Unwanted assignment
As a mom, I don’t want to worry about what I can’t control. Coronavirus forced me to.
It would not be surprising if I had grown up to be an alarmist.
Within days of my family moving from Chicago to Northern Virginia, my fifthgrade class was scheduled for a field trip into Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001; meanwhile, my mother was working less than 5 miles from the Pentagon. The following year, recess was canceled for months because of the Beltway Sniper. My mom was supposed to travel to London within days of the 2005 bombings. This potential for violence or catastrophe gave me prickly anxiety as a kid — the feeling that people I loved were always one coincidence away from something terrible.
As an adult, I had outgrown that anxiety. When there was a shooting at a bar a block from my Chicago apartment, my grandmother called me, panicked. I assured her I was fine, I was careful, I was never out alone at night. And though that was true, I never actually felt unsafe in Chicago and very much embraced the mentality that I had to live my life. You can’t refuse to walk out of your front door each day for fear of what might happen.
And then I had kids.
Before I had kids, I had never ridden in an ambulance. I had never gotten a flu shot. The prospect of the end of the world didn’t bother me. Now I’ve ridden in two ambulances, and I am aggressive about making sure everyone gets their flu shot. But the end of the world? I still don’t like to think about it. I don’t like to think about what I can’t control.
The latest thing I can’t control is the coronavirus. And yet every day, I click on articles about the newest outbreak, the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations, myth busting videos. My daughter’s preschool sent out an email letting us know they’re monitoring the situation and suggesting preventive practices. That prickly panic from my youth is back.
Around the same time the coronavirus started making headlines, a friend of mine in public relations reached out about a new client that provides preparedness kits. The kits are designed to keep you “ready for anything” by accounting for essentials: first aid, warmth, safety, food, water and tools. It had a technology component, too, with experts to text and videos to watch. My friend said the idea was to make creating an emergency plan for your family more approachable. Would I want to check it out?
Truthfully? No.
I had no desire to engage with all the potential ways harm could befall my family. But having a flashlight with working batteries for when the power goes out is on the very long list of yet-to-be-completed mom tasks always grinding away in my brain, reminding me I’m falling short by putting off these things. So I said yes.
The package arrived. I put it in our foyer. “What is this?” my husband asked. “Just a thing,” I said. Two weeks went by. I did not unpack it. My friend emailed. “Would love to hear what you think.”
Why was it so hard for me to engage with the idea of my family’s safety, even as the box promising to do all the work for me was sitting in my house? I like to think it’s a virtue to not worry about what you can’t control, but what about the things I can control?
I sat down to open the box, and sure enough, the booklet explaining all the ways I should be prepared was overwhelming. For potential storms, I should have sandbags to create barriers and stop floodwater. For fires, everyone in my household should know at least two ways to escape from every room in the house. In the event of a power outage, I should have a batteryoperated power source to charge phones and other necessary electronics. My list of mom tasks doubled in the few minutes I flipped through the booklet.
But then there was the page about a pandemic: Keep your health records in a safe, easily accessible place. Store at least a two-week supply of food and water in your pantry. Have medicine and other supplies on-hand in advance.
Robert Murphy is a professor of medicine and biomedical engineering, as well as the executive director at the Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University, and he assured me that preparation doesn’t need to be dramatic.
“Most likely, many things are not going to be disrupted. Utilities, telephone, internet, electricity, water all should be fine. So you don’t have to worry about that,” Murphy said. “The big thing is medication — that you have the medicine you need to take for the next two to four weeks, and you should have enough food that could get you through a few weeks, although you could still have stuff delivered. Even in Wuhan at the height of it, people were ordering food online.”
And rather than panic me, these practical instructions restored a tiny bit of my control. I don’t know if or when the coronavirus will make its way to us, or how bad it will be, but I can take comfort in the fact that I chose to prepare my family in the ways I could. And that preparation can’t fully restore control, but it can help me be competent in the face of danger. I can stop clicking on articles and know I’ve done what I can to ride the wave when it reaches us. The sandbags and escape routes and power sources may take a little more time.
I sometimes feel like if I open the gates to everything I can worry about as a parent, the possibilities will overtake me and the worrying will never stop. But there is a middle ground between refusing to consider possible emergencies and building a bunker to prepare for the end of the world. As everyone faces a pandemic, I’m ready to wade into the middle.