On An Endless Pandemic

 Hi everyone. The pandemic continues! We just hit the quarter of a million American lives lost mark. But Americans are indefatigable. They clamor for open bars, family Thanksgiving, unrestricted access to retail stores, concert halls, and sporting arenas. 

Meanwhile, the winter germs have issued warning shot across the bow to Shoyce family, striking 75 percent of us down with strep throat. The germs breached our fortress! Next time, we might not be so lucky. I have generally observed that our dog receives the highest quality healthcare, followed by our children, and trailing far behind, the adults. If Zoe receives a vaccination, a concerned member of the veterinary team will call the next day to inquire about how she is feeling. Zoe, having napped 22 hours since the vaccination, is fine. When our children get 23 colds, flus and other nasty bugs over the course of a year, a human generally answers the phone at the pediatrician's office and a same-day appointment is usually available. When Nitin and I catch 27 of these 23 colds, fus, and bugs, we call a primary care provider and are placed on hold for 3 hours; the hold music is a laugh track and you get hung up on twice before you are routed to a human being. There are no appointments available. The doctor is booked for annual physicals for the next fifteen months. A nurse practitioner can see you in three months. Etc. So I did score a coveted appointment with a nurse practitioner this morning, but she said I could not be tested for strep, even though my daughter has strep, because COVID, but did I want to be tested for COVID? Sure. 12 hours later, Myles also has a strep diagnosis, the kids are mainlining bubblegum amoxicillon, and I still have no antibiotics because I was on hold for 25 minutes before being directed to my doctor's after hours answering service. 

I realize that this is actually a blog dedicated to cataloging the children's progress and development, but as their mother, whose throat is being consumed by fire ants, I allowed myself a detour. Apologies. 

So. This has been a very fun few months! We sought therapy for Ellie, who has grown restless and captivity, and started ramping up misbehavior to master class level. For example, Ellie opens the refrigerator and begins throwing food items, or overturns every toy storage receptacle on the first floor. We ask if she is angry, but she assures us she is "happy" and "excited." We listen to the Laurie Berkner song about feelings while restraining her and frantically googling parenting tips on our cell phones.  One lesson I have learned is that I am not learning very much about parenting. I just have to outlast the particularly difficult phases while preventing bodily harm. I do find it soothing to listen to parenting podcasts like Respectful Parenting by Janet Lansbury. I gather that I am supposed to remain calm and neutral and provide child-centered feedback like, "You are pulling my hair. You really need my attention right now." I sometimes have flashes of anger that surprise and frighten me, but I am mostly dumbfounded by these defcon-level tantrums. Tiny humans can be very ragey. It almost seems she has enough feelings for both of us at times. 

I feel that I should counterbalance what might seem to be a damaging report. Ellie is also so stunningly smart and unbelievably observant. Her mental acuity shocks me at times. Nitin, feeling the weight of fixing the broken country on his shoulders, was having a grumpy day and he and Ellie were squabbling. They had reached the point in their argument where Ellie kept trolling, and Nitin was glowering while adjusting her bath water. "Do you just not even care anymore?" She asked him, perfectly observing how overwhelmed her grown up felt, the great number of rocks he felt like he was pushing up a mountain at any given time, and how futile his efforts sometimes seemed as the tasks continued, unrelenting.

I really enjoy my Ellie buddy. We went on a "treasure hunt" for hand-me-down holiday outfits around Arlington, picking up dresses I had found on the neighborhood listserv from neighbors' porches. She is a champion snuggler and still asks for a huggy and a kissy before we part. I kiss her very sweaty brow each night after she is asleep, having tucked her stuffed Peppa into a laundry basket bed next to her. She voices Peppa in a high-pitched timbre, and gives Peppa a birthday or two each week, as well as various illnesses and feelings that sometimes mimic Ellie's and are sometimes all her own. 

I see the sensitivity in her that I know so well myself. Children so badly need to be loved in a way that demonstrably cannot be changed or diminished no matter what the child does. So she tests and I tell her very clearly, there is nothing you could ever do that could change how much I love you. I understand that it is difficult to trust something so important without making the grown up prove it. 

And now I pivot to Myles, who remains unbelievably sweet and cuddly and also has an incredible penchant for endangering his own life. He trots like an excited puppy from one room to the next, strangling himself in the blinds here, stuffing his mouth with small legos there, unearthing a poisonous bottle of cleaning solvent, licking the bottom of a shoe, attempting to drown in a toilet bowl. And when he accomplishes his mischief, he will look straight up at us and grin broadly. It is hard to hold anything against such a sweet face. 

