact would be, and we hoped that delaying or avoiding getting infected as long as possible would pay off long-term. We managed to (to date) avoid exposing my dad, for instance – that was worth it. All the shit – the masks, the distance from friends, the change in our behavior – it’s for us, sure, but for me (and I assume Ei-Nyung), it was for J & K more than anything else.

And it’s weird – their lives from 6 & 9 to 10 & 13 have been really different than my life at that age. They didn’t get to spend a ton of time with friends from school, since we couldn’t pod up with anyone. I think their long-term social relationships will be fine – they both have friends they like – but it feels like … I dunno. It’s just different.

I don’t regret the choices we made. I’d make them basically all the same if we had to do it all over again.

But the time? The impact – it’s weird. there’s definitely a strange gap in our history. I hope the kids will look back at that time and understand that we were doing our best to keep them safe, and happy, and healthy. More, I think we actually did that. The impact wasn’t nothing. I believe it was worth it.