How are we going to patch the pandemic cracks?

A couple of weeks ago I was driving in downtown Bethel and saw a couple standing at one of the crosswalks. I stopped to let them cross as the sign advised me to do. The driver behind me either didn’t know why I was stopping or didn’t care, so he leaned hard on his horn and screamed out his window at me. The pedestrians stopped in the middle of the crosswalk with panic in their eyes, wondering if they were about to be run over. When I turned on a side street, the driver behind me let me know he was still mad at me.

This incident was far from isolated. Although I have no data to back me up, it sure feels like there has been more road rage than usual this summer. I could talk about my own increased testiness while driving, but I’ll refrain from embarrassing myself.

Closer to home, my son complained that he was running out of paper. He has been creating dozens of comic books, spending hours drawing covers. To create his books, he takes a small stack of paper, folds it in half, and then staples it along the fold. This is all great, except that he leaps from one story title to another, so, while there are some completed comic books, most of them are a wonderful cover followed by 15 or 20 blank pages. I pointed out to him that he is not really running out of paper — he has all of these blank pages that he could write on. I was not expecting this to be a controversial point, but his face crumpled and he burst into tears.

My son has always been an “easy” kid, relatively low maintenance, but this summer he has been as testy and onedge as I have ever seen him. He is not alone, either. I know from talking to other parents that while the title of the summer is Old Fashioned (see my last column), the theme is more apocalyptic. Kids who were easygoing and independent suddenly can’t let Mom out of their sight. Friends bicker more than usual. A stubbed toe becomes a monstrous tragedy. The thought of school, something that usually elicits a sort of nervous excitement, leads to an existential crisis.

My fellow teachers are preparing to return to classrooms with strange social distancing guidelines. In my classes, I will meet half of them at a time to ensure that they can space themselves out enough in the classroom. We are all preparing to teach in a couple of different ways, while holding contingency plans for online learning ready for increasingly bad scenarios. Other professionals find themselves trying to reinvent their businesses on the fly as well.

The year has been ludicrously stressful for everyone, and the pressure cooker is beginning to show cracks in myriad small ways. We are all on edge and feelings those cracks threaten to burst.

How are we all dealing with the stresses of a year that seems to be targeting every weak spot in our society? As we plan our rebuilding strategies post-pandemic, we absolutely need to keep in mind the mental and psychological tolls we have all paid over the past months. We have never been terribly good at dealing with our feelings of helplessness and anger, as this summer has illustrated vividly.

Even when whatever passes for normal returns, we will still be dealing with it in our heads. This is the conversation we need to push to the front of our queue. If we don’t, we will keep paying for our reticence.