I breathed deeply in my car. It was cold; my nose felt raw from a year inside with my allergies to keep me company. All around me, people adjusted masks, exited cars.

We didn’t look at each other. I think we were afraid to jinx it.

The vaccine.

After a year trapped inside. Scared. Confused. Bored.

I’m not at this moment certain which of those emotions is the worst for humanity.

I seized my phone with my appointment text. I pressed down on the mask over the bridge of my nose.

I followed a man inside the pavilion.

I got my sheet.

I walked to the man with the thermometer.

“Happy vaccine day!” he said.

Tears sprang to my eyes. Vaccine day. I wasn’t sure how this would end. I didn’t picture a nice man in the pavilion of a retirement home. I didn’t see a whole year … gone.

I never thought I would question my mortality in my forties or fear for my teen daughter’s or husband’s life from disease so early.

I got the shot. I sat in a chair for fifteen minutes.

I went back to my car.

I removed my mask.

I cried.

Happy Vaccine Day. Indeed.

Y'all. It's been four months since the U.S.A. admitted there was a problem, since I got sent home with my laptop and my oversized monitor.

I feel like I should record this for posterity, but what to say?

I have never in my lifetime donned a mask, homemade or otherwise, for any reason other than sanding drywall. Now, a mask is slung around my gear shift of my car, and I have an entire kitchen drawer dedicated to PPE.

I'm making choices about whether to allow the little angel to work (masked) and attend school (masked) versus struggle with online schooling not up to par with her level of learning.

I'm trying -- really hard -- to also remember what it feels like to be sixteen.

She has very few of the freedoms I had at that age.

I also want to observe, in this moment, what feels good:

• Sweating out a 90-degree run on my front steps
• Jumping into a pool on a hot summer day
• Letting the breeze hit the soles of your feet
• A deer making eye contact as they graze in the gloaming
• The nose flare of a horse who is thirsty seconds before you lift the water bucket to its lips
• The satisfaction of a barn cat who seldom is granted human touch
• Snapping a cover on a pontoon after a beautiful summer afternoon
• Saving a powerpoint that's been months in the making
• Reflecting on a book that hasn't yet been written 
• Asking yourself what is left on your list even if this pandemic shrinks your timeframe

I spend a lot of time hoping me and mine don't perish in this pandemic. I hope you and yours don't, either. I guess none of us know. 

This week, my daughter finally got her license, a month and a week after the intended date circled on my calendar. I took her birthday off months in advance, but when April 6 rolled around, all the government offices were closed. School was closed, the sleepover was weeks beyond cancelled. Life felt cancelled. We spent the day instead celebrating her existence any way I could think to do.

As Missouri and the world cautiously peeps out from behind closed drapes, I'm vacillating wildly inside. Part of me looks at those around me cavalierly chatting an arms' length away without a mask or apparently a care in the world and wonders if I am punishing myself and my family unreasonably. The other part keeps clicking on horrifying tales from Queens hospitals as if to remind myself why I'm home. We found this fawn in our yard this morning. Animal Control thinks he may have been born last night. I check on him every few hours to see if his mama has come back yet. His pose is my mental state during the pandemic. 

At the beginning of all this, I bought new novel-writing software and dug out the novel-in-progress I started multiple years ago. I, like many, thought I'd be so productive without commuting or being able to socialize outside my yard. I misestimated how much mental effort it would take to keep myself grounded from day to day. The level of effort to keep my anxiety from spiralling out of control has ebbed and fallen. I never know if tonight I will wake up at four am unable to find my way back to sleep, or if I'll hit my alarm five times with the feeling of dead exhaustion I haven't experienced since my vitamin D levels dropped dangerously in 2016. Or if I'll pop out of bed hungry and ready to smell the flowers. I have so many thoughts every day of ideas for short stories and novels and blog posts and advice columns that I know I should write before I forget them. ("I used to be funny," I said not that long ago to a new co-worker.)

Today I dragged my laptop outside to see how much our money we gave to Instacart this week and saw a post from my friend Deborah Siegel in my inbox. It had been there for a while. Getting myself to read my personal email is as hard as getting me to log into social media. The post talked about writers not writing during the pandemic. I wanted to cry. The way I have dealt with every scary thing in my life has always been to write about it. So I'm making myself put at least a few paragraphs down so I won't forget what this felt like. I write to remember, so I can remember later what it felt like to live my life.

It's shocking how easy it is to forget your own story.

Easter 2020.

It's the day my daughter was due, exactly 16 years ago. She came a week early. We named her Lily, anyway.

I just watched the filmed-from-home version of SNL. At the end, they paid tribute to a crew member who passed away of COVID-19. 

And y'all, it just broke me.

We sit here in our houses, trying to make fun of Zoom meetings and not wearing pants, celebrating the Tiger King and carbs.

Trying to ignore the fact we're stacking corpses in refrigerated trucks in New York City. 

Most days, I can play stay buoyant with the rest of America. 

Something about the raw reality of watching comedians try to be funny from walk-up apartments while paying homage to the sound guy from afar just got me.

