Boys: An Adventure in Gross

Having children is the grossest thing that has ever happened to me. Not just, like, birth itself (placenta!), but the ongoing grossness that presents itself in daily life is truly mind-boggling.

The vast majority of the grossness originates with the boy. He’s 7 years old now, and I have no more of an idea how to parent him than when he was first born. I was an only child and the boy thing confounds me every day. I also have a girl. She’s easy to parent. At 3 years old, she’s a pleaser and hates when her hands feel dirty. Sometimes this is annoying because she won’t even pick up food if it leaves the slightest residue on her fingers. But she doesn’t do gross. 

The boy, on the other hand, makes me look at all the men in my life and wonder what disgusting things they did as children. Did my boss’s mother have to stop him from idly holding the remote control in his mouth while he watched a show on TV? Did my grandma have to point out to my father that he’d forgotten to put on underwear under his pants? Did my neighbor’s mother have to keep constant vigil while he pooped to ensure that he wiped when he was done? 

Because I have to do all those things. See, my goal is to raise a son who will make a good husband someday. No woman wants to marry a slob. A man who stinks is not getting a date. I also don’t want my son’s potential future wife to have to clean up after him. She should be his partner, not his mother. I married a man whose mother washed kitchen and bathroom towels every single day. (Ain’t nobody got time for that.) Therefore, he never had to hang up a towel before. So when we married, there always were wet towels piled on sinks and floors -  even on our bed. It took many years and fights to make progress on this issue. I’m not going to do that to my son’s future spouse. I’m going to teach him all the laundry/cleaning/cooking things I can before he leaves my care. 

But will it really make a difference? Think about men’s restrooms vs. women’s. Think about men’s dorm rooms. One of my guy friends in college had a roommate who threw up into socks and tied them off before falling asleep after a night of partying. Another of his roommates didn’t change his sheets for an entire semester. And my friend himself had a pile of Mountain Dew cans numbering in the hundreds around his desk. 

The task to raise a hygienic male seems more Herculean every day. Like, if he can’t nail consistent hand-washing after peeing, how will he ever keep the microwave clean? He wants to take showers instead of baths now, but you have to watch him the whole time and order him to scrub each part, or else he won’t. And if you’re not monitoring his every move, he sort of just dabs the soapy wash cloth on his forearms and upper chest and calls it good. 

How the typical boy shower goes:

Me - You missed the whole bottom of your foot. 

Him - But I’ll fall down!

Me - Then lean against the wall. 

Him - Uuuuggghhh.

Me - You’re just touching it. You have to scrub. 

Him - I am scrubbing!

Me - No you’re not. There’s still fuzz between your toes. 

Him - THERE’S WATER ON MY FACE! I NEED A TOWEL!

Repeat for about seven minutes with every single body part. 

I thought we were starting to make some progress. He hadn’t put one pair of underwear on top of another for a while. He was starting to wash his hands for more than two seconds (one good thing to come out of the coronavirus pandemic is it’s put a little fear in him). No dead animal touching in at least six months. Then came last week.

He said he had to poop. Then he didn’t actually poop. I told him to wipe anyway, which was met with great consternation. As he’s washing his hands, I walk by. I stop. His pants are still around his ankles as he scrubs, and I see a wad of toilet paper stuck between his butt cheeks. I demand he stop washing his hands, dry them (so the TP doesn’t stick), get the toilet paper out, flush it, then wash his hands again. 

His response is predictably: “UUUUGGGGHHHH, MOOOOOMMMMMM.” 

I give him a bit of privacy to accomplish this (not that he cares) and come back a few moments later. What do I see? My son is basically twerking on the cabinet under the sink. He’s got his butt crack rubbing on the knob of the cabinet door in what appears to be an attempt to remove the toilet paper. I scream, “GET YOUR BUTTHOLE OFF MY CABINET!” He’s confused then starts crying because I’m yelling. The only way I can get to the sanitizing wipes is to pull the cabinet knob he’s been rubbing his anus on. So I bravely grabbed the E. Coli-covered knob, snatched out the wipes and scrubbed down the knob, cabinets and my hands, even though the wipes are not meant for skin. Then I see the toilet paper wad is no longer trapped between his cheeks. I look everywhere for it. It is sitting in his pants, which are still bunched around his ankles. I grab more toilet paper, pick it up with that, and toss it all into the toilet. 

“Why did you do that?!” I demanded as I vigorously washed my hands. 

