How to Be Okay with All This Going On: Love Your People

These days, I hug my children extra tight. I memorize the feeling of their tiny hands gripping mine. I look at every curl in their hair and how their eyelashes are way too perfect. Even on nights where being a mom is sheer exhaustion, my ear is tuned into every inflection in their growing voices.

I’m collecting moments where my husband and I can sit and talk in peace. I think about the ways that he shows he’s thinking about me. I can feel both the lightness and heaviness he walks with every day, and how through it all he does his best to do right by us.

I try to pick up my cat, but he wants no part of my campaign to be more present in the lives of those I love.

The cat aside, I am on a mission, and it helps me cope with the current climate. How? Loving your people has a strange way of making you mindful. It’s like the awareness helps you realize how fleeting every moment is. And I don’t want to miss it because I’m worrying about who’s in the White House.

COVID clearly altered our relationships, and I mourn the friendships that lost their groove in social distancing. However, it makes me strive all the more to connect when and where I can. Perhaps you can too.

Love your people. Stay close even from afar. We can still get through this together if we try.

~jennifer.