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Welcome to Episode 231 of the Non anxious Leader podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. In Episode 183, I went through how my family, my mom's extended family, does a family reunion every two years. My mom has two sisters who are 98 and 96, and the extended family is 60 plus of us, gathered together last year on the West Coast. And of course, there was a lot of anxiety about vaccination, testing, and masking requirements. I'll post a link to that episode in the show notes. This year, my mom turned 100 on May 29, and my brother and sister and their families were planning to gather near us for a long Memorial Day weekend to celebrate her 100th birthday. On the morning of Friday, May 19, six days before people were to start arriving for the big weekend, I woke up with the sweats. I knew I had had a fever overnight and it had broken and I immediately wondered, did I have COVID?

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So I tested and I was positive. My wife tested, she was positive too. The reason I knew it was COVID was because we had traveled back from Europe that prior Sunday, May 14th, and on that day, we had a 20 minute cab ride, we had a three hour train ride, we had another 20 minute cab ride, and a seven hour flight. We didn't mask during our travels and didn't even really think about it or discuss it. Well, I'll take that back. I thought about it for one moment during our second cab ride when the driver started coughing. He did crack his window a little bit, but then I wondered, should I crack my window? Should I put a mask on? But I think the surrounding togetherness pressure, the feeling that, Oh, I don't want to offend him, got to me and my wife and I think that that's probably where we were exposed, but we're not certain. The issue here was that my mom lives with us. She had been with my sisters and we had gone to get her the Tuesday after we had gotten home. So she was back with us for three days when we tested positive.

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After testing positive, I immediately called my sister, who was a doctor, and my sister says, we need to get her out of there. So within about 20 minutes, we had my mom packed up. She and I were both mask. She sat in the back seat. I was driving. We had the windows cracked, and I drove an hour and 15 minutes to meet my brother in law to get my mom out of our house. Remember, this was on a Friday, and so they started testing her daily on Saturday and Sunday she was negative. And on Monday, my niece arrived home from the Midwest right about midday. My sister, brother in law and mom were eating lunch when my mom coughed. My sister, who had been out that morning, said to my brother in law, Did you test mom? He said no, he had forgotten about it. So they immediately tested her and she was positive. So, now the hosts for the big celebration weekend, my wife and I and the guest of honor, my mom were all COVID positive. The scrambling began again and we got my mom back from my sister to avoid any further exposure to her and her family.

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Of course, hindsight is 2020. My wife and I should have worn a mask while traveling home. We should have not gotten my mom back from my sisters until we had waited five days and tested negative, but we had gotten complacent. It felt like we were coming out of the pandemic, and so we didn't do any of those things, and now we were in a pickle. Even as I was driving back after meeting and getting my mom, my sister, my brother, and I got on the phone for a conference call. What were we going to do? The first thing I'll say about this is that there was no blame. My sister or brother or both of them could have easily said to you, What were you thinking traveling to Europe so close to mom's big weekend? Why weren't you more careful? Look at the situation you've put us in. And of course, if they had said that, then I could have said, Well, you're the doctor. Why didn't you think to keep her with you until we were in the clear? You should know better. Now, of course, all of this is hypothetical because we did not say that.

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But notice the difference between taking responsibility for self and the situation and blaming others. I'm grateful they didn't blame me, and I don't think I would have responded in that way, blaming my sister. But they could have said that to me. I felt guilty myself that this was all because we had done this and we hadn't been more careful. But the tone of the conversation was, how are we going to respond to this? How are we going to handle this? It was, so what? Now what? It's already done. There's nothing we can do about it. Now, how are we going to handle it? Because we were expecting over 30 people for the weekend, we had rented two large houses right next to each other and then a third house about 10 minutes away. All the houses were past their cancelation period, so I had messaged the property managers to ask them if it was possible to reschedule. If we found another time when we could all be together, could we reschedule instead of losing our money altogether? As a side note, I had used a credit card that had travel protections, but I was pretty sure that it did not cover COVID.

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While I was waiting for a response from the property managers, my brother and sister and I discussed our options. One of the things that came out of this was that COVID was less scary. Now, one of my nieces had had long COVID, so we were still taking it seriously. But the one that we had all been worried about, really getting COVID, was my mom. Now that she had it and she didn't feel bad and only had a little cough, we were not as concerned about the rest of us. I felt like it was a really healthy conversation. My brother said he wasn't concerned and he didn't think his family would be. My sister said she was a little more concerned, but she was willing to go forward. Long story short, we decided it was going to be too hard to reschedule. We would try to take precautions to keep everybody safe and that we would move forward with the celebration weekend for my mom's 100th birthday. The only question was, what about the babies? Of the 30 plus people that were planning to come for the weekend, there were several who had children four years or younger and two who had children six months or younger.

