I’ve been writing things down this week here and there as they come to me. I’ve shared some of this as snippets on Instagram but if you’re interested in reading some more navel-gazing, as my friend Lorren says, then feel free to read on with these lightly-edited words. Maybe it’s helpful to use my own still, small voice to give some words to what we’re all going through at this moment in time.
Saturday, March 14th
My brain keeps trying to compare this to things it knows.
It’s like the holidays! My head says. And this is sort of true. The kids were off for two straight weeks and grocery stores weren’t always open when I wanted them to be and we mostly stayed home and Tyson was off of work more days than not.
It’s like the polar votex! It thinks. Then, too, we were stuck inside and didn’t dare venture out of the house. But that lasted four straight days and then it was all over. We could have flown on an airplane to escape it all if we really wanted. It affected only my little region and not the entire world.
It’s like a world war. My brain tries. And, though I’ve never experienced war like that, this seems right. The uncertainty of not knowing what each day, each week is going to bring. Not knowing how long things are going to last or how this is all going to affect us. Knowing that we are just at the beginning of all of this and there will be lasting changes to our society and to our world forever.
My phone alerted me yesterday to tell me my screen time was up last week— 17%, over six hours a day, instead of my usual four-ish.
Two hours more?! Was my initial reaction. Then, Two hours more. Of course. Because these times are unprecedented. Some of those two hours were useful. I’ve been in contact with friends and family far more than usual as we attempt to navigate this strange new world together. My friends and I text each other from across the country to give each other updates on what it’s like in Ohio, in Georgia, in Texas. I look at the news to find the latest update and seem to find a new one no matter how often I look at my phone.
Some of those hours are more negative. The times I’ve spent scrolling because I can’t seem to stop, to see how everyone else is coping, what is going on, how are we all doing this? The time I’ve spent reading too many articles.
But I’ve got this phone as a link to the world for better or worse. Of course I’m using it more. Of course.
+++++
Sunday, March 15th
I've made up my mind to try to say yes as much as possible. To things that would ordinarily make me cringe. Yes to dragging the Nugget upstairs to make a fort in your room which ends up in the biggest mess and blankets that need to be put away in six separate rooms of the house. Yes to watching Frozen 2 three days in a row. Yes to eating something from your candy stash while we do so. Yes to taking out the paint and the easel and the paint shirts and all the rest. Yes to playing on your tablets. Yes to baking cookies.
The thing is, we’re saying no to so many things right now. Especially this week, supposedly our spring break, where I had plans for the movie theater and museums and indoor playgrounds. None of that is happening anymore.
And that’s nothing to speak of next week when there will continue to be no school, no gymnastics, no dance class, no playdates, no eating at restaurants. Next week and for how much longer?
So I’m going to try to say yes to what I can.
+++++
Monday March 16th
It feels strange to know that time is still marching onward. Spring is coming. You wouldn’t know it from the forecast over the next week, but it is.
Time feels frozen in so many ways.
It feels weird to see the sunshine blinding us through the blinds in the morning and lengthening our shadows in the late afternoon, to see grass outside our windows, to see March 16th on the calendar.
I saw the first tiny shoots of green sprouting in the remnants of our day lilies outside. The ground is waking up, literally growing up to stretch toward the big blue sky.
Spring is coming. I feel it.
+++++
Tuesday March 17th
My right eye has been twitching since last week. It’s not terrible; I’ll go several hours or even a day between twitches. Sometimes it will do it several times in a row and then go away, for so long I forget about it.
Of course I looked up causes of eye twitching. Stress, it said, right at the top.
I don’t feel all that stressed. I feel all sorts of things, anxious, scattered, uncertain, but not exactly stressed.
Then again, maybe those are all just euphemisms.
Also I’ve been planning the shit out of everything there is to plan. So. That’s a thing.
It could be my body just trying to tell me something, reacting to what it feels in the air and sees in my newsfeed and senses down to my very bones. It seems like too much of a coincidence for an eye twitch to begin right when everything coronavirus here in America was ramping up. None of this is normal. Including eye twitches.
We tried to explain just how abnormal this all is to the kids the other night, even as we answered their questions. They asked us a dozen questions, probably a week ago now, kicked off by Caden asking, “Mommy, what is coronavirus?”
We sat at dinner and talked about what was going on and reassured them that they were safe, we were safe, life was probably going to look different for awhile (we didn’t know just how different then) but we would all be okay.
We continued eating and it dawned on me.
“Hey,” I blurted. “Just so you know, this is not normal. This doesn’t usually happen. Daddy and I are 33 years old and this has never, ever happened before in our whole entire lives.”
