isolation

Can you identify with these statements?

Being safe means being separated from those I love.

I don’t know whether or not there is something wrong with me, or with those around me, so I have to distance myself and not even trust the air I breathe.

The people in authority don’t seem to know how to handle the situation, but I have to obey them because it’s “for my own good.”

The people I used to rely on are unavailable to me.

I’m missing important events – funerals, weddings, graduations – of people I love dearly but cannot be around right now.

I feel “stuck,” even depressed, because every familiar routine and purpose I had was suddenly removed without warning.

My emotions vacillate within a single day – even an hour – between strong resolve and paralyzing despair, and all the feelings in between.

The future is uncertain and murky, and I can’t make any plans.

Yes?

Me too. We’ve been under a shelter-in-place order for almost 10 weeks now, and it seems that everyone has felt a similar struggle to varying degrees.

But I’m not talking about us.

I pause whenever I hear a spot on a local radio station calling this, “the greatest challenge of our lives.” I know it has been for some people. For some this has been utterly devastating – jobs and businesses lost, family members buried without the comfort of a funeral, suicides, severe illness, weeks of abuse unnoticed and unreported, homelessness, separation from children, permanent goodbyes that never got spoken.

But for many others, these weeks have just been inconvenient and sad. And for some with crippling social anxiety and stressed out schedules, they’ve been a sweet blessing.

We’re all floating somewhere on the spectrum between despair and peace. So right now, while we are still sitting in the middle of this collective experience with all its various losses and grief, can I introduce you to the experience of my kids?

And by “my,” I don’t just mean the two (or some weeks three) living in my home. I mean kids in foster care. They’re my people and they are some of the bravest, most misunderstood people I’ve ever met.

When the crisis first hit, and people were frantically trying to sort out what this would all mean and how terribly this would impact their lives, I remember shrugging and commenting to our pharmacist (from a safe social distance), “I feel like telling the rest of the world, ‘Welcome to the party’.” He chuckled. He knows which medications I’ve picked up over the years, and which disorders they treat, and how many different names have been on the bottles. A little thing like a global pandemic was not about to be much different from an ordinary day of crisis management in a foster family. We’re used to devastating loss.

Reread that list and hear it as the experience of a frightened child whose life is being uprooted while everyone else’s life stays the same. Often it happens in less than a day: a phone call from the school office, a strange lady coming to ask questions, long waits in several different offices, maybe a visit to the ER, maybe a frantic, tearful stop at home to shove belongings into garbage bags (or maybe not, maybe no belongings at all), and a late-night drop off to the home of total strangers whom your brand-new caseworker assures you are the nicest people she’s ever met. They show you a bed and a bathroom, and you spend the rest of the night staring in disbelief at the ceiling in the dark with all these thoughts swirling in your head:

Then, add these additional pressures:

“You should just be grateful to have a place to live.”

“Stop being so emotional.”

“You’re safe now. I don’t see why you can’t settle down and move on.”

“Why do you still care about those people after what they did to you?”

“Why can’t you just behave and follow the rules?”

“Something is wrong with you.”

“Focus!”

“You better be good for these people or you will have to go live somewhere else.”

I hope this is uncomfortable to read. I hope your emotions are all in your throat as you read this the way mine are as I write it, and that maybe your eyes are fuzzy with tears like mine. I don’t say that because I like making people miserable (though ask my teen and pre-teen and they will probably tell you otherwise), but because this is a gift – an opportunity to see and feel the pain of another human being. Over the past couple months, you’ve gotten to walk a mile in their shoes (shoes purchased at Walmart by a complete stranger because theirs were left behind in a house they may never see again). And now that you have, your well of compassion can be so much deeper.

Things are starting to open up across the country, and we will all together discover what our new normal looks like, and months and years from now we will look on this time with different eyes. But I ask you to find a place to store the biggest, scariest feelings of this time and remember them with tenderness when you meet a child who’s lost everything and is having a meltdown, or being difficult, or trying desperately to control a situation, or losing control of her emotions, or just being the bravest little soldier they know how to be.

Remember how you felt, and give my little heroes some grace.