Five years since. . . : Spring Break Reflections

Ever since I moved all of the photos I uploaded to Facebook over the years to my Google Photos, I get these charming/creepy little stories and memories from Google that show me past moments while reminding me how effective their facial recognition software has gotten. (Listen, I'm aware that Google is also an evil empire and that leaving Meta hasn't solved anything, but this is a one-step-at-a-time process for me.)

This time of year is particularly busy for these memories, because historically, we were traveling for spring break during March. When Oscar was little–at least, when my school's spring break lined up with my sister's–we would take a family vacation, often to places none of us had ever been before.

But a couple of days ago, Google Photos hit me with one of those "___ years since..." stories they do and kind of shook me up. Five years ago this week, in 2020, we were on Hilton Head Island, enjoying the beach. My sister and I grew up going to the Gulf of Mexico, but my landlocked kid had never seen a big body of water or walked barefoot through the sand before this trip. He was immediately in love with the ocean, so we spent a pretty good amount of time by or in the water (even if it was too chilly for real swimming). We got up early one morning so he could see the sunrise over the ocean. We visited local museums and restaurants.

As we were enjoying all of this, we were all keeping one ear open to see what we would hear about this new illness that was quickly spreading. The coronavirus had been hovering around the periphery of my awareness for more than a month at that point, but it didn't seem all that serious. We even joked about it with my friend and her husband when we met them for lunch at the beginning of this trip. And sitting on a bench while Oscar ran around a playground, I had chatted lightly about it with a couple of other spring breakers who were watching their own kids play.

Then it started to feel less like a laughing matter. On the Wednesday of that weeklong trip, I got an email from the university letting us know that students would not be coming back after spring break and that we'd need to figure out how to shift our coursework online for at least the next few weeks. We weren't supposed to head home for another three days, but Jeremy and I decided pretty quickly that we would squeeze in one last adventure the next morning–Romie and I had bought tickets to take Oscar on a "pirate ship"–and then head home.

The drive back to Missouri was kind of surreal. I spent time on the phone reimagining a major course project I had co-designed with a friend in another department; I mulled over how to teach books that my students had almost certainly left in their dorm rooms when they left for spring break; I mourned the loss of child care, both because I knew that I was going to be having to put in a lot of hours to transform my classes and because we loved Oscar's preschool and everyone in it so much, and we knew how much he'd miss it. Meanwhile, we ate meals at restaurants that would close their doors the next day and stayed in a hotel that felt empty and haunted.

I don't remember if we really had a sense of how long things would be upside down. I do remember creating a schedule for Oscar's day that would help give some shape to my own; I remember lots of family walks around our neighborhood and the empty university campus, which was gorgeous in the spring. I remember taking out the sidewalk chalk and bubbles and any other outdoor activities we had around the house, googling "things to do with a toddler when stuck in the house indefinitely," and tackling ridiculous recipes that I would not have attempted under normal circumstances. I remember weekly Facebook photodumps and the ways we reached toward each other online when we couldn't safely do it in person.

Looking back, I think I mostly considered that era in terms of how it was defining Oscar's life. He was supposed to start kindergarten in 2020, but we balked at putting him in school as our small rural community was largely deciding that masks and social distancing couldn't really be that important. He spent months with just four nerdy adults, aside from occasional outside playdates with friends we knew were also isolating. I worried about his levels of anxiety and loneliness, about whether he would get behind academically, about whether he would ever get to have a normal school experience.

I also worried about my students, especially the seniors who lost their last couple of months of college and the bubble they weren't supposed to have to leave just yet. I thought back to my own senior year, which had been rocked by 9/11, and wondered if they felt that same sense of having been robbed of the full joy of the last few months that we were supposed to get together in that weird, otherwise basically impossible version of early adulthood.

And I didn't really worry about myself because, as an introvert, I found that not having to leave the house wasn't exactly tragic. I missed teaching in person and seeing my colleagues anywhere other than Zoom meetings, but I didn't really mind that the world had kind of shrunk. . . until I started to realize that it wasn't just a matter of not leaving our house. We wouldn't be leaving our town, our state. We wouldn't be making our usual trips to see family in Texas. We wouldn't take a summer vacation.

Fully a year later, we wouldn't go anywhere for spring break.

The thing I didn't really grapple with and probably still haven't, really, was how that level of disconnection from the rest of the world wore on us. Obviously, we talked a lot about the immediate loss of connection with our usual face-to-face folks, but the sense that the rest of the world just wasn't available to us, and we didn't know for how long? That was a much harder reality to sit with for a family that has always liked to go.

Five years later, we have made up for some lost travel time. We were extremely lucky to be able to take Oscar to Scotland in 2022, the same year we found our current house and, over the course of three months and as many trips, moved all of our stuff from Missouri. We've caught up on lost time from the trips we didn't take to Texas during the pandemic. Obviously, we have made 2024-2025 the National Parks Tour year.

But now, for different reasons than five years ago, the world is starting to feel like it is shrinking again. Since the election and especially since the inauguration, things feel too unsettled to make the kinds of plans we normally would. I don't really love the idea of flying anywhere when the FAA has been gutted. We've been wanting to take Oscar abroad again–specifically, to Italy this time–but now feels like an unwise time to do anything involving passports when your name doesn't match your birth certificate, even as a cis woman. The road trip we want to take to Montreal? Feels like we will need to wait on that one, too. Even the trip we do have planned, which will take us through seven national parks, is going to depend on things like whether anyone is actually getting paid to work for the National Parks Service anymore by the time summer rolls around.

Since we moved here, we've mostly stuck a little closer to home for spring break. For one thing, Oscar's school breaks never seem to match up with my sister's anymore; luckily, she's been able to spend parts of her spring breaks here with us. For another, we live a lot closer to a lot more stuff. It's part of what drew us to this part of the country.

This year, aside from jaunts to Monarch Mountain, we're staying home for spring break because 2025 has already involved more travel than we expected it to, and we need time in our house to recover a bit. But I think we're also feeling the tensions and fear from across the country, possibly cushioned a bit by living in a state that feels a little safer than others at the moment. So we will stay put this spring break and enjoy the things we love about where we are now–and focus our energy on doing what we can to rest, to gather mental and physical energy, and work through how to respond to the historic moment we're living in.