Learning to Fly Again

When COVID struck I had recently sold my business and was feeling newly liberated. I was intentionally aimless. I spent days by myself puttering around the house, taking walks, deliberately doing nothing. I did this by choice because I was tired of the rat race and I needed some peace and quiet away from it all.

When COVID reached pandemic status and I was forced to isolate and limit my daily activities I felt okay for a while. It didn’t feel that different to me. My teenage daughter was initially happy about the two weeks off of school. My family made lists and played games. For a little while, the forced isolation was okay. Then it wasn’t.

My partner and I acclimated. We found ways to be grateful for the quiet of our new life. We often relished in the lack of social expectation. We’d been buzzing around in the world for half a century and a little rest was just what the doctor ordered. But for my daughter this isolation was not welcome; it was torture. I watched the flicker in her eyes slowly fade; it was as if a chrysalis was forming around her budding wings. Her essential adolescent desire to fly was stripped away and she lay listless in her room for hours on end.

During those long months that turned into years, my daughter’s mental health was my greatest worry. I masterminded efforts to have a friend spend the night in warm sleeping bags on our deck, bringing meals and water and games outside for them. I bought heaters and umbrellas and a fire pit to encourage outdoor gatherings. Last summer brought us a little respite and my daughter and her friends finally gathered freely, without the help of their parents, without the fear that had plagued them in the winter months. They fluttered around the city, exercising their broken wings for a delicious few months.

Things have slowly gotten better and I’ve seen my daughter come back to life. But she’s not the same. That flicker in her eyes that dimmed during the first year of the pandemic has still not come back completely. And maybe it never will.

I hear stories every week about teenagers who are suffering — stuck in the listlessness that afflicted so many young people during the first year of the pandemic. Some kids haven’t gone to school in months and many, including my own daughter, have lost the academic musculature to stay the course with the school expectations that used to feel so normal.

I see it in my work too. Even though we are partially back to in-person, it’s so easy for people to call in and say, “I was exposed” or “I have a sore throat.” This will mean a few days working at home until they can get a test, easily a full week of isolating away from the team again. The ability and inclination to go into the shadows are ever present now. It’s easy to stay hidden. Isolating is what was required of us for so long that reverting back to this way of being feels easy now.

It doesn’t serve me to wish for things to go back to how they used to be, especially because I don’t think that the “used to be” busy-ness and frenetic lifestyle was the right thing either. But I do wonder how we recover. I wonder how we help our kids recover.

My priority is still my daughter’s mental health. I just want to keep her wings active until she flies off to college. Whenever I see a spark in her eyes or hear enthusiasm in her voice I am right there, cheering her on, interested, excited, encouraging. I want to remind her of that muscle, the one that engages in life. I want her to keep working it, strengthening it enough so that when I’m not here to cheer her on, she’ll still be able to fly.