I’m writing this on a Monday because I have no idea whether my kids will be at school or home tomorrow. This kind of uncertainty and indecision could be my undoing, would be, if I weren’t held by something bigger than myself.

It’s like this: we’re standing at the edge of a cliff and we don’t know what awaits us on the other side. We don’t even know what is waiting for us one foot/metre ahead, visual schedules be damned, because we have never done or been through anything like it before. And despite all the posturing on social media, the judgments over how other people are handling quarantine or whether they’re socially distancing enough, the ad nauseam articles posted to make it look as though we have our finger on the pulse of Pandemic 101, none of us have the vaguest grasp of the situation. None of us have any control. Whether we have the virus or not. Whether we have a backlog of toilet paper or not. Whether we wash our hands or not. (Please do, you nasty freak.)

Maybe, in a way, I’ll fare better than some (hahaha nope) because I had to come to terms long ago with the fact that I’m not in control. It was revealed to me in grad school, in relationships, in New York City, on examination tables, in preterm labour, in diagnoses. They say that people make plans and God laughs. Well so do I. But I keep making them anyway, because this is how I stay sane. Even as I know that these plans could be broken at any moment.

Now all we have are broken plans and cleared calendars. There are no illusions to create to distract from the fact that we can’t manipulate this outcome or direct a conclusion. We are utterly helpless.

If you are like me and that statement makes you short of breath in a way that leads you to ask for a COVID-19 test, then consider there’s also this: the possibility that even though much of what is going on is clearly fucked, there are other things that are, strangely, maybe more like they should be than they ever have been before. You know all those assholes who used the hashtag #timeslowdown on the reg in their social media captions? Well, they got their wish. Time has a way of grinding nearly to a halt when all the days are the same, bleeding together so that there’s no such thing as a “weekend” anymore. But up until now, my kids’ kindergarten and third grade years were flying by as they always do. Now I feel like I’m watching them grow live, in real time, rather than in retrospect: their hair is getting longer (and will not be cut anytime soon), their limbs as well, and I’m around for all of it, not just at the end of a school day when somehow they’ve gotten older in six hours without my witnessing it.

There’s the invitation we received to spend Sunday morning “watching” church at our pastor’s house while the kids played Hide and Seek, and what The Husband said afterward: “I think that’s actually what church is supposed to be like?”

There’s the morning I just spent researching websites and activities for teaching kids at home, because I am nothing if not great at generating ideas (and shit at executing them, #prayforme), and imagining both the toll it will all take on my mental health and the moments we’ll create that they’ll remember forever (hopefully not capped off by mommy riding in the back of a padded truck off to her new home).

There’s the new dance that TH and I do around and with each other now that he’s working from home, the one that both builds my anxiety and chips away at it: cups left out, guttural sighs released, resentments stockpiled; impromptu conversations, watching Netflix together again for the first time since the kids were born, sitting outside talking about whether we can afford to buy anything other than a cardboard box to live in here.

There are the conversations with the kids that I never could have imagined having when they were babies, talks about pandemics and instability (“Is the world descending into chaos?” The Kid asked me on the way to school this morning, and I laughed and crapped my pants a bit), markers of their growing awareness and our tell-the-truth policy with them (about everything but Santa Claus).

We have been robbed, for now, of a clear vision for the future. We’ve been robbed of every moment except the present one. And maybe that’s how it should be? Maybe that’s a gift that’s been given to us (along with all the gifs, har har) that will help me to be here, now. That will help me not to interpret every moment, but inhabit each of them.

I’ve been meaning to do that anyway.