“What are you comfortable with?”

I have asked this kind of question before.

It sounds like a polite, intentional question. A helpful question for gauging how to proceed in a situation. One that opens up conversation, instead of shutting it down. A question of consent.

And I think it generally is.

But I asked it last summer, tired of quarantining and tired of not seeing family. I used it in the context of trying to gauge whether or not me and two of my kiddos could drive across Michigan to come visit my dad and his wife.

I had good intentions about having a conversation.

But I have some guilt about it.

You may think that sounds silly, or absurd.

Bear with me.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, when Coronavirus hit the US (and everything screeched to a halt) my family and I have heeded the advice of medical professionals pretty seriously. We washed, we masked, we stayed home pretty religiously, and distanced if we had to go out.

(That may work for you, that may not. I’m not really interested in debating those choices.)

Anyway, it had been months of home time. And summer time was drawing to a close, with a new school year (also at home) on the horizon. And I hadn’t seen my dad since the previous Thanksgiving.

A few years back, I was kind of used to that – being the only kid of his who had moved off to the east coast and started my family out there. But since we moved back to the Mitten State in summer 2017, we’d gotten to enjoy more visits and time together. I have friends who see their family multiple times a week, and live in the same town, so that probably doesn’t sound like a lot. But for our family, it was a definite bump up, and a huge blessing.

So I asked him if we could talk about our comfort levels.

And he wasn’t offended. He missed us too. (Maybe not all of us at once, but that’s a different story.) He had been taking pandemic-related precautions seriously too.

He’s off a certain age, errs on the side of mildly anxious/cautious, and um, dude – he and his wife got stuck in Florida when it all started. He and his wife “snow-bird” (yes, I made it a verb), and disappointingly, they’d spent a good chunk of that visit staring at 4 walls and not getting out to do Florida visitor things. He and my stepmom had to lengthen their stay and navigate how to road trip home in a safe, efficient way, with minimal stops. I did not envy him that process.

And I think he was aware that we’d been trying to be very careful too. So we talked, agreed to a visit that would be pretty low key (time in my childhood home without big outings and minimal getting together with hometown pals), hand picked which children I’d bring with me (ha! they’re crazy!), and we picked a date.

And we visited.

It was nice. We stayed a few days. The weather was lovely. We walked to the very quiet beach area a few blocks from my dad’s place. We sat on the back porch and talked. We ordered in. We went on walks. We didn’t swim at the Y, drive down to the zoo or any museums or kid events. We visited two of my lifelong friends and their kids in a deserted school playground, every person masked (outside my little dude, under 2).

And we all survived.

No one got sick. No one had a scare.

So why do I have some residual guilt about having that “what are you comfortable with?” conversation?

Because, as numbers of sick and dying have swelled, and public schools have popped in and out of in-person due to exposures and illness, and local hospitals have reached capacity, I was humbled.

I realized it doesn’t matter what our comfort level is as long as the virus is running rampant.

A virus doesn’t take our considerations into consideration. It doesn’t run the risks we think about. It doesn’t look at our running tally of good choices, and say, “Well… they do great about 85% of the time, so I won’t touch them.”

A virus is opportunistic.

A virus looks for any opportunity it can to replicate, infect, survive.

It looks for weakness, and exploits that as it’s able to.

Maybe you’re tired of this kind of talk. Honestly, I get it. I am too.

But I’m writing about it because my realization … that a virus like this doesn’t give a shit whether or not we’re comfortable … woke me up.

In fact, when we get comfortable, we can slip up and make mistakes.

And people can end up very sick, or at minimum, picking up germs that they pass on to others.

And I know many would read this, and essentially say, “Damn. Is this fear any way to live?”

(An aside: There’s a lot of horrible false equivalencies and abusive messages floating around ye old internet that accuse people who are being careful of “omg!! LiViNg in FeArZ!!” and that is a whole other post that I don’t have the mental energy to navigate.)

I get that.

And may I add, bragging a bit, that we DO have a lot of joy in our lives.

The guilt I have reminds me to take this seriously. And to take the health of my family (close and extended) and strangers seriously. Because it IS serious.

It is a gift that we’ve been able to stay healthy so far.

But it’s not because we’ve beaten the system with our smarts, or done everything perfectly.

Don’t get me wrong: our choices MATTER so much. We can minimize our risks.

But if a wretched, dangerous virus like Covid gets the opportunity to move along and infect people, it will exploit that. It will take our comfort level and blow it up in our faces. I know many people now – personally – who aren’t sure how they got it, but they got it. And they’re not knowing (coupled with a certain level of comfort), passed it on.

I loved that my boys and I got to spend a few days visiting Dad and Linda. I don’t regret our visit. But I don’t think I’ll try to have that kind of conversation again, until numbers move down and more people are vaccinated and things are a little more under control.

I still struggle to make some choices, as I really do need to consider the emotional and relational needs of everyone in my family. In fact, though we didn’t let my daughter attend a birthday party, we did choose to let her have some 1:1 time with a friend today.

When I’m uneasy with other’s choices, I’m learning to have a different kind of conversation, where I say, “Hey, I’m not sure I’m comfortable doing that. Can we [x, y, z] instead?”