He chats with us more these days. "Cheese please," was a popular new phrase this week, and a useful way to ask for one of his favorite foods. His affection for Sesame Street has increased and he still loves to dance and bounce to any kind of music. He is in many ways so easygoing. His amoxicillin goes straight down the hatch with a smile. He hardly protested the swabs for his flu, strep and COVID tests today, apparently just thrilled to be the center of attention for a few moments. He continues to impatiently bang his shoulders against his highchair repeatedly when he is bored after finishing a meal, but never seems particularly angry about it. 

What a sweet, funny, surprising, joyful and charming little human he is. I am enjoying his increased attentiveness while we read bedtime stories in the last few weeks. He soaks up affection like a sponge, leaning into a snuggle, pressing his lips to your cheek while he says, "Mwah!" He has learned to blow kisses and has just started saying I love you. 

So anyways, I am besotted with these two humans, and this feels like a difficult time, but I am still grateful to be snuggling so many extra snuggles these days. My two very favorite people living right under our roof. How lucky can we get?

A few quotes, and honestly, there are so many that we sadly forgot to write down!

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E: ""In the olden days, was I a baby?"

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B: Bye bye, I love you.

E: Bye bye, you love me. 

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E: Bye mama, see you in another dream!

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I went downstairs and E said, "It's mama! Hello, vagina!" 

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E: I like red because red is the color of the heart.

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E, in response to Moonshadow: This is silly. I am not going to lose my body parts until I die. When I die, all of my teeth will fall out. 

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"Daddy, when are there going to be no more days?"

"There are always going to be more days, honey."

"Even when we die?"

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New Moonshadow Verse: And if I ever lose my toes, I won't have to wiggle, no, no.

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After the COVID test: "That was a very NAUGHTY doctor. That doctor was badder than bad: terrible! If they did that to you, you would not like it one bit, either!"

On 36 Years

Midlife birthdays are famously fraught with self evaluation and creeping thoughts of mortality, and mid-pandemic midlife birthdays are just as moody. Caveat: sample size of one. This may not be a particularly fair moment for any of us to take stock of our progress toward honoring our one wild and precious life. One reason that I dread birthdays is the temptation to count and compare social media, text messages, and phone calls each year.  

I had conveniently already been enmeshed in an engaging cycle of household chores, resentment, and lack of personal meaning for weeks when this year's birthday arrived. My husband, always a rising star, has an especially important Very Important job these days, and has been working, or at least looking at his phone, nearly around the clock. I can rarely discern whether he is refreshing Twitter or trading emails about the finer points of restoring democracy with other Very Importants while I load and unload the dishwasher, mop floors, endlessly launder, wipe bottoms, and restrain screaming children. He is quite right to point out that he is also unhappy, but I think there is a certain privilege in being happy for your own reason, the unhappiness that comes from living the middle paragraphs of your own substantive obituary that was written by someone other than a family member. My unhappiness is an invisible footnote to his obituary, and the meaning of my life, when it is over, will be but an appendage to whatever his menat. 

Nora Ephron had no patience for this model. She advised women to be the heroines of their own lives, rather than the victims. She divorced famed journalist Carl Bernstein after he cheated with a mutual friend and used the whole mess as fodder for her next novel, Heartburn. Women may be capable of particularly impressive feats when we shed the need to be well-liked and thought pleasant, to avoid offending the broadest swath of people. 

So my happiness, making meaning of my wild and precious life, is mine to grab and hold onto. If I find myself in the orbit of any other person, instead of on my own path, the misstep was mine, and the task of finding my footing again is also mine.

I granted myself this time in my darkened office on my birthday, while older child screams through bedtime with my husband, because I felt I deserved a decent and private wallow. It understandable to have been forgotten on my birthday by a few friends whose forgetting stung me, the day after Halloween, two days before an historically important presidential election, in the midst of a giant upswing in a global pandemic. This has been an extraordinarily difficult year for many of us. There ought to be a moment of very pure gratitude for the many friends who sent kind notes, and for my very dear friend who baked lasagna, brought lunch, and endured late autumn chill to reminisce with me on the porch this afternoon. 

I have been struggling to break from monotonous chores, endless parenting, a life that while fortunate in so many ways could feel even before the pandemic like an ill-fitting garment. Like when you buy something very expensive, elegant, that should be perfect and objective has excellent resale value but you can never find an occasion for, and just do not feel like yourself in. It seems very possible that this cold a midlife thing, a hiatus from hobbies, introspection, the types of close adult relationships that are built on conversations that are not constantly interrupted by a child who should be asleep. 

