I realized I never posted some of my writings from the Covid-19 quarantine in the spring. I guess it never felt like the right time (and still might not be). But it seems like I should share them at some point, so I guess now it is!

Dandelions

One day in April, my 5-yr-old looked out the window into our back yard and audibly gasped. “Mommy, come look!” he called, and when I walked to the window, he pointed out to a patch of dandelions. “Look how beautiful!” 

Isaac didn’t see a problem when he saw dandelions. He wasn’t looking at a yard full of weeds; he saw bright yellow flowers popping out of a sea of green. Eventually his dad explained what weeds are and how they can kill other plants and ruin the grass. But before my son understood the bad side, he only saw the beauty. 

It felt like an apt metaphor for locked-down life in the pandemic. Isaac has no idea what life is like outside of this house. He hasn’t seen stores full of masked shoppers, emergency medical tents erected in Central Park, worn down medical workers; he doesn’t know the death toll or what ‘economy’ even means, let alone how bad it’s gotten. Sure, there are things he notices & really misses – going to preschool, seeing our friends, playing at church – but the actual horrors of this reality are beyond his scope. Is that good? Bad? I don’t really know. It’s just what is.

But it reminds me that every once in a while I should try to see the beauty in the dandelions, even though I know how bad they can be.

Bittersweet 

Did we really understand what bittersweet meant before this? (That’s rhetorical. Obviously, yes.) But doesn’t everything seem more poignant somehow? Like literally everything is primed to make me cry and then wonder if they’re happy tears or sad tears (answer: both). Maybe it’s the condensed feeling of it all – having so much sweetness and so much sadness piled on top of each other in just a couple months. I find myself choked up over the oddest moments; moments I wouldn’t have thought to imagine 4 months ago. Here’s a small sampling of things that make me cry these days…

Walking through my neighborhood and witnessing 2 preschool age children seated at a balloon-decorated folding table in their yard with their presumed grandparents in lawn chairs about 8 feet away to celebrate a birthday. Pictures of grandparents meeting their infant grandkids through a closed window, or video of an elderly man singing to a spouse he can’t visit in a nursing home. Watching my niece open her birthday gift from the sidewalk across the street. Driving my son through his preschool parking lot to wave goodbye to teachers he’ll never see again. Cities erupting in honks & flashing lights to celebrate medical workers. Literally any episode of Some Good News with John Krasinski. Meeting my friends at a park and never getting closer than 6 feet to any of them, but just desperate for each other’s company. Car parades. My kids air-hugging their aunt or grandparents on videochat. Videos of COVID survivors leaving the hospital. 

All these experiences are unique, not in being the only experience of their kind, but unique to the moment in history we’re living through. None of us imagined this or prepared for it, but when faced with it we stepped up to innovate ways to stay connected. But even that feels bittersweet in the sense these crazy acts are even necessary. Someday touching other humans won’t feel weird, but until then I’ll just be over here bawling my eyes out at the ways we’re compensating.

Adulting Level Up: Deciding How to Handle an Actual Cataclysm

There are problems! Big problems! Who’s going to deal with this shit? Wait… me? I have to deal with this shit?? Well. Shit.

I liked it better when the grown-ups were telling me what to do. And by grown-ups I mean my state’s governor and director of the health department. They told me to stay home, so I did. Great. Done. But then it started being more like “stay home, unless…” which then turned into, “it’s probably ok to do some things some times, but not too much or you’ll die” and now I’m over here like “BUT WHO’S GOING TO TELL ME EXACTLY WHAT TO DO?!?” This is an actual worldwide cataclysmic disaster! You can’t just tell me to figure it out for myself. I am not responsible enough for this! I’m only… 36. Practically a helpless babe. 

Where was the “preparing your family for an apocalyptic catastrophe” class at school? I learned how to balance a checkbook, which I have literally never done in my adult life. But you know what I have done? Had to keep my family alive and part of the workforce through a global pandemic! Where were your lessons about that, The Liberal Arts?? 

My point is – this is a whole new level of adulting we’ve reached here. I’ve always had trouble making decisions, what with the crippling fear of whom I will disappoint and what consequences may come, etc. But pandemic decisions? Oooof. No thank you. I’d like to sign up for a different generation’s problems please! I’ll gladly protest the Vietnam War if it means I don’t have to be the one to decide if letting my kids see my parents will be a death sentence.

I’m not old enough for this shit.

Thank you for the place you had in my life

Back in the olden days of February, when we were allowed to go places and see people, my younger sister, Kristina, and I drove to the DC suburbs to help our older sister clean and organize her house. (Why yes, we are amazing sisters; thanks for noticing.) During the process, Kristina invoked a Marie Kondo practice: thank an old possession for the place it had in your life, and then get rid of it. This became a sort of joke as we sifted through junk – “Hey Ang, do you want to thank this pile of tangled bobby pins for the place it had in your life before I toss it?” – but another, more recent experience brought this practice back to mind in a more sentimental way.