I want to go inside a place other than my house.

I want to hug my friends.

I want to hug my parents.

In the wee hours, I'm scared of my daughter getting intubated.

I'm afraid of my loved ones dying.

I know we're all terminal, but not all at once.

The hard bit of this is to not lean in to the fear. To embrace the boredom and the weight gain and the exhaustion that comes from being on video for eight hours straight rather than the real human terror of a global pandemic, something that used to be the stuff of sci-fi pulp fiction and streaming third-rate thriller films.

Tonight, I cried for the sound guy. And for spring 2020. And for the seniors who don't get prom or graduation, the families who unexpectedly said goodbye to someone important, to the exhausted medical workers and Amazon warehouse workers. For the hair stylists and dry cleaner owners who face bankruptcy. 

I hope we never have another Easter like this one, ever again. 

So I've lost track of the days. I remember the Friday - how many weeks was it ago? When I stood in the parking garage elevator clasping my computer monitor, prepared to work from home for however long it took. I thought it would be like a week.

I was so wrong.

Now I think it will be until at least the end of April.

I just left a ten dollar bill under a rock for my Door Dasher. It'll be the first food not prepared by us we've eaten in two weeks.

The little angel hasn't spoken in person to anyone her age in as long.

Today I saw some week-old kittens. We went to the barn, where there were considerably fewer humans than lambs, goats, cats and horses. We kept a six-foot distance from the humans.

Oh, but it's spring, and it's warmer, and it's windy.

It's terrifying to not be able to plan for a week, a month from now.

The news every day is awful.

I've become too paralyzed to write. I've almost decided to delay my next novel until the little angel goes to college.

I almost wonder if it will take that long for the world to right itself.

My incisions sort of burn. They will heal soon. It's weird to think that I've finally achieved my breast cancer door prize. That it's over, as incredibly bizarre as the surgeries were.

ONWARD.

It's been a while since I've been any sort of regular blogger. But hello, 2020! What a nice surprise to remind us that sometimes journaling is important.

So ... my second surgery to end the breast cancer reconstruction experiment 2020 is scheduled for Wednesday. 48 hours from now. And I'm not sure at all that it will actually happen at this moment. Life is that fluid.

I left work on Friday, huge monitor in hand, kind of in shock. We were told we'd be working from home for the near future. Some friends left for spring break. I thought about my daughter's sweet 16th birthday sleepover. Life felt pretty normal.

Monday. Bars, restaurants shut down. Co-workers on spring break domestic and abroad all but stranded. New normal all Microsoft Teams meetings. Meanwhile, industry charges on.

My surgeon called me. Told me as of this minute, I'm still having my procedure on Wednesday.

Cried twice today.

Co-worker's wedding just got cancelled. Multiple people on my team worried about being single parents having to homeschool their elementary school children while also working.

Nobody has toilet paper, milk or butter.

I write young adult novels. I read all these stories in the late 2000s. 

WHAT IS HAPPENING?

So, I decided to come back to blogging in this bizarre social experiment called COVID-19. 

Today, we contemplated cancelling my little angel's sweet 16. Today, a co-worker had to cancel her damn wedding. Today, I have friends flung wide domestic and abroad, and I'm actually worried about them getting home. I don't recognize my country or my world.

And at the same time, my world has shrunk to the less than 2k square feet of my home. The three people and one cat who reside here.

For the next eight weeks - is this it?

What the hell happened to us?

It's been 28 days since my first surgery. I was so naive about the recovery. I am historically inclined to overestimate my stamina and pain tolerance, but I really outdid myself this time. I went back to working from home full-time two weeks ago, and last week I went into the office four out of five days. I also somehow managed to bust a blood vessel in my eye and pull some part of me that used to be my full lat muscle so that on Thursday morning I tried to sit up in bed and couldn't.

It's odd, after a surgery, when you look fairly normal and you're trying to act normal and the world bustles on around you. It's almost harder psychologically when you still feel so vulnerable to jostling or seatbelt rubbing or even lifting something larger than a milk carton while trying to fake normal life. I remember not taking enough time after my lumpectomy and bursting into tears on Monday morning when someone asked me what I did over the weekend, because I had spent the weekend recovering from my Friday surgery and the loss of more than a third of my breast. I hadn't told most of my co-workers I had cancer.

Last week and this weekend, I suffered a very bad mood. There have been deep bouts of anxiety throughout this whole process. Some might have been influenced by all the painkillers, if I'm to believe their pharmacy inserts. Some of it, no doubt, is seasonal. Some hormonal. A lot related to my inability to do the things that help the most -- running, lifting weights, taking a bath. 

And the overwhelming realization that I didn't have to have reconstruction. I did this to myself.

So this morning, I woke up and looked outside and saw the sun shining. I went for a walk. I listened to an audiobook about a WWII bombadier/Olympic athlete who went down in the ocean, floated in a life raft for more than 40 days, and was captured and tortured as a PoW. What got him through the hardest parts, the book said, were stories. 

