83 Missing the Milestones

Julia Rayner-Beben

During Covid, I was living in my parent’s house in Burlington, Ontario. I was living with my mom, dad, and younger sister. When the lockdown first happened, I was 5 months into being 15 years old and I was in the second semester of grade 10 in high school.  

Once the government announced that schools were suspended, lockdown protocols started and then all non-essential services were closed. We could only leave the house for necessary errands and walks outside. Indoor guests were not allowed, and we could only visit a few individuals outside while socially distanced. The full lockdown lasted until the end of July. Then there were more lenient restrictions throughout the summer and into the fall, when stricter rules began being reinstated. Since they were constantly changing, it was difficult to keep up with the current rules. Both of my parents started working at home. My mom had sometimes worked at home before Covid, so the transition was easier for her. My dad had only worked in an office setting, so remote work was difficult for him. My sister and I had school fully online too, which meant that all four of us were sharing the house during the day every day. We had our classes through Google Meet, even gym class. High school was reduced to classes and homework, which made me realize how important the social aspects of the high school experience really are. In grade 9, I was finding my footing and starting to make new friends, but it was not until grade 10 that I joined many extracurriculars. When schools shut down, I missed seeing my friends every day and I missed attending these clubs. Due to limited social opportunities, I had to find other ways to keep myself busy in my daily life. I started working out in my basement and trying home dance workouts. I also started sketching and doing crafts with my sister. My family was so lucky that we had recently put a pool in our backyard. Before the lockdown, I used the pool occasionally, but during the lockdown, it became part of my daily routine. 

Since I was in grade 10 when the lockdown first occurred, I felt like my high school experience had just begun. One moment, I was beginning to find my rhythm in high school, navigating friendships, and figuring out who I was as a teenager. I was also imagining the years ahead filled with dances, hanging out at lunch, and making core life memories that all the adults in my life said were supposed to last a lifetime. Then, suddenly, it was all put on pause. Even when we came back to high school and had hybrid school and then finally fully in-person school, it never returned to how I had hoped high school would be. I felt that I missed out on big life events that are supposed to come with a high school experience. I also felt like I was expected to be older, more mature, and ready for grade 12. But in so many ways, I still felt stuck as a 15-year-old in grade 10, like the part of me that was supposed to grow using those key life-defining experiences during those years had been frozen. 

Even the way we celebrated those advancing years had to change. Other big life events that I missed out on were birthday celebrations. Not only my own, but that of my baby cousin who was born during the pandemic, and my sister’s 14th birthday. When I was a little girl, I dreamed of my sweet sixteen birthday and saw it as a big life event. Seeing it represented in so many movies and hearing about it from my older cousins, I was so excited to celebrate my 16th birthday with all my friends. My birthday fell at a time when the lockdown was still strict, so I could not have the big party I imagined. I was so grateful that my family tried to make the birthdays as special as possible, even if they had to be different. 

A theme I have noted throughout this course is improvisation. Throughout history, the responses to different diseases have included people doing what they think is best at the time and using improvisation to navigate an unknown situation. For example, during medieval times, in the absence of modern science, they improvised remedies and methods of prevention such as praying to saints or subjecting themselves to flogging. Cities began improvising other precautions such as quarantine by requiring ships to wait offshore for 40 days, even though they did not understand how the Black Death was spread at that time. As traditional burial systems broke down due to the vast amount of people dying in a short period of time, societies had to improvise mass graves. Later on, plague doctors used masks filled with herbs and flowers, which was an improvised form of personal protective equipment. Another example of using improvisation is that in the absence of a vaccine for diseases such as smallpox, people tried other remedies such as variolation. Also, Edward Jenner’s use of cowpox to protect against smallpox was a revolutionary improvisation that led to the creation of the first modern vaccine. These moments of improvised innovation throughout the history of diseases and plagues were not always effective, but they reveal how people tried to adapt to unknown experiences under pressure. It also shows how so many of the public health practices we use today were born out of trial, error, and necessity.

During my Covid experience, I felt like I was constantly improvising. For example, I improvised locations to complete schoolwork and watch lessons on Google Meet around my house. I set up stacks of boxes in the backyard and balanced my computer on top. I also improvised how I would study with friends by switching to using FaceTime calls, sending pictures of notes over text, or taking typed notes instead so we could email them to each other. When there was a shortage of toilet paper in grocery stores, I collected and used napkins instead. Gyms were not open, so I improvised by creating a little gym in my basement and doing aqua aerobics with my mom in my pool. When disposable masks were in short supply, I improvised by switching to using fabric masks instead. Even birthday celebrations were improvised to still make them as fun as possible based on what was deemed to be safe at that time. Since my sister’s 14th birthday was very shortly after the lockdown began, my parents set up an indoor camping experience in our basement with a tent and a fake campfire for our immediate family. For my 16th birthday, my parents set up a “red carpet movie premiere” in our basement for my immediate family and a couple of friends in our “bubble” since restrictions had changed. During Covid, the entire world was improvising and innovating, and even at my small personal level, I was too.