“Because I didn’t want to wash my hands two times!” he yelled back. 

And that, my friends, is the challenge I face with trying to raise a civilized person with a Y chromosome. 

I pooped my pants, and that's OK

So I pooped my pants a few weeks ago, and I’ve decided I’m not going to feel bad about it.

It was a temperate, sunny, Saturday, and my husband needed to mow the lawn and do yard work. He could do this most efficiently if the kids were gone, so I said I would take them to this lovely little outdoor train ride in a park not far from us. I was feeling a little shaky. It was about 4:30 p.m. and I hadn’t eaten all day, so I grabbed a low-carb protein bar to eat on the drive over (pictured above). It was from Aldi, and I’d had it several times before. 

The kids and I headed out and enjoyed riding the train and playing in this little play area for about an hour and a half. (And for the mask police out there: yes, we all wore them the whole time.) I’d had to toot for a little bit, but I waited until we got away from everyone and I was loading the kids into the car. As I was buckling my 3-year-old into her carseat, I decided to let it out. But the normal fart warmth lasted longer than usual. And then I felt that warmth running down my leg. I was wearing gray capri pants. I looked down and was horrified to see brownish water trickling down my calf. I shrieked and slammed the car door. Then I had to go around and buckle my son in in his booster seat. I couldn’t tell the kids. It would be humiliating. I looked back at all the smiley happy families gathered around the train entrance. Could they see the growing spot of shame on my pants? 

It felt like the liqueous poo had now soaked through my capris, and I wanted to protect the seat of my car from feces. I opened up the glovebox and found a package with a few dried-up baby wipes inside. I spread them out across the seat. The kids remained fairly oblivious. I tried to be nonchalant and rolled all the windows down. 

On the drive back, I called my husband and informed him that he had to drop whatever he was doing and be ready to take the kids out of the car and do whatever else they needed when I got home. When he asked why, I told him as quietly as I could. But my 7-year-old son heard me. 

“Mom, did you just say you pooped your pants?!”

Then he laughed maniacally.

 Next, the 3-year-old piped up.

“You should be ashamed of yourself!” she scolded. For real. She said that.

(For the record, I have NEVER told her she should be ashamed of herself when she pooped her pants. I’m blaming my in-laws. I did, on this occasion, however, yell back, “I didn’t make fun of you when you pooped in your sleep a couple months ago!”)

Although the drive was only a few miles, it felt like years. I finally pulled in the garage, honked the horn to alert my husband and tore upstairs to the bathroom. I threw my clothes in the bathtub and started running water on them while I sat down on a place where I could fart safely. I showered and put my clothes in the laundry with bleach. Once clean, I cleaned up in the seat of my car. (The dried-out baby wipes had only handled so much.) 

As I scrubbed, I reflected. For the love of Immodium, what had happened?! I felt FINE. My stomach didn’t bother me once. No cramping, nothing. The last time I sharted was when I had norovirus in 2012. But on this day, I felt in perfect health and thought I could just sneak out a little poot, then BAM: Hershey squirts.

A little lightbulb went off, and I went to check the ingredients of those protein bars. Sure enough, the second ingredient was malitol. Malitol is a sugar alcohol that also is a main ingredient in sugar-free gummy bears. I had remembered reading Amazon reviews about the havoc those little bears could wreak on the gut and your anal sphincter. I’d eaten these bars before, but never on a totally empty stomach. I guess with no buffer, it just went to work “power washing my intestines.” Beware keto people: malitol is often in desserts marketed as keto-friendly. 

I didn’t feel safe to fart for days. It didn’t take me long to laugh about it, though. I told some friends about it, and then they all shared THEIR stories of pooping their pants, so maybe it’s not as rare and embarrassing as I thought. 

My favorite was from my friend Karen (who is totally NOT a Karen, proven by the fact she encouraged me to share her story). She has Crohn’s Disease and had to have a scan for it in college for which she’d had to drink a ridiculous amount of barium solution. Afterward, she and her digestive system - devoid of anything but barium - went to McDonald’s and ordered a grease-tastic meal that she specifically remembers super-sizing. When she got back to her college campus, the only parking spot she could find was super far from her dorm. She felt the crapper wheels start turning, and she knew there was no way she’d make it. As she walked across campus waving hello to friends and making small talk, diarrhea that mostly looked like cottage cheese due to the barium was running down her overall-clad legs and into her clogs (peak early 2000s fashion). It pooled and squished inside the clogs, but from the outside, no one knew she’d shat herself.

