Support Groups Blog

For those of us in the age 30 and up category, our childhoods included trips to Blockbuster to rent VHS tapes that required you to rewind them once viewed (remember the slogan: “be kind, rewind”). It was the height of cool to have a tape rewinder, a machine where you could pop in this huge chunk of VHS plastic and in a few seconds, TA DA, rewound! We of a certain age can also remember when tv could not be paused or rewound. In the magical present where you can regularly pause and rewind a host of tv shows and movies, occasionally something goes wrong and everything freezes.

Life is all about making decisions. As we come up on the 2 year anniversary of being in a pandemic, the decision making that is a part of regular life seems, in our opinion, to have multiplied. There is the choice to act as if nothing is happening, we can ignore all the medical advice as hubris and much like the story of Chicken Little, go about our lives while the sky is indeed falling. We can also decide to listen to medical advice and get our vaccines and wear our masks.

In the vast world of technology there is something so traditional about maintaining a paper or white board calendar. In our house, a large paper calendar from an office supply store takes up the wall of the laundry room. While our personal and work obligations are dutifully put into our phone, the family calendar is lovingly maintained on paper. All the dentist, doctor and ortho appointments are jotted down, as well as all the after school activities and commitments.

Another year is coming to a close and what a year it has been. January of 2021 brought about something that few of us imagined outside of the movies, our capitol was attacked, but not by a foreign country, but by its own citizens. Lives were lost and the era of the Trump Presidency ended not with peace, but with armed Americans storming the capital.

The holidays come around and there is this perceived expectation that we should look and act like the cover of a Christmas movie. Our houses should look perfectly decorated, the matching pajamas should be ready for Christmas eve, the presents perfectly wrapped and of course the menu should be magazine perfect.

Christmas can't be bought from a store. Maybe Christmas means a little bit more.
-Dr. Suess