I wondered what they were thinking, these little six and four-year-olds. (Well, the four-year-old didn’t seem to be paying attention all that much.) Did they think this was just routine, that once every six years or so everyone’s lives just shut down? That this is just a regular part of life, like sometimes you just don’t go back to school for the rest of the year? Did they think Tyson and I had any idea what we’re doing?
I wonder what they’ll remember of this time. Will they remember being out of school? (Will they go back to school this spring? Oh, we love their teacher, it will break my heart if they don’t.) Will they remember Tyson and I in conversation about this and not much else? Will they remember us watching the news on TV? Of not being able to go anywhere: not to stores, not to restaurants, not to gymnastics, or dance, or indoor playgrounds, or other people’s houses?
+++++
Yesterday, Monday, I tried to place a grocery order. I usually place my grocery orders on Tuesdays, for pick up on Wednesdays. This has been my routine for almost two years now. I went to select my time slot and...the earliest I could pick up my groceries is Sunday. Almost a week. And here I thought I was doing good by getting it in a day early.
+++++
Wednesday March 18th
Just 10 days ago it was over 50 degrees outside and we bought ice cream from the ice cream truck that rolled through the neighborhood. From a stranger. In a truck. Who handed us food and we handed him money. With our unsanitized, unwashed hands. In a crowd of neighborhood kids.
That feels like a lifetime ago.
I keep checking myself when I watch or read things. Tyson and I watched The Two Popes last weekend (which was excellent, btw) and one of the first shots was of a huge crowd, packed together shoulder to shoulder as they awaited news of the new pope.
But you can’t do that! my mind cried.
Same when I read a metaphor in a book recently that went something like, “she stuck around like a virus”. Yikes, I thought, That reads a bit differently right now.
Video of people shaking hands or reading about people having a party or just the idea of a bunch of people going to the store all leave me with the same reaction. But that’s not safe!
How quickly we accommodate this new life, even while it still feels so very, very bizarre.
+++++
I did yoga tonight for the first time in a long time. Too long. I noticed my body in recent days has been tense and tight, my shoulders creeping involuntarily toward my ears.
It needed a release.
As we lay down to complete the practice my YouTube guide told me to hug my knees and “take the biggest breath you’ve taken all day”. It was then that I realized I’d been holding my breath.
My breath needed a release, too.
+++++
We dropped groceries off to my parents this morning. I made a run to Target first thing, I got one of the last loaves of bread off the shelves and so much was still empty and barren. I had the hand sanitizer at the ready when I got back in the car because that’s a thing we do now.
I got home and wiped everything off. Tyson had mixed up a bleach solution and I picked up cereal box and wiped it down with a damp cloth. Then I looked at him across the room and shrugged. He burst out laughing because what even is this life?
I loaded the kids up in the car so they could get out of the house and we delivered things to my parents. Bread and eggs and peanut butter and a sunny bouquet of tulips, because we all need a little bit of brightness right now. I explained on the way over that we wouldn’t be going inside or giving hugs and we couldn’t play and had them recite the rules back to me. We left their bags of groceries on the front step and talked to them through the glass door instead. It was weird. I don’t have many words lately but weird is one of them.
Friday March 20th
I cried for the first time today. At least tears filled my eyes and I sniffled a lot and it stayed that way for several minutes which for me is the equivalent of a full-on emotional meltdown.
What triggered it, of all things, was Taylor Swift’s song “Mine”. It reminded me of college, or the tail end of it, right before I Tyson and I got married because the lines “We’ve got bills to pay/we’ve got nothing figured out” were particularly relevant to us at that moment in time. (Ahem still relevant to us at this moment in time.) And it reminded me of graduating with a design degree in 2010 into a recession and how absolutely impossible it was for me to get a job at that time, and all the “no”s I heard and the resumes I blew through. And then, of course, I thought of all the college kids who are about to graduate college right now into the same damn thing (Or worse? What is this?) and I just couldn’t handle it.
Especially the students like me, who were told that if we just followed the rules and followed our dreams that everything would work out, and so we did. And we went out and we got A’s from the first time we ever got report cards and graduated with honors all the way up to walking across the university stage with our cap and gown and special tassels and still, because of the economy, because of that moment in time, we couldn’t get jobs with our degrees in design and humanities and history and architecture.
Anyway, that’s what did it for me. Those college students who are ready to launch and are about to be launched out into a world that’s even scarier than the height of the recession I graduated into.
Unrelated: Brooklyn thinks the opening line to “22” is “It feels like the perfect night to dress up like hamsters” and I want her to believe that forever.