My Pandemic Baby Has Made This So Much Easier
She was born as the first U.S. surge began, and we’ve been living in that reality ever since.
For many people, or so I hear, the days and weeks and months of this pandemic have tended to blur together, into a static lump of time. For me, this time has had a different shape. At any moment, you could have asked me how many months we’d been doing this thing, and I could have told you immediately. In March 2020, I had a baby, whose entire life has been measured in those same pandemic days and weeks and months. Now the pandemic is turning two, and so is she.
She came early. A few days before, I was watching the only other person in my office disinfect a pack of seltzer cans, and just beginning to engage in the arcane, inexact risk calculations——that would soon become ubiquitous. I’d just skipped a party for two 4-year-olds (the
