What Fresh Hell: Laughing In The Face Of Motherhood

Vaccines. Mandate-liftings. Scaled reopenings. All of these things are great and long wished for. But we were kind of thinking there'd be a bell, or something. A hard deadline. A day when we'd all dance out into the ticker-taped streets and make out with strangers in Times Square. Without a "you are now free to move about the cabin" announcement, how will we know when it's okay for grandparents to visit? To fly to that wedding? To toss our masks once and for all? When is it okay to start saying yes? Our listener Heather put it this way: I think seeing a light at the end of the tunnel can be unsettling. We've been living in this weird way for a year now. And as much as it seems crazy, we've gotten used to it. Psychologists call the stress this is making us feel the “third-quarter phenomenon.” For people forced to endure long stretches of isolation– astronauts, Arctic explorers, submarine sailors– the most difficult part, regardless of the length of the assignment, has been proven to be about 75% of the way thr