Global pandemic wipes out monumental moments
Coronavirus hasn’t made my kids sick, thank goodness, but it does have them sad, angry and kinda depressed.
The global pandemic has robbed them of experiences they were expecting and felt entitled to have, rewards they’ve been diligently working toward. They are missing out on things they’ll never get back and they know it.
My eldest is 19 and after graduating from high school last spring and getting accepted to the university program of her choice, decided to take a gap year. The plan was to work and save for school but also to travel. We had a backpacking trip to Europe mapped out and were a couple of weeks from departure when the pandemic hit.
So instead of seeing the world and spending time with her friends, she’s spent her summer watching Netflix and pouring all her restless energy into crocheting — we now have more dish towels than we do dishes. The job market has dried up, a fact made bearable as long as TruDaddy is signing cheques (that’s what the kids call Justin Trudeau, apparently.)
My youngest kid is 14 and was just entering the final phase of Grade 8 when the longest March break in recorded history began. The year-end class trip to Ottawa — something they’ve been talking about since kindergarten, more or less — high school prep and graduation were all on the horizon.
Instead, everything got wiped out by COVID-19. Graduation was a 30-second solo trip to the front entrance of the school to pick up a diploma with some teachers clapping. It was sweet, in its own way, but understandably light on the pomp and circumstance.
As adults, we learn to contextualize setbacks and disappointments, to keep them in perspective. Life experience teaches us that, well, poop happens, and this too shall pass.
But for kids, losing out on milestone moments seems monumental. They’ve been told all along that there was a payoff for all that hard work and now that’s been taken away from them. To make matters worse, there’s nobody to blame and absolutely nothing they can do about it.
Now, my children aren’t completely self-centred (which is a credit to their mom alone) so they understand there are plenty of people in the world who have it far worse than they do. People are dying in droves, after all, and others are being asked to put their lives on the line every day. So far, we’ve been able to maintain our standard of living and that puts us among the lucky few. They get that. We talk about it often.
Their immediate future, however, is full of yet more challenges — and few of the experiences they’ve been promised. My eldest won’t be getting the typical frosh week when she logs into her online university classes this fall. The youngest goes into Grade 9 — an exciting, nerve-racking experience at the best of times — with even more uncertainty. It doesn’t help that the digital learning experiences haven’t been great thus far.
If there is any benefit at all to growing up a COVID kid, it’s the lessons of resilience and perspective. Those are valuable, to be sure. But it’s hard not to be sad about the cost, to mourn everything they’ve missed, rites of passage suddenly gone very wrong.