Family Day in the time of COVID
When the Star spoke with former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty a few years back on what inspired him in 2008 to establish a mid-winter Family Day holiday, his answer was commendably simple.
“I wanted a day for families to be together,” he said. “It seems most of the forces in life pull us apart. Family Day is about giving us time together.”
What to make of it, however, when the world-wide vicissitudes of a novel virus force us together around the clock, in ways never imagined, or in some cases not much desired?
What respite does a Family Day offer when lockdowns of various severity put us in each other’s way 24/7 and driven mildly mad by the quirks and habits we once found charming?
If, as the novelist Joyce Carol Oates has written, all drama is in the end about family, there has been almost limitless opportunity this past year for drama studies.
Northwestern University psychologist Jay Lebow has called the pandemic a once-in-a-lifetime “international social experiment about family life, perhaps the most widespread social experiment of all time.”
Let us dispense, first off, with the notion that we’re all in this together. The impact on families has varied widely depending on circumstance, resources, emotional supports, temperament, cultural traditions, online access and simple luck.
As Lebow has said, the COVID-19 pandemic has delivered its pain unevenly and “effects are most pronounced for those who have the least resources.”
For those with means, the ample space, the capacity for diversion or change of scene, the access to whatever they need, as well as to consoling treats and novelties, have all buffered the pandemic’s impact in ways the less affluent can only dream of.
Still, it’s fair to say that most everyone has had, to some degree, their daily life and rituals disrupted and their closest relationships tested in unforeseen ways.
Worst hit, naturally, are those who have died or been sickened by the virus and the loved ones who have lost precious souls.
Even for those not made ill, there has been the loss of work, financial security, sometimes food security.
There have been disrupted sleep habits and increased screen time, having younger children at home attending school online, having adult children returning home for want of jobs, all of which have contributed to a reported increase in irritability as walls close in.
There has been the ongoing stressor of uncertainty, difficult physical distancing from many friends and family members, and, conversely, the sheer challenge of being in company with another person most moments of the day.
When the rocker Sting wrote that “every little thing she does is magic,” it was likely periodic occasions of absence that inclined him to think so.
Before COVID-19, family was already that most formative of mechanisms, holding the power to comfort and nurture, to fill the heart. Yet also able – as the poet Phillip Larkin famously and colourfully noted — to inflict pain, damage and scarring that no enemy actually intending to could match.
In an article in the Law Times last year, Nathalie Boutet, a mediator with the Ontario Association of Family Mediation, said the pandemic had created new complexities ranging from the safety of spouses in abusive relationships to parenting conflicts about social distancing, to concerns, when intimate matters are dealt with remotely, about digital privacy.
While issues remained familiar, they had become more complicated to resolve, she said, and clients showed “a new sense of urgency” to end a marriage or find new places to live.
When it came to children, she said, “everything is more complicated and everything is more stressful.”
The additional stress and complication also come at a time when the countervailing comforts of church, or social assemblies, or 12-step fellowships and such to support those dealing with the great family stressor of addiction are not available in person.
In all, there are apt to be fewer pieties this Family Day of the sort typically sewn on samplers, fewer easier platitudes.
Dawn Trussell, a researcher at Brock University, says an over-arching challenge of the pandemic was to find new ways of living together while letting go of old expectations. “There is an important opportunity to strengthen familial bonds and create a sense of unity,” she said.
And not least of that is scheduling time for solitude or self-care that helps people “navigate this difficult time and contribute to the collective well-being of the family unit.”
The pandemic has cast a searchlight on so much — the unequal sharing of domestic labour and child-care responsibilities, the health or otherwise of our dearest or most painful relationships, and the disproportionate impact of inequality in society.
What resolve and action comes of that hard-won understanding will go a long way to determining the quality of Family Days to come when some version of normalcy returns.
Most everyone has had their daily life disrupted and closest relationships tested