Did you lose your job in 2020 too

On April 1, 2020, I was laid off. A brief video call from California and it was done. Outside my window, I watched my four children and my husband of 13 years jump on the tramp. Their blonde hair stood on end, static electricity playing its reliable tricks. I hugged my knees and watched them bounce, bounce, bounce, crash. Cry. Then bounce, bounce, bounce, collide. Cry. My husband pulled them off one another like, wild puppies. Spring lingered in the air, deep in the ground. You could feel it. It was 65 degrees and the earth ached to cut into the new season.

I didn’t cry. I got quiet. Then I got mad. Then I ate and baked and ran. I called a lot of people I don’t talk to often enough to assure them that I was kind of relieved. To lie and say that everything was fine, to them. To make sure they knew I was fine.

I was unemployed for three months. That’s so little in the scheme of things, or even a year. But this wasn’t an ordinary year. It was 2020.

I spent a lot of time clawing at our grass with a metal dandelion digger, exorcising myself by murdering every single dandelion in our yard. Only to have them re-grow in the exact same holes I left behind weeks later.

I weeded flower beds I hated, in 100 degree heat, listening to mediocre podcast hosts pretend there was anything besides COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter in Jun 2020. I hand-watered brown, Rocky Mountain climate averse grass at 4:45am. It still died. We removed 100 year old ivy for 7 days straight, churned and nourished the clay dirt until it was rich and iron clad, and planted in its place $250 worth of vegetable plants and seeds. Built a fountain. Strung up outdoor twinkle lights. Bought six damn chicks for gosh sakes and built the damn chicken coop Taj Mahal.

We sat out there maybe five times the entire summer. We couldn’t get ourselves to. We couldn’t get ourselves to pick the vegetables, ripe and ready, climbing vines on the south side of our old brick home. To sit in the peaceful summer night and be with it. With everything happening. Joblessness, but so much more. Black Lives Matter, but so much more. Loneliness. Somewhere between making our Kindergartner sit in front of a barely working Acer laptop trying to learn to read with 25 other six year olds and life as we knew it falling away almost over night, we couldn’t get ourselves to do it.

What’s “it”? All the things. The hopes. The bigger plans. The to-do lists that sometimes, can be kind of fun to make. The Sunday night planning sessions. Thinking about one month, six months, five years down the road. All of that went away. No, not with my job. Both of our jobs went away. But with the loss of dreaming. The daily caution around COVID 19 our family, like so many, lived with.

We retreated completely from social, school, church, and family circles. We stayed home, wore masks, and only went out when necessary. We called off summer family reunions and vacations. Summer camp. We stayed at home, sometimes okay but usually drowning. We needed each other; but we wanted to run away. Get real space. See other people. We went weeks and weeks without seeing anyone or leaving our house and yard.

During this summer, which I call The Summer of Reckoning in my head, I applied and interviewed, the competition growing fiercer every week as more and more people were laid off as the economy plummeted. I was hopeful and determined but only because I rage-dug dandelions to get my demons out.

In July, three months after losing my job, I found another. Friends said, That was fast! Family said, We’re so proud of you! I was a lucky one. I loved that job. More than my previous job. I was so lucky.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the feeling of being laid off. I’ve forgiven and I understand. No hard feelings, sincerely. But that feeling of rejection. Someone telling you you are done, out of the blue? Cuts somewhere deep in our tender psyches. And to lose your income and health insurance and routine during a global pandemic? That’s a special suck cocktail.

Did you lose your job in 2020 too? Your business? I want to know but I really want to know: then what happened. What happened in the rest of 2020? What’s happening now? Did you change career paths? Are you still unemployed? Did you move?