“Look, Mommy, there’s another mask, and another one! Look how many masks there are on the ground! Why don’t people throw their masks in the garbage?” My six-year-old mutters as we walk towards the river for our daily exploration time. I gave the kids an assignment to count all the masks they see littering our way to the river. A task that they have taken quite seriously. They are concerned and (unsurprisingly competitively) excited to see who can count the most masks.
The moms of the blogosphere have spoken. They’re burned out. Each and every one of them is doneso. We can’t take it anymore, they type as they angrily thrust at the keys of their laptops whilst breastfeeding, preparing a meal, and meeting a deadline, melodiously drowned out by the cries of sticky-fingered toddlers, over-stimulated school-aged children, or ravenous teens.
Only Dead Fish Go with the Flow read the text in bold on a tote bag. Oh, this will do! I grabbed four bags and a few cards and headed for the till. “That’ll be (insert some overpriced Euro equivalency),” says the clerk. I’m all ready for the party. My tri-sisters, as we like to call each other, have an annual “Swine” together. We coined the term and use it to describe coming together for a swim and a “whine.”
“Spare me a week of faux soul searching,” I’d say in my cynical, New-York-circa-early-2000s fashion, whenever my middle-aged Bikram teacher requested a moment of silence for gratitude. I mean, my twenty-something, cough, thirty-something self always considered practicing gratitude cliche. Something my friends who visited Ashrams did. It took a while, involving legit, hostel-living, south-of-the-equator soul-searching.
Yet another familiar email came in from the airlines. This time it’s official: you finally have the answer you’ve been waiting for, for the past three months. Your family trip is cancelled. It’s something we have become accustomed to during this pandemic. Cancelled holidays and changing plans at the last minute characterize the summer of 2020.
Each year I’ve lived in Germany, the month of August has been met with the boisterous cheers of school children and delighted neighbors preparing to head for the sea. The airports were packed with German tourists ready to embark on sandy beaches and foreign languages, while in the meantime, we’d head over the Atlantic to visit home.
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