So friends, maybe we should end the social stigma about shitting our pants. Like, it probably shouldn’t be encouraged for public health reasons, but neither should it be demonized. We’re all just one virus, greasy meal or accidental gummy bear consumption away from trouser chili, so let’s give a little grace.  

Let's go to the Lake!

If anyone in my area says they’re “going to the lake,” there’s no need to elaborate. We all know it means the Lake of the Ozarks. This sprawling lake in southern Missouri is to the people of Kansas City and St. Louis what the Hamptons are to the people of New York City: a beautiful place to escape the rigors of the city and relax and have fun. Only unlike the Hamptons, you can be total white trash and go to the Lake. In fact, it seems to be especially appealing to that demographic. Also, you have to check the current E. coli levels at the Lake before getting in to ensure there aren’t too many poop germs so you don’t get sick. I’m not sure, but I don’t think that’s a concern at the Hamptons beaches. 

I come from a long line of kind-of white trashy people who liked to go camping at a different, smaller, crappier lake in Missouri. Like the Lake of the Ozarks was too boojie for us, which is really saying something. My mother always hated tent-camping there with her in-laws, and we stopped going when I was in middle school. My mom passed her hatred of camping on to me. (Why did humanity even bother evolving if you want to choose to live like a neanderthal for “fun” and go in the woods to squat and pee atop a bed of poison ivy?) So in the last decade or so that I’ve been going to the Lake of the Ozarks with girlfriends or on family vacation, we rent condos. There are some really nice, spacious and affordable ones with lakefront views. 

The problem with the condos, however, is that other people are in them. There are the nice retirees who live there most of the time, but there are also the bachelor parties and loud, drunk women from St. Louis who drop the F bomb several times at the pool in front of your kids. On our family vacation last year, I went to the condo below us and walked in the unlocked door of a frat-type party that was keeping our kids awake at 11 p.m. (I knocked first and no one answered. I was annoyed beyond any fear of confrontation, and my husband was being a weenie.) I mustered my best mom guilt and told the bros they were keeping small children from sleeping. Small children that would - no matter how late they stayed up - still awaken between 6:30 and 7 a.m. They quieted down after that. This year, a drunk St. Louis woman in the condo below us was blasting music on her deck and being ridiculously loud well past midnight. 

You may ask how I know she was from St. Louis: It was by accent alone. It’s worth another blog to describe the differences between Kansas City and St. Louis (like in St. Louis your value as a human being is largely dependent on which Catholic high school you attended), but we’ll just cover the kind-of whiney St. Louis lilt for now. A large amount of the people I went to college with were St. Louisans, including very close friends, which is where I learned that they say “mom” like “mam.” And discussing one of the interstates that runs through their city, I-44, they pronounce “I-farty-far.” It was that same accent I heard slurring up into our bedroom a couple weeks ago as I tried to sleep, knowing the 6:30-7 a.m. kid wake-up time that awaited me. It stopped after the same lady walked by the next day and heard me talking to the nice, retired couple next-door to us about whether the condo complex had quiet times and how to report violators. 

Anyway, the ultimate revenge for all of this is to take your kids on a walk past the offending condos singing songs together as soon as the kids wake up. 

But probably my favorite Ozark condo experience ever didn’t involve loud drunk people; it involved a taxidermy conference. Three of my friends and I rented a lovely condo in a really nice resort-type complex for a girls’ weekend. We noticed some weird vehicles parked around, many with taxidermy business markings. We just thought, “Hey, it’s the Ozarks; that crowd would appreciate it here.” Then the next morning, we went to the gym. As we went down the hall at the main clubhouse in our snug little athletic leggings and such, we had to make our way around a large crowd of bearded white guys. Then we saw the signs: it was the registration line for a taxidermy conference. I don’t know what kind of workshops that entails, but I have some guesses: 

- The Latest Glass Eye Technology

- Creative Ways to Reuse Innards: You Won’t Believe all the Things You can Make Sausage Out of!

- Recreating a Lifelike Anus

- Holiday Taxidermy: How to Stuff Dead Animals in Festive Poses

And you know what? The taxidermists didn’t throw loud, late-night parties. 

The Ozarks is also a place where you don’t have to worry about body-shaming. Some of the largest women wear some of the smallest bathing suits, and the men have no compunction about letting that beer belly out. In fact, many of them enhance their beer bellies while at the Lake. 

