After two months of remote learning, this morning was student pick-up for locker and desk belongings for my daughters. We drove up to a long line of brown paper Trader Joe’s bags tagged with students’ names at one school, and a distribution of clear trash bags with Sharpie names at the next. At neither location did we get out of the car. It was, as so many things are today, curbside and touchless.
My oldest was able to see her core classroom teachers, standing outside on the curb, masked and wearing gloves but with warm words of encouragement and support. She cried when we drove away. I cried, too. It’s hard to process all the ways that life has changed on a dime. Some are huge, like remote learning, and some are small, like stepping off the sidewalk when taking a walk, so that everyone can pass one another comfortably, or my go-to almond milk brand not being always available. We’ve taken for granted a lot more than we ever realized. Maybe that’s inevitable when we’re regular-but-ever-so-lucky people, living lives with normal everyday complaints about work and traffic and our HOA, but wanting for nothing.
My youngest daughter is moving on to middle school next year, and her 6th Grade Continuation ceremony was online last Friday. It was well-done, as 6th Grade Continuations go. There were seamless and not-so-seamless transitions between student speakers and teachers and photo and video montages. The video production skills of all teachers have my gratitude. We tend to start thinking in rosy nostalgia around this time of year, and photo montages play upon our already brimming emotions. This year is no exception, except that our nostalgia is not just for when our children were ponytailed cuties with bangs and scraped knees, but for that pre-March time when life was routine. Driving the familiar loop to my daughters’ two schools today, I couldn’t help but think about how long it had been since we’d done that once-daily ritual, how long it’s been since I’ve gotten up at 5:15am, and how fun and exciting this last week of school usually is, rather than the emotional avalanche of continued distance this year.
One oft-used graduation video montage quotation is the classic, The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost… And it’s like hearing Sunscreen by Baz Luhrmann, or seeing that pencil-sketch still of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet holding hands. Certain emotions are necessarily evoked. But I don’t think I’d ever heard the full quotation, which continues, The world and all our powers in it are far more awful and beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us.
I’m not going to call a pandemic a mere accident, of course; it has rocked us. Loss is our least favorite thing as humans. But life is, truly, both awful and beautiful. Loss and gratitude are two sides of one coin. We are all grappling with the idea – and just the very idea is uncomfortable – that we could lose a loved one to a previously unknown disease far before we are ready, or a loved one could lose us. We feel young (even as we meet new decades with some surprise that they have crept up). We feel healthy (even as we reach for one more glass of wine). But even if we remain untouched with personal, physical loss — and please may we all — we’ve also already lost a way of life that we assumed would just continue on its pre-COVID trajectory.
Most weekends, my household leaves our suburban neighborhood with its children-at-play signs and chalk-art driveways and we head to the much smaller mountain town where we can breathe a little more deeply, where the dog smiles more, and where most of the time, you can be sure that there is no one within probably 600 feet of you, let alone 6.
It’s in this town, this weekend, where I went grocery shopping for the first time in probably 6 weeks. Grocery shopping has long been my household gig. I make most of our meals, so it makes sense that I put together and execute the general grocery plan. I make a list, but I also know in the back of my mind what items we use as staples, even if they aren’t on a list, and what to pick up because it’s a good price, and how much room we have in the freezer, and what favorite treat or fruit or good-smelling shampoo will make the people in my little household happy. If I come home with raspberries, green grapes, and York Peppermint Patties, I’ve been able to wordlessly say, “I love you.”
I’ve been very lucky as far as how I’ve been affected by this pandemic. I switched from working solely in the office to going in every other week, as part of the low-people-density safety plan. I’m a long-time hypochondriac germophobe, and even though community microwaves and conference rooms freak me out, I haven’t had to wonder about my next paycheck. Super lucky, I know. And I’ve had to come to terms with how terrible I am at sixth grade geometry, but my children already know how to read and add and navigate email and Google Classroom and sign into video meetings. Also super lucky.
I read an article recently that pandemics end in two ways. One is when the virus is eradicated, and one is when the fear begins to evaporate, and whether the virus remains or not, people begin to go about their lives again. I’m not quite ready to let go of the fear yet, which is why I’ve been avoiding grocery stores. If I have carpal tunnel numbness in my hand, I’m going to Google MS symptoms. If I had a dollar for every time it wasn’t cancer… well, I’d have about $5, but I’ve sweated those times out. I always jump to the worst-case scenario because – I’m not sure. I guess I assume that if there’s a 2% chance, someone is going to be in that 2%. Why would I assume it wouldn’t be me? What makes me teflon to the margins? It’s definitely sucked years from me, like the Machine in the Pit of Despair. “I’ve just sucked one year of your life away.” That’s me, on worry. Me, on anxiety. On fear.
My biggest pandemic loss has been that part of me that feels in control of my family, the well-oiled machinery of my household routine, my microcosm of the giant Universe. What I’ve lost is the sense of identity that comes with keeping multiple balls in the air and feeling satisfied when – for the most part – they don’t come tumbling down. It sounds so very boring, but I miss the part of me who anticipates when we will need more canned Italian-style tomatoes, so that we can have them at the ready when we decide to make sauce, and who knows when my daughters will logically need their shampoo replaced and puts it in their shower before they need to ask. I miss the me who can decide on a dime to have salmon for dinner, because I can swing by the grocery store on my way home without a second thought. Today, if I make a grocery list, my non-germophobic other half will purchase anything on it. Again, very lucky. But it’s left me questioning my place in our usual domestic balance and feeling at a loss for how to regain my sense of equilibrium. Who am I when I’m not the me who does the things I’ve always done?
This weekend, because of the way the day lined up for both us, and because there was only one morning’s worth of coffee for two mornings of breakfast, it only made logical sense that I drive into town and pick up coffee and maybe some more Pringles, if I was going to be there, anyway.
At the mountain town grocery store, a smaller building than my suburban monstrosity that sells everything from sweatpants to liquor to artisan olives and 2,000 cheeses, I took a cart from a front-line 16-year-old in a face mask whose job was now disinfecting hot touch surfaces. I turned into the produce section and I looked at my list – coffee. And I looked at the ripe quarts of strawberries and remembered that back in suburbia, we were out of baby carrots, and certainly both of those items would survive a 90-minute drive back down the mountain the next day. And so I bought a full cart worth of mostly non-perishables, because it felt so damn good to be in control of – really, anything – just for a few minutes. What this pandemic has taken from us is our very basic sense of order in chaos, the idea that we have control of the balls we have in the air.
Every female member of my household cried today. We went through shades of awful and beautiful, amplified by the stress and comfort of having been our own insular, small Universe for so many weeks now. As we relied on each other to soothe our weary souls, I began to realize that my household is still a living, working engine, even if my role in it has changed a bit.
I haven’t reinvented myself or taught myself any new skills while in quarantine. We have only made cookies once. But we’ve sat around the dinner table for a lot longer after plates have been cleared. And we’ve become much more strategic at Qwirkle and Skip-Bo and we’re still making the youngest one do all the adding up when we play Rummy. Sneaky math to supplement remote learning. My oldest daughter has kept her circle of friends tight, and even added new people to it, all in the midst of a pandemic. My youngest has a full sketchbook, and better understanding of the area of a trapezoid than I do.
I’m beginning to realize that I still have a dozen balls up in the air, they just look a little different – and for the most part they haven’t come tumbling down. This isn’t where we thought we’d be. But here we are. And maybe I’m still me.