I've been working so hard I haven't touched my novel-in-progress since I got promoted. I wasn't even sure where it was, because I'd been writing it on a Mac desktop that died years ago.

Today I dug it out. The last date on it was August 26, 2015. 

I'm writing on a Chromebook now. I found some new software called Dabble. I signed up. I transferred the 17k words I have very little recollection of writing. I need a creative goal. I need a new story. I need to fall a little in love with my imagination again. 

ONWARD. 

Last Monday I had the first surgery in a phase of breast cancer reconstruction. Basically some of my back moved to my front via my armpit. It's as gnarly as it sounds. I've had three drain tubes trailing directly out of my skin for over a week now. Totally reminds me of The Matrix. 

It's been a hard week or so. The night after my surgery I stayed in the hospital, pretty much drifting in and out of episodes of American Greed. My nurse was 15 minutes late with my morphine the first time. He made some joke about how my doctor had so no more morphine, and I told him it wasn't funny at all. The second time he was 45 minutes late. I'm sure there was a reason, but it just goes to show people can decide their hustle based on how they feel about you. Not so well played, Rita Arens.

I didn't really understand what had happened to me until I finally found an animation that wasn't too gross. Now I understand why the healing has been going what to me feels like so slow. I was back at work four days after my lumpectomy, after all. It was way too soon emotionally, but I was fine physically. This time has been the opposite, except for two big cry days.

Last night I went to sleep at midnight and Beloved woke me up at 1 pm. I remember getting up with my alarms to take hydrocodone at four and eight am and my other pills at 9, but each time the fog enveloped me again pretty quickly. If he hadn't woken me up, I think I could've slept 24 hours straight. I do feel better, though.

The reason I wanted to write, other than to capture how this has been (the somewhat primordal scent of limbs not fully lifted in days, the clicking and hissing of hospital machinery in the wee hours, the passing fear that your actual skin might die during a commercial break) -- is to say I found myself searching blogs for what to expect in the ensuing weeks. I've had my first surgery, and now I anticipate my second, which will be much easier, much quicker. I'm amazed at how open and honest the bloggers are, even sharing pictures of what their expanders look like in naked breasts. I wonder, if this would've happened to me years ago when I was more comfortable sharing all my feelings on the Internet, if I would've posted pictures, too. Most of what I find is about reconstruction after masectomy, but my lumpectomy was so extensive and my radiation so effective, I'm essentially being treated like I lost the whole damn thing. 

So hear I am, someone who blogged so faithfully for so many years, surfing and searching the blogosphere for other people's courage and raw authenticity. It feels great to know I can do this, that the whole emergence of blogging created a safe space to say things we all want to hear and no one is able to find in the scientific journals or legally approved medical websites. 

I have to go now - evidence of my past blogging lingers in my inbox. This month I emailed with a woman whose cat had the same surgery I blogged about years ago, and two boyfriends have emailed about my 2013 post on eating disorders and relationships. 

This is beautiful and amazing, that we can all talk together about these hard things in these ways. That I need it so much now feels like a beautiful irony. 

Beloved called me this afternoon to say the wood floor guy called, like, a few months early to say our wood is in, and could he bring it over tomorrow?

Except that meant I needed to clear out six floor-to-ceiling bookshelves between dinner and the work left over from today. With MY BABBEE'S childhood memorabilia, along with my master's thesis, gifts from family members, copies of three books (one out of print) and photo albums dating back to college.

Oh, and in the space I used for eight lovely years when I worked for BlogHer from my house, where I greeted my daughter each day when she got off the big yellow bus from kindergarten through sixth or seventh grade.

This won't take long. 

The biggest thing I noticed, though, in scooping out books I loved from writers I used to email daily to my daughter's early elementary accomplishments, is how far away I've grown from the daily documenting of my own life. In leaving BlogHer, I left blogging, and tweeting, and really ... all of it.

In some ways, it's okay, because the little angel does not want me documenting her life anymore. It's her life, after all, not  mine. My dad always says your right to swing your arm ceases when it connects with someone's face, and writing about my teen feels like that. Like telling you the story of my current parenting situation would be stepping out of the bounds of my experience and treading on hers. I'm not interested in doing that. 

There are, however, some things I've forgotten to write down.

1. I always thought teenagers would hate me. She doesn't. Unbelievable.

2. Watching your child drive is both terrifying and awesome.

3. I owned a horse as a kid. My daughter seems more confident than I ever felt on horseback. That's pretty cool. But as she's lost interest in the horse we've leased since she was a preteen, I've taken over. He's my horse now. I didn't see that coming.

4. I cry over all the things, because I can see the moment where she leaves looming on the horizon. I thought eighteen years would take longer.

5. I always thought I would be so old when she left, but now I realize I will have probably 20-30 years of life left after she starts hers. Whut? I did not plan for this. I need a second act.

6. I don't want to put on her that I hope she has babies. But I hope she has a baby, because I want to talk to her about becoming a mother. I'd love to talk to her about what that feels like. I'd love her to know how much I truly love her.