The Things We Bring With Us
I’m bringing my unhealthy coping mechanisms into 2021. I’m not done coping (or hoping) yet.
Dionne Warwick, singing superstar and recently-hailed Queen of Twitter, shared some pithy advice for everyone last December:
The foolishness in question was some silly behavior by some of her followers, but the tweet quickly became a motto for the new year. People enthusiastically embraced the idea of leaving behind all the frustration, stressors, and pain of 2020, and entering a new era of hope and satisfaction.
This, of course, is not a new thing; we do this every year with our shiny resolutions and our declarations that This Is the Year That I Will ______. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Every new leaf gets turned over for good at some specific point. Every piece of old baggage has that moment when at last it gets left in the dust.
But this time as the calendar turns over to a new year, I’m not setting anything down behind me. The world itself is carrying over plenty of foolishness: the COVID-19 pandemic and futile efforts to contain it; the vast political divisions that seem impossible to bridge; the social inequalities that we’re just beginning to acknowledge on a wide scale, let alone attempt to remedy. At home, I’ve got kids struggling with remote learning, and a house that’s so much messier and chaotic than it was ten months ago.
I still need to cope with that foolishness, so yeah, I’m bringing my own personal foolishness into 2021. Sorry, Dionne.
I’m willfully bringing my three-a-day Diet Coke habit, my insomnia, and the resultant oversleeping. My doomscrolling. My who-needs-dressers-when-I’ve-got-a-laundry-basket procrastination. If something helps carry me and my family through the quagmire in which we’re living, then yes indeed that thing is coming along with us.
The hitchhiker that I wish I could leave behind is my foolish, stupid, optimistic hope.
Hope hurts. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you look naive when reality lets you down — or when you let yourself down. Hope is so fragile and takes so little to crush, and is so hard to rebuild (and it’s never quite the same when or if you do.)
I spent a lot of 2020 hoping. The kids will be back in school at the end of March, I told myself. Okay, fine, they’ll go back after spring break. Surely at the start of the school year? …January, maybe?
We’ll be able to travel for the summer as usual, right? Thanksgiving then? How about Christmas?
Maybe people will understand the need for masks and for staying apart, I thought. Maybe the far-right fanatics will settle down after the election. Maybe none of our friends and family will get sick. My kids will pass all their classes. My house will miraculously clean itself and I won’t be embarrassed to have people come over anymore.
I hate hoping. I hate the crushing heartbreak when something you didn’t even know you wanted gets cruelly snatched away. The first time I cried during the pandemic— really, really cried, curled up in my bed late at night with no one around—was not when we went into lockdown, not when the first deaths began happening, but a week or two later when school canceled the annual Fifth Grade Camp that my son had been looking forward to for more than a year.
I’ve tried to not hope, and to live in a world where we just deal with today. But I can’t seem to shut it out. It sneaks back in when I catch myself saying things like “When we see your cousins again…” or “Once this pandemic is over….” I’m a planner at heart, and hope is an integral part of planning: hope that we’ve foreseen everything, hope that the timeline is reasonable, hope that disasters won’t upend all the plans.
I don’t know how to not hope.
So I guess I am bringing hope into 2021 after all, tucked in with the rest of my foolishnesses. I will make plans for the future, and brace myself for when they get swept away. I will try to reassure myself that surely there will be joys to balance out the sorrows. I will pack extra tissues to hide the inevitable tears, and wrap them around my rose-colored glasses, and hold my people close, and hope.
