When I was giving birth to my daughter, there came a point—about twelve hours into my unmedicated, at-home, every-90-seconds-a-contraction back-labor odyssey—where I was done. I looked up at my midwife, bleary and exhausted, and said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” She smiled, beatifically, and said, “Okay. Let’s do something else.”

One of the more obvious and trying aspects of this pandemic we’re floundering in is all the things we can’t do. This horrid little virus has spurred limitations the likes of which most of us have never seen.