I remember the night we brought Jo home from the hospital in 2018, when my mom came into her nursery to say goodbye. Up until then, we’d been surrounded by doctors and nurses and family. Now, I realized, stricken, we’d be on our own. The sole caretakers of a fragile human life. It was terrifying.

The last two years of parenting young children in a pandemic have felt like an extended, unyielding version of that moment. Every day we measure the threats and perform intricate cost-benefit analyses. What’s more damaging, for example: unrelenting isolation or the possibility of a child contracting the virus from a return to daycare? The stress of playing Russian roulette with our children’s lives—or refusing to, keeping them home as much as possible—is crushing. I think of that old carnival ride, the Gravitron, which spins so quickly that riders are lifted from the floor, held against padded walls by forces three times that of normal gravity. The fun of the ride (if you like such rides, which I don’t) is that it stops. The pressure eases. You can move again.

For two years, we have not been able to move. We have felt that force against our chests, hearts gone pulpy and bruised, and it has not stopped.