The media has dutifully noted that the pandemic is stealing women's careers out from under them, as the dual roles of reliable worker bees and default reliable person in family clash and meet a breaking point. I see echoes of this in my office, in the lives of friends and friends of friends, and is is a pity about our careers. Also somewhat strange that the conversation is always narrowed to careers, when there is so much else that women seem to have stripped from them.

Or maybe I should just own my feelings without projecting them unto others as some kind of larger cultural moment. Facts. I spend most of my free time placing shoes back in the front closet, hanging coats, picking up toys and dishes, cleaning surfaces that will be filthy again in less than 24 hours. I am married to someone who commented recently on the lack of chemistry in our relationship and my first thought was surprise that he had noticed that too. I have that left behind feeling sometimes, like I am holding on to friends who are not as much holding on to me. I also have new friends and though none of us have very much energy to devote to knowing each other as people, I am grateful for that. 

I spend so much time considering how best to support our daughter, who has become more prone to somewhat extreme outbursts in recent months. "I want to misbehave!" She may shout as she blithely tosses a large basket of magna-tiles all over our living room. She crunched salt menacingly between her teeth at her first appointment with her play-based therapist. She is almost always articulate, intelligent, terribly observant, and there is so much of her that she regularly spills over. I can relate. It seems impossible to impose limits. She is simply wired to push past them without regard for any reasonable consequence. Is she angry? No, she is happy and excited, she declares. It is apparently too young to even consider diagnosing her with all of the things that I have googled. I wonder if she should be back in school and whether, when we decide to enroll her again, she will be able to return.

But the behavior is more of a mirror than a mystery. She has more feelings than she can contain. She cannot name them and they look like aggression but she rejects that characterization. She is out of sorts. She is possibly lonely but connecting with other children feels difficult when she has the chance. She is restless and intelligent and not capable of working her way out of what she feels trapped in. 

The therapist, G, is gentle and playful. E admires G's "house," the office where we visit G, a large carpeted room with open shelves of hundreds of small figurines of unicorns, snakes, fire trucks, giraffes. We discussed preparing a toolkit of sorts for E, a stash of sensory toys she can engage with when she cannot calm her body down. I ask E how sad and happy and angry feel in her body. We snuggle and listen to the feelings song. I pretzel myself to find a way to connect or understand.

I wonder if some fraction of this effort would be better directed toward my own well-being. I wonder if she senses that her trail guides have wandered off the path, are cross with each other, overwhelmed by the elements. We can easily complicate what is simple. There is shouting in this house, and sadness. There are adults who, when visited by difficult feelings, turn every direction but towards each other. 

It should be simple to say, this is the life that I wanted. Or this is not. And if it is not, it should be simple to say, that over there is more like the life I wanted. I have not found it simple. But Anne Lamott believes in shitty first drafts. And even though I am not, may never be, a real writer, my stranger-mentor-women are wise, strong writers who broke the mold, painfully. 

A shitty first draft of my next life, a place I could walk to from here, with courage and planning. I want either a partner who delights in and delights me or I want to be free to delight in myself. I want to wander back toward that person who painted flower pots and could laugh until tears streamed down her face. I want to be as good a friend as she was, but I want to expect more from the people I love than she ever dared to. I want to listen to my own voice and let it drown out whoever it needs to.  I want enough space and quiet to think my own thoughts. I want to always have a dog. I want to walk daily without regard for the weather.

I would like to take a long train trip, visit national parks, take our children to Ireland. I really know that I would rather spend my weekends and evenings reading books to our children than clearing dishes and sweeping floors, but somehow I am always cleaning and too infrequently snuggling. I would love to learn to play the guitar and sing with our childrens' sweet voices, although I strongly suspect at least of them is tone-deaf.

How do we find our way home to ourselves, remembering what we loved as children, how deeply and bravely we let ourselves feel? Shitty first drafts and other failed efforts. The difficult practice of deep listening. 

Thirty-six is not early days. The novelist Doris Lessing wrote, whatever you are meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible. And how many times have I begun to do what I am meant to do, only to wander off and fold laundry or load the dishwasher. How embarrassing to be human and living a life that is a string of first drafts. How humbling to show up for oneself again and again, having already been disappointed, carrying the doubts of all the years. I nonetheless choose myself all over again this year. I choose reading by the fireplace, walks in the woods, writing to hear my own voice, wherever it takes me. Less scrolling, less scrubbing, less laundry. More connection, more quiet, more joy, clearing a space for new dreams.