This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves.

Welcome to the waves. Slates podcast about gender feminism and the latest wave of coronavirus.

We're all doing this anxious, fronting all over again. Every episode you get a new pair of women

to talk about the thing we can't get off of our minds. And today you've got me, Shannon Paulis,

a senior editor at SLEEP, focusing on health and science. And me, Rebecca Onion,

a staff writer at SLEEP. Today we're going to be talking about the delta surge and how it's put

us all back in a position of having to navigate very difficult family decision making situations.

For a while, the mental load of the pandemic seemed to be gone. Now it's back. How are people dealing

with the narrative switch back to quote unquote starting to worry again? How is that flip getting

reflected in relationships? And how is this period of negotiation different from 2020? Rebecca,

why were you interested in talking about this? Who isn't thinking about this right now? I'm not sure.

I just kind of personally overwhelmed by this switch as I think a lot of people have been.

I have a child who's four and a half who's been out of preschool for 17 months. We're lucky enough

to be able to have a place to send her back to, which is not a given considering the state of the

child care industry. And we have been in a relative hibernation, I guess I should say. So I'm a

remote worker. I always have been. And during the duration of the pandemic last year, my husband was

a stay-at-home dad. So we didn't travel. We had a really small social life. And actually we were

pretty happy with it. And then this summer, of course, my husband and I both got vaccinated. We

saw everybody. We went to New Hampshire. We saw my whole family. We went swimming in lakes. We

ice cream. We felt renewed. And now I don't know. I don't know. I just don't know how to feel.

I'm also just really professionally interested in family decision making around children's risks.

And how people do it. And how people sort of weigh risks when they when they are really afraid.

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