How could you be stressed in a place so beautiful?

If you’ve ever had a baby (or even if you haven’t), you might be familiar with the phenomenon of being so utterly exhausted you can barely function yet when you lie down to sleep, you just can’t. Or if you have migraines, or any kind of recurring pain, you might know the feeling of desperately needing to sleep to relieve your misery but hurting so much that you just can’t. Why are our bodies so contradictory and stubborn? What is that about? And why do doctors ask if you’ve been experiencing a lot of stress lately. When have I not been experiencing a lot of stress? Not that I am stressed 24/7, but it’s always there, lurking.

Today we went to a beautiful state park where I had never been. At the ranger station, I dropped my money into a fishnet that the ranger extended out the window. She returned the net to me with my receipt and a map.

The sun was shining and the temperature was about 70 degrees and it was a lovely day. A lot of other people thought so too and had also come to the park. I would estimate that about 80% of them were not wearing masks. In fact, we received some strange looks because of our masks. In Arlington, I feel like at least 90% of the people I see are wearing masks. I don’t know if that’s because Arlington is more densely populated or because the number of confirmed coronavirus cases here has passed 1,000, or because people in my community are getting their news from different sources. At one point on the trail in the park we passed a mom with two small kids. The mom said loudly, ostensibly to her daughter, “are you afraid of the masks?” And I took my mask off to smile at her. I said, “it’s ok, it’s just us,” as if we knew the girl or that made the slightest bit of sense. The mom said again, “she’s just really afraid of masks.” And hurried the kids along. The girl was not visibly upset. The mom seemed more upset, perhaps by the prospect of the girl getting upset? I don’t know what the girl’s (or the mom’s) history with masked people is, but I hoped for all of their sakes they would overcome the fear because masked people are not going away. And we were not wearing scary monster masks or those creepy giant face masks of Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan. We were all actually wearing cute, hand sewn masks in whimsical fabrics. Zeke was wearing a rainbow buff. But I still felt strange, as if we had done something inadvertently offensive.

So all the while as we were walking by the water and through the woods, my mind kept returning to the masks. Were we being over reactive? Were all these other people endangering their health and ours? Did any of us really know what was going on? What are the actual chances that anyone at the park was a carrier of the virus? I have no clue.

One thing I have learned (or relearned, really) during this pandemic is how people I know and love have significantly different styles of thinking about and reacting to unknowable questions and unsolvable problems. Some people like to speculate. What do you think is going to happen? Why do you think that? When do you think we will be able to go out normally again? I am sure that many people could come up with creative and perhaps profound answers to these questions. Maybe people who have this mindset are the ones that reimagine the future and make things better for humanity.

This is not me. I know that I cannot stand to speculate. I don’t know if this represents a failure of imagination or just an affinity for facts, but I truly do not want to discuss what may or may not happen two or four or six months from now until I have actual information in front of me with which to make decisions. And right now none of us (or at least none of the people with whom I talk to regularly) have any of this essential information. I’m not saying this information doesn’t exist, but I don’t know it and it doesn’t seem to be common knowledge.

For example, could you get coronavirus in a swimming pool? Would the chlorine kill it? Does it depend on who’s swimming in the pool? Is it possible to test all the kids arriving at summer camp? What about their families? If you test them when they arrive could they still be carrying the virus? How do you know if it’s safe to be in a house with people who you haven’t been quarantined with but who have also been quarantining for months? If you aren’t likely to get the virus from a surface, why is everything still closed? Could you get it in the ocean? Could you get it on the beach if you’re not close to anyone? What if you’re in a tent? I DON’T KNOW! Does anyone know? I don’t know if anyone knows. I don’t know when we will find these things out. So how can we make any decisions without knowing the answers?

Now I’m just getting riled up. I don’t know what exactly it says about me or my personality that I need information like this. Part of my feels like it’s paradoxical because a lot of my decision making is emotional, based largely on what my heart and gut tell me. I guess in these kinds of times, you can’t go with your heart and gut when people’s lives are on the line. I don’t usually make a lot of life or death decisions. Thank God.

These days are long and meandering. And even longer when you can’t sleep. Again tonight Randy and I had to tag team bedtime with Zeke several times because Zeke can’t sleep, and he is the most visibly upset about his insomnia of all of us. After Randy relieved me and I came back into our bedroom I ordered some melatonin for pickup tomorrow at the vitamin store. We used this a lot when Zeke was younger because he couldn’t sleep them either, but not because of pandemic stress. He just could never settle down. Then he outgrew that issue and we stopped the melatonin and all was well (at least on the sleep front) for a few years. I guess that returning to outgrown challenges requires revisiting old solutions. Better living through chemistry. In fact, over the 45 that I’ve been writing this, my migraine medicine finally, blissfully, kicked in. Maybe now I can get some sleep.