Bye-Bye, 2021

Two years ago, before The Time of the Virus, my husband and I spent a wonderful New Year’s Eve ringing in 2020. We drank prosecco and played charades with good friends at their country house surrounded by sparkling snow. Our two kids were off at parties with dozens of their friends, as one would expect from young adults.

- Patricia Pearson

Celebrating the start of 2021 was more like a hastily-assembled family meeting of Neurotics Anonymous. How swiftly times had changed.

Although he would rather have been stuck in an elevator with bees, Geoffrey, our 20-year-old, came to stay for New Year’s Eve because he had literally nothing else to do without breaking the law. No gatherings allowed. Our 24-year-old daughter, Clara, who hasn’t lived with us in years, spent the evening in our guest room recovering from having wisdom teeth yanked out of her head. While one moped and the other moaned, for my husband and me, the presence of two other humans in our quarantined home several months into the pandemic was alarming, like we’d been invaded by bears.

The only thing I could think to do for the evening was contribute to the war effort, so to speak, by supporting local restaurants, which were desperate for takeaway orders. But Clara could only imbibe baby food through a straw; my husband, Ambrose, is a diabetic vegetarian who had just gone off flour, potatoes, and sugar; and Geoffrey wasn’t focused on food at all. He yearned for something unobtainable, like a girlfriend he might meet at a party, or, failing that … I don’t know … a bowl of opium.

Everyone was miserable and short-fused. Even I, a mother who prides herself on being calm, burst out with an uncalled-for bellow: “