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We all know that kids are not as affected by COVID as adults, but there was some concern about those two youngest ones, those two babies. And they both happened to be my grandchildren. One of the main concerns was not my wife and I and my mom because we knew we were positive and we were planning to stay outside and distance, and if we went inside to mask and not stay inside for very long. However, we moved my sister to the overflow house, the smaller house that was 10 minutes away because she and her husband and her son had been exposed. So we felt like we couldn't have them in either of the two main houses with everybody else, especially around the babies. That was all well and good. But the one wild card was my niece who had arrived from the Midwest and she had been sitting at the lunch table when my mom had cough. As soon as my mom tested positive, they got my niece out of the house and she went to stay in a hotel. So she hadn't been there very long, maybe 15 or 20 minutes, but it was a kinda gray area.

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I asked my sister and my sister said, Well, she wasn't sitting 6 feet away, but she was sitting two seats over, so she wasn't right next to her. My sister, ultimately, through several conversations, told me that she thought it was fine for my niece to be staying in the house where my kids would be staying with their two babies. I shared this with my wife and she reminded me that my kids might not be that comfortable with that, that we better check with them to make sure they are okay with that. Now my anxiety level is going up because I need to talk with my kids and I don't know what their response is going to be. What if they're not okay with that? I'm going to have to go back to my sister and try to work something out. Now, you might be thinking, This is a triangle. It's my sister and her kid. Maybe she should be talking directly to my kids, but I felt responsible here that it was not her job to deal with my family. Other families may do things differently, but that's the way we handle things. Remember that every family of origin, every relationship system has unwritten rules about how things are done.

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And typically, they're neither right or wrong. It's just that's how we do it. I called the first of my kids and laid out the situation and they said, Well, if your sister says it's okay, I trust her. In the back of my mind, I was wondering, Well, if I would have said it, would you have trusted me? Actually, I'm thinking, Probably not. I'm not a doctor. And that wasn't really a reactive response. That was just a thought in the back of my mind. Anyway, I thought, Great, we're going to move forward. I called the other kid. They were fine as well. And we were able to finalize sleeping arrangements for the weekend. An important point here is that the higher the perceived emotional stakes, the harder it is to be a non anxious presence. And it felt here like the stakes were high. We had quite a few anxious moments, but we were able to work through it because people were able to define how they felt and we were able to come to an agreement on how we would move through the weekend. It turned out that the weather was great for the weekend, and these houses had a lot of great outdoor spaces, so we spent most of our time outside and everybody felt safe.

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The one thing that was a challenge was that we kept testing and we were positive on Thursday, we were positive on Friday, we were positive on Saturday. My wife said to me Saturday night after we had gotten home that it was a wasted weekend because she wasn't getting to hold her babies. If I had been a true nonanxious presence in that moment, I would have asked a question like, In what way is this a wasted weekend? But instead, I nearly engaged in a conflict of wills by saying, What do you mean it's wasted? At least you get to see them. To her credit, she didn't respond. But as I reflect on that, I could have done better. Just another data point that it's difficult to self differentiate to be a nonanxious presence, even half the time. As it turned out, my wife tested negative Sunday morning and was able to hold her grand babies for two whole days, which she did. A final note here is that people were all departing on Tuesday after Memorial Day weekend, and that was also the day that I was supposed to be at the Baltimore Inner Harbor for the Baltimore Washington annual conference.

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If you've ever been to the inner Harbor, you know that it's a beautiful place, and so my wife had planned to go with me while my mom stayed with my sister. However, it turns out that my sister and her husband never tested positive. And on Tuesday morning, my mother still was testing positive. So we could not take my mom to my sister's because that would expose them again. My wife, to her credit, said, I guess I just have to stay home with your mom. And as it turned out, my mom did not test negative until late Thursday, so my wife was never able to join me at the conference. I'm grateful because I felt guilty leaving her with my mom, but I had to be there and my wife never complained. So what? Now what? So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I think all in all, we were able to work through some anxious times. We were able to celebrate my mom's 100th birthday. I'll put a link so you can see a picture of our family in the show notes. I'll also put a link to a story that CBS News did on my mom because she's actually a Hiroshima survivor.

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And one of my daughters in law is a producer for CBS Mornings and actually did a segment on her which aired the same morning that we tested positive for COVID. Anyway, that's it for Episode 231. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with somebody. Also, if you can leave a review in either Apple podcast or Spotify podcast, it also helps other people to find it. You can connect with me at thenonanxiousleader.com and you can email me at jack@christian-leaders.com. Until next time, thanks and goodbye. Thank you for listening. If you found this episode helpful, there are two things you can do to help others find this podcast. First, tap the subscribe button on your podcast app, and second, leave a review. I appreciate your help. Finally, you can find more resources as well as subscribe to my blog at thenonanxiousleader.com. Now go be yourself.