I’m the biggest sucker for those little nostalgia movies your iPhone makes out of pictures from your camera roll, even when it’s trying to squeeze sappy memories out of blurry snapshots taken on a random day in January. It kind of recreates that thing parents do when we spend the day chasing our kids around, bemoaning our lack of alone time, only to then spend our precious few moments alone at night staring at photos of the kids. Lately though, my iPhone has been regurgitating photos from five years ago and it’s like witnessing a car crash in reverse, watching as slowly it counts down to March 2020.
That January five years ago was actually pretty eventful for my family. My husband and I and our 2-year-old son moved back to Toronto from the U.K., and I was six months pregnant with our second. We knew that we needed to be closer to family and friends as the three of us became four. I remember sitting in the cab on the way to Gatwick airport on our last morning in London and hearing a radio report about some students trapped in Wuhan. The news segment was presented as a curiosity. How strange and sad for them, but nothing to do with me, most of us listening (probably) thought. I certainly did.
By mid-February, our lives had already become more or less routine. I was back working in TV news and the show I worked on was covering the upcoming U.S. elections, while keeping an eye on this virus that now seemed to be devastating parts of Italy. A co-worker was stressing about the mediterranean honeymoon she had planned later that year which seemed a little over the top to me. How long could this whole thing last?
At the end of February, I met up with a friend who’d been traveling for work, she’d just come in from New York City. A few days later we canceled plans to meet up again because she’d come down with a cold and I’d started to feel real heavy in my bones. I had never felt that sick and haven’t felt as bad since — my head hurt so profoundly that I imagined driving a nail through it to relieve pressure. My fever topped 105 degrees. I was delirious, sweating through sheets and blankets and then shivering so hard that my teeth woke up my husband in the room next door. I kept calling my doctor and then the nurse hotline begging them to reassure me that my baby would be okay. They seemed most interested in whether I’d traveled to Italy recently. “I can’t really breathe,” I kept telling them. My doctor suggested I keep trying to manage my fever at home, no one even suggested it could be COVID. Only later did we piece together that the lack of smell and taste, the improbably high fevers, the debilitating cough meant it could only have been that.
Ten horrible days later, I was able to go back to work, where the manager who’d earlier scoffed at me for needing so much time off was suddenly making a big show of sanitizing her keyboard. That was the last time I was physically with any of those co-workers. A couple of days later, well, we all know what happened.
The words grief and trauma have been thrown around a lot since 2020, becoming catchall terms for the discomfort and pain so many of us have been feeling but still can’t entirely adequately name. As the working parents of young kids, my husband and I were in a daily freefall, trying to navigate the demands of our jobs, our kids, our own health and theirs, it was panic mode 24/7 with no relief in sight. Friendships were cleaved and forgotten. There was illness and death in the family. What else would you call that but trauma?
There have been many times in the intervening five years where I wondered if the world would ever “go back to normal.” In some ways it has, of course, the kids are back in school, a lot of us are back in the office, people even sing karaoke in poorly ventilated bars again and do their groceries without masks on. Only all of it is a little off, like an episode of Twilight Zone, where the world you’ve arrived in seems fine but everyone has a sixth finger and eats their pets. We’ve awkwardly fumbled our way back to something new but none of it really feels right anymore. Is it possible it — as in, the present, right now — feels even worse?
There was a bit of optimism at one point that all this collapsing work and care would lead to some kind of revelation. As parents, we no longer had to hide that we had families, that sometimes those families’ needs would overlap with our responsibilities at work and that that would be okay. Remote work even gave some power back to parents whose newly flexible schedules created some breathing room in claustrophobically rigid calendars. Yet here we are, back again, bosses demanding employees return to the office, even where there is no need and where we’ve proven we can get more done from home. Any leeway we felt we had as parents has disappeared, replaced by the sense that we should be over it by now.
That familiar feeling of dread each morning is back too. What vitally important corner of American democracy will Elon Musk decide is “government waste” today? Is the measles outbreak spreading? How would you even know if it was? Will Medicaid be cut? Does Social Security still exist? Eggs cost how much?! In the same way we all became wastewater experts in 2020, we’ve all had to become constitutional scholars in a matter of months as your family’s lives and health lie in the hands of politicians who are disinterested at best and comically evil at worst, as you constantly worry that your job, your livelihood will be the one that disappears next.
In December 2024, Miranda Rake and Sarah Wheeler, the hosts of the podcast Mother of It All, put out a survey asking parents how they’re feeling five years since the pandemic was declared. They got over 400 responses, with many parents saying they still haven’t quite recovered from the toll those years took, with over a third of them saying they continue to see negative impacts from COVID on their kids.
Recently I spoke to parents in my own circle, who echoed those same sentiments. “I feel like I’ve been anxious for five years,” Jacqueline, a mom of four from Toronto told me. She also feels “crazy [still] referencing the pandemic,” since it’s been so long, but for her, little has changed in the workload and feelings of dread around the news. She often feels like she should be “over it.” Nam, a mom of two, whose oldest son was in fourth grade when the pandemic started, told me she’s “heartbroken” and grieving all the time she feels she’s lost with her kids. With all of the constant stress, anxiety, and fear that kept her occupied throughout the height of the pandemic, she found herself distracted with survival. “I missed out on their baby years,” she said. Jean, a mom of one, was so impacted by how COVID defined her early years of parenting that she decided to stop having kids altogether because of the “unrelenting news cycles of chaos” the last five years have been.
Some things have changed in my world of course. Since 2020, our family of three became four and now, five. It may seem irrational to bring another baby into the world I just described, one full of anxiety and turmoil, but what I’ve felt from my own community has been the opposite. When we could have resorted to our worst selves, retreated into our own bubbles, and focused only on what made our material lives better, the people I know extended ourselves as much as we could in the other direction. We helped neighbors carry groceries, find vaccination clinics, and made sure no one went lonely or hungry when it mattered. In the same way we’ve seen so many communities pull together over the years since, offering aid to each other through moments of crisis, whether creating national networks of support in the face of abortion restriction, providing disaster relief in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, or helping each other navigate the devastation of the recent L.A. fires, the power of community has never felt stronger or more important. That’s what I’m holding onto. When it has mattered, I’ve seen our collective grief and trauma transform into hope.
Five years on, that’s what I choose to remember.
More From This Series
- No Crap for Christmas
- Finding Hope in Hopelessness
- How Dare You Blame Parents for Pandemic Kids Being ‘Behind’