VACCINES ARE HERE. SCHOOL’S OPEN. SOME PARENTS STILL AGONIZE

Eight days into the school year, all five of Amber Cessac’s daughters, ages 4 to 10, had tested positive for COVID-19.

Having them all sick at once and worrying about long-term repercussions as other parents at their school, and even her own mother, downplayed the virus, “broke something inside of me,” Cessac said.

“The anxiety and the stress has sort of been bottled up,” she said. “It just felt so, I don’t know, defeating and made me feel so helpless.”

Like parents everywhere, Cessac has been dealing with pandemic stress for over 18 months now.

There’s the exhaustion of worrying about the disease itself— made worse by the spread of the more infectious delta variant, particularly among people who refuse vaccinations, which has caused a big increase in infections