When I See Others
The other day, Tyler asked Rowan for a hug and he gave a tiny, hard squeeze and said, “This is the best hug I have.”
Zoe is constantly walking to the door, putting my rubber clogs on, and pulling on the door handle, whining. She can reach the handle but not the lock (yet) and is (rightly) furious at being penned in. She brings me her tiny Saucony Jazz shoes, her big eyes pleading. It's raining. Has it stopped raining since we've been in quarantine? It doesn't feel like it has, but that's probably because even sunny days feel like rainy days.
The Escherian nightmare of cleaning a high chair and its environs just to see it covered in rice, egg, sweet potato, and various vegetables an hour later is enough to make any sane, rational woman go mad.
Everything that was charming in the beginning of quarantine is wearing, now. Even our neighbors are tired of Rowan’s greeting. Hi, Neighbor!! He shouts with no less enthusiasm each day. I have a big stick!!!! Look!!!
He still asks every day if we can go to school. No, Rowan, we respond. School is still closed. It’s still vacation time. Family vacation time, we say, our eyes narrowing, lessening enthusiasm in our voice each day.
There is an insane amount of laundry associated with all of us being home, all of the time. Recently potty-trained toddler means plenty of random accidents, which means plenty of huge towels to soak it up and clean it (we ran out of paper towels eons ago). Zoe stepped in dog shit in the yard, but I didn’t know that and so when I picked her up, her shit-covered shoe smeared all over my new jeans, which I didn’t plan on washing until mid 2021. That, ad infinitum.
The only place to go is the Peloton. Both kids know not to touch the wheel when one of us are on it, and we wear bluetooth earbuds, so that we can't hear the whining that now just one parent is forced to deal with, while the other climbs, speed races, and sweats in place. Around and around, going nowhere, fooling our bodies. Such fools, these limbs, these mortal coils.
Last night, Tyler and I finally dared to say out loud what our fantasies were for what quarantine would be like if we didn't have children. We have always maintained we'd never get a TV in our bedroom, but we agreed in the case of quarantine, we would get that new beautiful kind, the one with birch wood frame that looks like a painting when it's turned off, just so that we could say midway through each day "Hey, wanna go to that other place in our house? Let's watch this show from a NEW vista." So that we could feel like we were at a hotel. Maybe even the hotel we were GOING to be staying at next week for our 5 year-anniversary, a beautiful surprise Tyler cooked up that is now a sad footnote in an April that never was. I would try to learn Spanish and Dutch and I would buy a sewing machine and learn how to make my own clothes. I would write, I would have all the time in the world to write.
I was telling my friends on our Marco Polo thread today that I want, when we come across people without children on our daily walks, I want them to look at Tyler and me and give us some kind of acknowledgement that we are doing the fucking impossible. That there is no rest, not a single moment (like there would be, say, if Zoe was old enough to sit down and watch TV like Rowan can). I can't wrap my head around the disparity of the experience of quarantine of people with and without small children. That we are going to have to endure likely two more months of this is....staggering. That we will have to throw Rowan a third birthday party in our yard, alone. We were going to take him to Disneyland for the first time.
I finally put batteries in the walkie-talkies Rowan got for Christmas. We send each other messages from the same room, or sometimes one room over. “Mommy? You okay????” he asks over and over. “Yes, Rowie, I’m okay. I’m putting your laundry away. Over.”
He runs into the room I am in. “Mommy? It’s over?”
“Is what over?”
“You said, Over. On the phone.”
“Oh. That’s just something you say when you talk into walkie-talkies. When you’re done talking. To sound official. I’m doing laundry. Over. Then it’s your turn to talk.”
His head is cocked, listening carefully. “Okay, so…mommy? Is it over?”
My whole body is heavy with a really kind of extraordinary amount of fatigue at the end of each day. It's monstrous, it's massive, feeding and cleaning up after and caring for and tending to and entertaining and mollifying the multiplicitous tantrums of two toddlers under 3 in 1000 square feet. Some days are easy, fun, even. Move fast. Other days are heinously challenging. My bedside light has one of those Tungsten filaments that stays lit for a couple seconds after you press the switch. If I close my eyes, right after, I can still see it. A little bit of light.