I’m not a full-on “lake life” person with a boat or jet-ski or lake house or any of that. I know some of those people. But I find lakes generally too gross to actually get in (see aforementioned E. Coli concerns). Disease is generally not a concern at the Ozarks however. In fact, amid some of the greatest transmission rates of the pandemic, we ate at a restaurant there a few weeks ago where not even the staff were wearing masks and the tables were not distanced from each other at all. Were it not for the whiney chorus of “I’m so hungry!” from my kids, we probably would have left. Because up here in Kansas City, we know the ‘rona is everywhere and we act like it. 

But the Lake will always be a very nice and beautiful getaway that’s only a three hour-drive from the rigors of city life. Just be prepared for it to be like a summer-long spring break for middle-aged people. I doubt it’s the drug-fueled underworld in the Netflix series that bears its name (which isn’t even filmed in Missouri), unless the drugs we’re talking about are beers like Natural Light. That’s fueling at least 50% of people at the Ozarks on any given day. 

We need to talk about men sneezing

Click on this picture to see the most accurate DILMS depiction ever. 

I was in my car at a stoplight with the window down a few mornings ago when I heard a horrific noise that made me jerk and look around in terror. It sounded like a seal had been smacked with a shovel while it was in the middle of “orking.” Then I happened to look in my rearview mirror as the sound came again. It was the guy in the truck behind me sneezing out his window. This sound was enough to terrify me a car up with my radio on and traffic noises all around. 

Ridiculously loud sneezes are like the nasal version of manspreading. Like most other women, I have been conditioned my whole life to make my sneezes as small and quiet as possible. Bonus girl points if you can make it sound cute. It seems most of the men I’m around, however, have been conditioned to compete with heavy metal concert decibel levels when they sneeze. I call it DILMS: Distracting, Inappropriately Loud Male Sneezes.

My friend’s husband literally knocked over a guitar that was sitting on a stand with the force of his sneeze alone. My husband’s sneezes have at one time or another awoken every member of our household. They’ve also made me drop books I’m reading. So loud and unpredictable are my boss’s sneezes that they make me mistype words on a regular basis. He’s usually sitting in another room when it happens, but the blast is potent enough to freak me out like someone jumping out at me at a haunted house. 

Contrary to the belief of every man I’ve argued with about this, you will do no internal damage if you tone down the volume of your sneeze. You don’t even have to use your voice when you sneeze at all! You can just let that mucus fly right out of your nose without trying to sound like a space shuttle launch. The noise is not connected to the physical act. 

Many think manspreading is a way that men show dominance or show that they think they’re entitled to more space. DILMS are much the same. 

“Excuse me, my lesser humans, but testicles entitle me to eject a noise of startling proportions whenever a booger tickles my sinuses. I expect you, oh bearers of estrogen, however, to sound like Betty Boop being lightly pinched when you sneeze.”

A little of this can be excused if an effort is made to mitigate the DILMS’s sound upon its exit from the face, such as burying your nose and mouth in your elbow or a tissue. Most of the men I know don’t even try to do this, despite the obvious public health issues surrounding it. My husband claims it’s because he never knows when it’s coming. Sorry, but I don’t think it’s my ovaries that allow me the ability to sneeze into my elbow every single time. Breasts don’t grant you that foresight, but the feeling in your nose does, and that’s a unisex indicator.  

Obviously, men suffer much more during things like the common cold so I guess it makes sense they would like to convince us all of their exceptional discomfort through audible means. But no one appreciates having the pee scared out of them because the people with penises have allergies.

Men, you are not entitled to startle everyone in a 50-foot radius whenever you spontaneously clear your sinuses. Practice toning that crap down and have your inner elbow at the ready. Otherwise, you will bear one of the greatest insults a Midwesterner can dish out: I will NOT say bless you. 