For my quarantined birthday in April, some thoughtful person/people organized to have my inbox flooded with birthday emails in order to make the isolated day special for me. (I suspect my high school BFF Catherine was at least partly responsible) This was incredibly sweet and brought nostalgic, grateful tears to my eyes more than once throughout the day. But it was also… weird. 

Sorry, but weird seems the only appropriate word to describe receiving out-of-the-blue emails from people whom you haven’t seen or spoken to in 15+ years. It stirred up unique emotions I’ve struggled with throughout my life when confronted with friendships that exist in past, not present, tense: emotions that seem to be a melting pot of fondness, nostalgia, and guilt.

Personal relationships have always been one of the fundamental tenets of my life. So when relationships change or fade, as is inevitable, I usually find myself questioning if I did something wrong. This is true even in cases when life circumstances are obviously the driving force in relationship changes, not any bad feelings or wrongdoing. It is completely normal that I wouldn’t have close relationships with almost anyone I went to school with 2 decades ago. And yet, I have to deliberately remind myself of this, because behind my rational understanding, there’s a tiny voice in my mind whispering, “If you don’t keep in touch with that person now, did you two ever really mean that much to each other?”

Sorting through these weird feelings is what brought my sister’s possession-purging practice back to mind. “Thank you for the place you had in my life.” The simple truth is that my current life doesn’t have room for every single friend I’ve ever made. I’m trying to learn that my lack of ability to stay in touch with all the people I’ve ever loved isn’t a personal flaw: it’s just life. And it certainly doesn’t mean their friendship wasn’t important to me, or vice versa (I hope). One of the best things I can do with these past tense friendships is acknowledge the place, whether small or large, they had in my life.

Whether they are cherished friendships that if/when I happen to encounter that person again I happily pick back up & enjoy again, or surface friendships developed around common school or work – they were all relationships that had a place in making me the person I am now. And that means they had value. I can appreciate those people and appreciate the place they had in my life.

8 minutes and 46 seconds

[The week after George Floyd’s murder, my church hosted a (masked, socially distant) vigil in the parking lot. Part of our time together was observing 8 minutes and 46 seconds of silence – the amount of time a police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck, slowly killing him. After the period of silence, we were asked to journal our thoughts. This is what I journaled on my phone that afternoon…]

8:46 is a long time. A long time to reverse course. How hardened must our hearts be to continue in a destructive course of action rather than admit we are wrong? To turn aside? Repent. 

Soften our hearts, Lord, to abandon destructive, hurtful ways before it is too late. Soften our hearts; rid us of defensiveness; open our ears to the voices of those who can’t breathe… before our refusal to reverse course leads to more death.

Who’s been keeping you company? 

I received a check-in email from a small group I’m part of, and one of the questions was, “Made any new friends?” I was impressed with others who said they’d struck up relationships with neighbors or used this time to reconnect electronically with old friends. My answer was much less inspiring: “Does the Rose family on Schitt’s Creek count as new friends? Cuz I feel very close to them right now.”

I’ll be perfectly honest here, in the absence of my actual (beautiful, delightful, hilarious, sorely-missed) friends, I’ve been spending most of my ‘free time’ with these folks…

As lockdown began and what little I had of a social life disappeared, I knew I’d have more time in the evenings for TV binging. But I wasn’t in the right headspace to catch up on This Is Us or start a journey through Better Call Saul. No, I needed comfort, familiarity, friendliness, and hilarity in my life, so I turned to the cooky residents of apartment 4D. New Girl has been one of my favorite sitcoms since it originally aired, and re-watching it did not let me down in quarantine. I needed Jess, Nick, Schmidt, Cece, Winston, and Coach to make me laugh, make me feel better about my maturity level, make me tear up with their love for each other, and generally be my make-believe friends for a month when I didn’t see anyone else.

Still not emotionally ready for a heavy drama, my new fictional friends come from Schitt’s Creek. It’s actually kind of surprising how much I love this show; as my husband pointed out somewhere in the 2nd season: “This is one of those shows full of terrible people that you normally don’t like.” (No matter how witty or well-written the show, I cannot bear to watch comedies where all the characters are awful human beings. See: Veep, Arrested Development, Always Sunny in Philadelphia, etc.) I thoughtfully considered this for a while and eventually determined that the reason Schitt’s Creek works for me is because these are the Canadian version of horrible people. Yes, the characters are largely self-absorbed, but they all have hearts of gold and more often than not do the right thing. (Also, as the show moves into later seasons, the characters evolve into even better humans!) Laughing at the clueless antics of the Rose family is providing me joy in turbulent times, and that’s the distraction I need 🙂

So who’s been keeping you company during quarantine?