I never thought buying a new pair of shoes would make me feel like the world is ending.
And yet…
Here we are.
On Saturday, I lamented that Covid-19 had officially taken all the fun out of shopping. I had hoped to get my daughter some new tennis shoes at the local outlet mall, but outside every store was a line of people (all standing six feet apart) and a sentry guarding the doors to the stores that were open. Each had its own subset of rules to follow: At this one, you had to wear the employee-distributed mask, at that one a mask wasn’t required at all, at some you had to sanitize your hands before being allowed to enter, and at every one only a certain number of shoppers were allowed inside.
“Do you know what you’re looking for?”
”Do you know where you’re going?”
”Can I help you find something?”
No one was invited to browse. “Just looking?” Ha! Don’t even think about it!
On a “normal” Saturday, my daughter would try on every pair of shoes in the store, then go to three more stores, declare that the shoes at the first store were probably the ones she was going to go with—probably—but first we’d need to try them on again.
And on and on it would go. Shopping for shoes with Cari Jill is never “easy.” She likes to be absolutely sure. And for her, waiting two days for shoes is not an option.
She’d much rather torture me for two hours.
So we ALWAYS do our shopping in person.
I want to be optimistic, and I promise I tried to be: “We’ll get used to this,” I assured her. “It won’t always be this way,” I promised.
But the reality is that I don’t know. I really don’t know.
Maybe the new normal means we’ll never be able to shop the way we used to. Masks and gloves and social distancing will just be a normal part of our everyday.
Maybe.
So far, 2020 has not been the year we had all hoped. Just this week, while we’re all just coming out of our Covid stupor, riots erupted in response to race issues across America.
And yet, here we are continuing to plow forward with ever-growing fervor toward… toward…toward who knows what?
Settling over the countryside, however, I have noticed this general malaise, a weariness that extends from work to family to home as people try to navigate a changing reality.
I want to pretend that everything is normal, but on the news I never hear the word normal unless it is also attached to the word NEW.
And so as I begin to accept this new normal with growing unease, I have also tried really hard to tell myself that the new normal is perfectly normal.
It seems ridiculous to think about something as mundane and ordinary as buying new shoes right now. Like I’m torn in two directions — my regular life and what’s happening in the world. I can go without new shoes, but my growing kids actually do need them—and they need to try them on first.
And with everything else that has been canceled or delayed, I just wanted this one thing to feel like something I recognize.
It’s only a pair of shoes, after all.
The ordinary and the mundane have always shaped my life, far more than any big moment.
And you know this is true.
Your high school graduation was fun, but it wasn’t the event that made you who you are. It was the tests, papers, relationships, and disappointments all along the way. Your wedding was a huge event; you planned for it for a year or more. But it was really all the time together and conversations you shared that came before and after the big day that determined the quality of the actual marriage. The birth of your children—an extraordinary miracle—but what mattered was not how they came into to you. All the sacrifices and memories you made as they settled into the routine of family life with you was what really made them a part of the family.
Quarantine.
What’s disorientating now is that the little ordinary moments no longer feel ordinary.
I was trying to figure out what was so depressing, and then I realized that was it; the ordinary has become novel.
But just because something is new doesn’t mean I can’t adapt.
That’s what healthy people do.
They ADAPT.
So from now on I’m just going to tell myself how mature and self-aware I am—adapting to all these new things like it’s no big deal. Whether things go back to the way they were or they don’t, one thing I’ve decided is that I’m not going to be one of these old people “so set in her ways” that she can’t welcome the new and unfamiliar with open arms—despite the fact that those open arms will be able to embrace exactly nobody anytime soon.
Will you join me?
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