The dreams of an anxious woman

A lot of people are having anxiety right now. I guess I’m lucky in that I got diagnosed with an anxiety disorder at age 10 and have remained pretty well managed since then thanks to a very effective medicine that rhymes with sex-a-bro. While my anxiety thankfully is no longer much of an issue in my conscious life, it manifests itself in my subconscious. I have hard-core recurring dreams, which I thought everyone did until a conversation with friends. So about two-thirds of my dreams are one of the below: 

Get out

If you’ve ever seen the movie “Far and Away,” (and you should - I have it on VHS if you want to borrow it) there’s a scene where Nicole Kidman’s and Tom Cruise’s characters have snuck into a rich family’s house to get out of the cold and get something to eat. The family is about to return home. I always have this dream where I’m in some building I shouldn’t be and I need to get out because the rightful owner is coming. In my real life, I have never engaged in burglary. I am a rule-following machine who has never even once cracked an “employee-only” door to see what’s behind it. But in my dream life, I’m somehow a breaking and entering machine: mansions, computer server rooms and private gardens in which I have gotten tangled in a hammock trying to escape. I never take anything. I’m just there hanging out until the freak-out moment of a door opening somewhere. I usually awake from these dreams very sweaty. (Who am I kidding? I wake from pretty much all sleep very sweaty.)

Forgot the routine

At least every other week, I ruin the dance recital. My ballet instructor is like, “Where have you been?! Get out there now!” I stumble onto the stage with my fellow dancers and strain my brain trying to remember the moves I learned in high school. They’re all turning one way, and I’m going the other. I also dream-forget my tights or leotard a lot and have to dance in my bra. A variation on this one is the marching band show. Although not as frequent as forgetting my dance routine, this dream features me forgetting our halftime show with the added danger of getting whacked by a flag twirler or trampled by a bass drum. 

Sexy times with unsexy people

Not really anxious while I’m asleep, but about twice a year, I have a sexy dream about different guys at work to whom I have absolutely zero attraction in my waking hours. It’s anxiety-inducing the when I seem them the next day and feel super awkward. I feel like they know, and I want to clarify with them that I don’t feel that way about them and am happily married. Like it was just a drunk, one-night dream stand, and can we please move on? There’s zero chemistry here, and I know we’ve seen each other dream naked, but this is a place of business, so let’s act like this never happened. Which it didn’t. (And why can’t I have sexy dreams about hot dudes?! You’re really letting me down, limbic system.)

Credit hours

Someone discovers that I did not actually have enough credit hours to graduate from college, so I have to go back. This is a regular occurrence in my REM, but it somehow blends with my real-life concerns. I have to move back to my college town three hours away, but how will I balance that with my job and my kids? There are no apartments available so I have to live with my horrible freshman-year roommate again and walk in on her giving blowjobs to football players. And dream campus features 40 new buildings that have popped up since I graduated, so I don’t know where anything is or even what classes I’m enrolled in. Because I don’t know what classes I’m enrolled in, I miss a bunch of them and have piles of work to do and a tanking GPA, which I cannot handle because I’m an over-achiever who graduated magna cum laude IRL. 

Nowhere to go

I’m in a public place and have to pee. Unfortunately, the only toilet available is in the middle of everything. Like in the magazine rack at Target or in the middle of the stadium concourse at a football game. Or there are no stalls. You just have to pee in front of God and everyone else inside a huge, open restroom, to include dudes. Sometimes this dream gets a little too real and I have to wake up and make a beeline for the bathroom. 

Bye-bye teeth

Apparently, teeth-falling-out dreams are fairly common. They certainly are with me. As I drift into slumber, my teeth start cracking and falling out. I push one with my tongue and out it pops. I basically have meth mouth every few weeks as I doze, but just the mouth - not the scratched up face, paranoia or next-level horniness that are the other common meth side effects. The frequency of these dreams intensified when my 6-year-old son lost four teeth within a month. Every time I wake up from one of those dreams, I run my tongue around my beautiful, complete set of teeth and praise Jesus for my chompers.

Last week I had a dream about playing with kittens. It was a nice break from F-ing up the halftime show, not finding my class and pissing in the middle of the aisle in the grocery store.  

Things for which a pandemic has given me new appreciation

I am a working mother of two small children. I keep reflecting on how nice this whole situation might be if I were childless: 

- My husband and I could binge-watch all kinds of shows and movies.

- We could do some adventurous cooking together.

- We could deep-clean, redecorate or garden.

- I would read a lot.

- I could perhaps finally put together that book of humorous essays I always wanted to write. 

But with little kids, self-isolating has looked a lot more like: 

- Much more frequent complaining than normal about how the meal I made looks disgusting.

- More requests to view the size of someone’s turds.

- Constant hand-washing nagging.

- A 3-year-old who suddenly doesn’t like the number zero and gets upset when she sees it.

- A nearly constant, high-pitched whining noise emitted by one or both children when I leave their sight.

- Daily internal questioning about whether 4:30 p.m. is too early for kids’ bedtime.

