Little Juliette Berkhemer is only a few months away from the truth about her grandparents – they do not actually live in her mother’s cell phone.
And for that, Juliette, a 14-month-old toddler from Jersey City, New Jersey, can thank the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has given grandparents who have already been vaccinated against Covid-19 the green light to get back together. . with loved ones from whom they had to stay away due to the pandemic.
For almost as long as Juliette lived, her only contact with her grandparents was in Houston in FaceTime chats, her mother, Becca Hoffman, said.
“She gets so excited when they call,” Hoffman said. “She wants to pick up the phone and chat away. She was only a few months old when my parents saw her, and then the pandemic happened. That’s how Juliette knows them, just from the phone. ‘
Excited grandmother Renee Hoffman said Juliette was just a newborn when she saw her – and her grandson, Vincent, now 7 – in January 2020.
“I thought I would see them again soon, and then hit Covid,” Hoffman, 60, said.
Now the Hoffmans are together to fly back to New Jersey as soon as possible.
“Vincent already knows we hope to come, but Juliette does not,” Renee Hoffman said. “She’s going to be so surprised. She thinks we live in FaceTime over the phone.”
There are legions of older Americans like the Hoffmans, who for fear of Covid-19 were forced to leave their sons and daughters and grandchildren without hugs, without kisses, for more than a year.
The CDC acknowledged the pain in its first federal public health guidelines on how people who have received both doses of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, or the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, can return to a normal life.
‘For example,’ the CDC wrote, ‘grandparents who are fully vaccinated can go indoors with their non-vaccinated healthy daughter and her healthy children without wearing masks or physical distance, provided none of the non-vaccinated family members risked having severe COVID-19. ‘
These were words that Renee Hoffman feared she would never hear.
“It’s been 13 months, 13 very long months,” she said. “It was very difficult.”
Becca Hoffman said she felt very stressed when her parents visited in the winter of January 2020.
“I felt I was not enjoying it enough,” she said. “But I thought we would see them again in a few months.”
Renee Hoffman said she and her husband, Ted, spent a lot of time with their other grandson, Aiden, now 6 and living with his parents, in Conroe, Texas.
“I have been watching him a lot before the pandemic,” she said. “The last time we saw him in person was February 27, 2020.”
While Texas, like the rest of the country, began imposing restrictions, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott quickly lifted them to get the economy back on track, and he only imposed a mask mandate in July, when the Covid-19 case numbers have started to skyrocket. the state. He scrapped the mandate this month by ignoring the CDC recommendations.
Renee Hoffman said she and her husband decided early on to listen to the medical experts instead of the governor and that they were eager to wear masks.
“I must say that I immediately started wearing a mask, and I have not been sick once,” she said. “The same goes for my husband. He has heart disease and needs a pacemaker, but it has been postponed because his doctor says it is not yet safe to be in a hospital.”
Still, Renee Hoffman said, they felt they were exceptions to the rule, and they watched with dismay as many people around them were lazy about wearing masks and seemed unimportant in social distance. According to her, other families came together despite the admonitions of the CDC, and she admitted that it tested their intent.
“The wait and the fact that I could not see my children, could not see my grandchildren, began to come to me,” she said. “It got to the point that I thought I don’t care if I get sick. I need to see my kids.”
The Hoffmans were therefore ecstatic when the country heard in December that the Covid-19 vaccines were on their way.
“Last Friday we got our first dose of Moderna, and we get our second dose on April 2,” Renee Hoffman said. “Our goal is to see Aiden by my husband’s birthday in June.”
And then at some point it goes to New Jersey to see Vincent and Juliette, she said.
“Oh my God, we are so excited and so very grateful, thankful that the vaccines are available,” she said.
Her voice cracks with emotion and says that she has been running reunion scenarios with her children and grandchildren through her mind for months and that it is now suddenly possible to let the excitement grow.
“I missed them so much,” she said.
In Jersey City, Becca Hoffman said she is also excited to be reunited with her parents. But the daily reality of an apartment with her husband and two children in a cramped apartment lets her real estate listings in the suburbs of New Jersey, and her son must homeschooling does not give her much chance to allow her not to stray imagination .
And at the moment, she dares not fly anywhere with Juliette – and not just because of the Covid-19 threat. “She’s a spicy little girl,” Becca Hoffman said with a laugh.
According to her, it is therefore summer when her parents return to Jersey City.
“I have this vision that we are hanging out across the river in Central Park,” she said. “I would like them here.”