Get Real: 2020 Life in the Pause

 Story I: Olympic-Level

March 13, 2020

Freshman year of high school was supposed to be the start of something new—late-night study sessions, cafeteria food complaints, maybe even some dumb high school drama to roll my eyes at. Instead, I was stuck at home. 

At first, it was tolerable with the constant zoom classes, awkward silence filled breakout rooms, and the occasional “You’re on mute.” But as the months dragged on, the walls of our house felt smaller. Tighter. Conversations turned into arguments. Arguments turned into screaming matches. Every little thing got under my skin. My younger sister chewing too loudly, my older sister hogging the WiFi, and the way no one else seemed to put their dishes in the sink.

I tried to escape with my nose in a book, drowning out the tension. But the fights found me. My sisters and I had nothing better to do than get on each other’s nerves, and we did it with Olympic-level dedication.

Story II: Bombshell

October 15, 2020

I found the test before she told us.

It was shoved in the bathroom trash, buried under tissues, but not well enough. I don’t know why I reached for it—morbid curiosity, some gut feeling. Two pink lines. Positive. 

I stared at it for a long time. Then I put it back, walked to my room, and shut the door.

I told no one—not my sisters, not my mother, not even myself, really. I willed it into nonexistence as if by ignoring it, I could undo whatever was happening.

It didn’t work.

The knowledge sat heavy in my chest, pressing down on me. I barely spoke at dinner. I picked fights over nothing. My younger sister clicked her mouse too many times playing Roblox and my older sister sighed too loudly. We were already suffocating, trapped in a cycle of sameness—Zoom calls, restless scrolling, fighting over WiFi, over space, over who had the right to be annoyed at who.

And now this.

A baby.

I couldn’t imagine it. We weren’t the kind of family that embraced change. We were set in our ways, in our rhythms. Then COVID happened, and it shattered everything we thought we knew about time, about routine, about certainty.

And now my mother was pregnant. As if we hadn’t lost enough control already.

When she finally told us, I did not hide my reaction.

I spiraled. My frustration, already bubbling beneath the surface, erupted in a scalding wave. I snapped at everything and everyone. I stayed up late, scrolling mindlessly, resenting the world for locking me in this reality.

We were not meant to be trapped inside together, not for this long. There were three of us, sisters, compressed into the same square footage, breathing the same air, cycling through the same arguments.  It went like this for months, then a year.

Story III: Esther

May 14, 2021

Outside, the world unraveled in slow motion. The news flickered with numbers and warnings, but in our house, time twisted. There was no structure, only repetition. Zoom classes that blurred into afternoons, evenings that turned into 2 a.m. binge-reading.

The months passed. My mother’s belly grew. My sisters and I cycled through the same fights, the same slammed doors, the same silence. Nothing changed until everything did.

We weren’t ready for her.

But she came anyway.

We weren’t allowed in the hospital, so my mother and father went alone. 

By the time we saw her, she was already here, wrapped in soft pink blankets and blinking up at us like she had always been part of this house.

She was tiny. She didn’t do much at first—just ate and slept and occasionally let out a cry so piercing it rattled through the whole house. But something shifted. It wasn’t sudden, and it wasn’t something we talked about, but it was there.

At first, it was in the way we hovered around her bassinet, pretending we weren’t staring. The way we watched her little hands curl and stretch. The way my sisters and I, who had spent so long resenting the time trapped inside this house together, suddenly had something new to focus on.

Then it was in the laughter—real laughter, not the bitter kind we had grown used to. The way my younger sister made up songs to sing to her, the way my older sister reached for the baby without thinking whenever she cried. The way my mother, exhausted but glowing, handed her over and said, “Here, hold her,” like it was the easiest thing in the world.

And I did.

I held her. I traced my finger along her impossibly tiny palm and felt the warmth of her settle into my arms, into my chest, into the spaces that had been empty for too long.

She did not ask anything of us. She did not know about the months we had spent fighting, or the way we had resented her arrival, or the nights we lay awake wondering if things would ever go back to normal.

She only knew us as we were. And maybe that was enough.

Maybe, without realizing it, we had needed her. Something new. Something outside of ourselves. A reminder that not all change was bad, that not everything unexpected had to be feared.

Maybe we hadn’t lost something after all.

Maybe we had been waiting for her this whole time.

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Footnote:

This essay mirrors Joan Didion’s The White Album in both structure and thematic resonance. Like Didion’s work, it is fragmented into vignettes, each acting as a self-contained yet interconnected moment of disorientation. 

The White Album famously begins, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Similarly, this essay reflects on how narratives shape our understanding of uncontrollable events, such as COVID, an unplanned pregnancy, and the slow unraveling of familiar routines. Like Didion’s account of the late ’60s as a period when the old structures of meaning failed, this blog captures the abrupt loss of normalcy during the pandemic.

Moreover, just as Didion resists neat conclusions, this essay offers no grand epiphany. Instead, it embraces ambiguity by saying, “She only knew us as we were. And maybe that was enough.” This shift in perception mirrors Didion’s tendency to present change not as resolution, but as something inevitable, like something to be lived through, rather than fully understood.