So given that my life is not all binge-watching and unicorns, I have gained a new appreciation for some things I previously took for granted and other things that are getting me through this time:

Teachers

My school-aged son has been on spring break, so we haven’t gone full home-school yet amid closures, but the little bits we have done here and there have made me aware of what I already knew: teaching small children is not my calling. I don’t even like young children, which sometimes even includes my own. I worked with my first-grader for half an hour on his messy hand-writing today, and he cried twice in that 30-minute period. This does not bode well. Elementary school teachers, you are patriots and heroes, and you all deserve six-figure salaries. 

My government job

No matter what happens, I can’t really dream up a scenario in which I won’t get paid as normal. My job security is on lock, especially given the particular part of government I work in. If people keep shooting each other during drug deals, (and they will, come a pandemic, an earthquake or the apocalypse because ‘Merica) I will still be employed. And while everyone else’s 401K has gone down the poop shoot, I’ve got a pension. It will probably take a hit, but it’s big and broad enough that it will be there for me when I retire so I can pursue my retirement dream of socializing kittens. 

My office

The people who work in my little office at my government job are amazing. I know this makes me sound like a horrible mother, but I’d usually rather spend the weekdays with them than with my children. (Under normal circumstances, I do spend more time with them. And don’t try to mom-guilt me. I already feel guilty about not feeling guilty enough.) My coworkers never throw a fit when I don’t let them play video games. They’re not always losing their shoes. They don’t scream and stomp when they don’t get their way (I mean, not usually). They are smart, funny human beings who deftly handle crises every day that most people won’t face in their lifetimes. When we’re not in the office together, we’re often texting each other because we just like each other and want to share the video of a guy who left his mic on when he went No. 2 at a public meeting. This is the best team we’ve had in a while, and they make going to work a joy. As of today, I still get to join them on a regular basis in our actual office, praise Jesus Christ.   

Streaming services

Like honestly, where would we all be if this outbreak happened 10 years ago? Panic-renting at Blockbuster? Is the Cosmic Kids Yoga lady a millionaire yet? She should be. She got my 6-year-old to do yoga for an hour today by making it about Star Wars. My son’s goal in life is to never have to do anything that requires him getting out of his pajamas. She made him do relatively strenuous physical activity for 60 minutes (I joined, as well), and he didn’t even notice it was a work-out. His only caveat was that he allowed to be do some of it with a light saber in hand, which I allowed even though he inadvertently hit me in the head with it multiple times. And this wonderful children’s yoga programming was right in my living room. 

That I always keep a good stock of household supplies

I already had toilet paper that will last us for at least another month. I always try to have plenty of that on hand. Same for hand sanitizer, Kleenexes, bleach, rubbing alcohol and the like. You know why? Because I’m not gross! Did all you panic buyers not already have this stuff? If not, how disgusting is your house? If you did already have it, are you a selfish prick? (rhetorical question)

Freezer meals

One of our local grocery stores does a freezer meal prep program every month that I attend religiously with some friends. It’s how a working mom of two like me can feed her family good stuff in a tight time frame after work. I have five healthy and hearty meals waiting for me with four to eight servings each in the freezer right now. When I saw chicken and ground beef wiped out on grocery store shelves a week after this month’s freezer meal prep, I became a smug bi-otch and patted myself on the back for my preparation. The freezer meal program is now suspended until this coronavirus business clears up, but it’s given me enough tricks up my sleeve (to include several bags of frozen onions that were already chopped) that I know we’ll get through this. 

Social media

When I am isolated from some of my favorite people, this is where I go. Yes, a lot of bad stuff and misinformation propagates on social media, but it does amazing things, too. Where else would I see Shapermint ads that are almost as satisfying to watch as power washing videos? How else would I know that there are just as many parents as me struggling to stay sane? Where else could I see people all around me coming together to help each other out so much? Where else can you see memes that make you laugh in the face of this terrifying thing while making fun of idiot anti-vaxxers at the same time? We need support and each other to get through this. If we can’t physically be with each other, being together virtually is the next-best thing. 

My hope is that a year from now, we will look back on all of this and find the parts that were funny. We will laugh about how stir-crazy we got but acknowledge that it was worth it because we stopped something that was bad from becoming something that was truly horrific. We will remember how those of us who were more fortunate helped those who were less. And we’ll remember the wicked-cool Pokemon-themed children’s yoga we did with our families.