Day 1, Week 2

I wake early enough that the birdsong is still soft and the light outside feels flat. Gray. I hear kids already playing out there, toddlers probably. Those little ones across the street who go to bed when it’s still light out and, these days, wake in the dark. 

The anxiety in my chest feels a little worse than usual this morning, the reality of this new world setting in. I feel like I had a terrible dream, and it lingers in an incessant noise that I can’t understand. It’s coming from the window. Probably from the toddlers’ house across the street. They have a pony in their backyard. An actual pony. My kids told me this and I didn’t believe them. But it’s true. A pony lives across the street. It’s miniature and strange. All of it. 

Anyway.  I feel like I’m afraid to see the morning’s headlines, but it is also the biggest urge I can’t resist. 

My nine year old is asleep next to me because he asked me to sleep with him last night, and lately he feels permanently attached to my side. “Can I just stay until you fall asleep?” I asked him, after he’d snuggled in tight. “You don’t have to sleep with me if you don’t want.” I kiss his baby cheeks, “I want.”

He asks me to leave the light on. It’s a king size bed and he’s still right next to me, his shoulder touching my shoulder. It took ages for me to fall asleep and I listening to playlist after playlist when the sound of his quiet breathing became less quieting, and more like little boy snores fueled by a day of fresh air. 

We have homeschool every day, a sort of make shift schedule that we slipped into like a swallowed knowing. But we begin the morning with mochas and cappuccinos and coffee made to order, toast with peanut butter and jelly, or waffles with coconut syrup. Peanut Butter Puffins with milk. Sometimes a pan of bacon. Biscotti if it’s there. 

Then, a barefoot spin or two around the backyard littered with early spring ephemera—twigs and seed pods and clumps of neon grass—and late winter cast-offs of broken toys and various athletic equipment buried in January by snow. The backyard looks a mess with all these broken items, but for him, they are building blocks for everything. Forts. Swings. Chairs. Mountains. Launchpads. 

Two nights ago he no longer needed an old chair in his room and I gave him a screwdriver to take it apart. He did. Then he tried to reconstruct it, without legs, to use on his bed, and he did so with packing tape. When that didn’t work, he put the chair back together with screws and then asked, “Can I use the saw?” This all happened at 10 pm. While he was wearing a swimsuit and his belly was rosy and warm from a bath. (In the hot tub.)

Last night they shattered a drinking glass in the hot tub. 

“Why did you have a glass in the hot tub?” I’m exasperated, but their insistence that we keep it a secret from dad sort of delights me in the most mischievous way, so I’m not angry, but I am curious. “Really,” I insist, “Why?” They look at me innocently: “We were thirsty.” 

It’s almost like projects beget projects, and they’re all inane, like we are inventing them so that we have something to do. I will go in the hot tub this morning to double check on the glass, that it’s all gone. And in a strange way I’m looking forward to the task.

I make a pound cake from scratch, a four hour Bolognese, pans of roasted things: salmon and brussels and broccoli. I am excited to vacuum, a productive chore with a clear beginning and end. Those lines in the carpet; the satisfaction of emptying the canister into the bin. I listen to The Daily. I double check for Live Coronavirus updates! I still do the puzzles. Always the puzzles. Crossword, sudoku. Some of us start to binge-watch, but I remain the one weirdo in the world for whom television isn’t a relief. It stirs me up too much lately, a concoction of boring and stimulating at the exact same time, my thoughts too wild to focus on anything. 

I need a haircut, I need my nails done, I need about 85 shots of Dysport in my face.   

I need to read this book in front of me. I need the words to not blur. 

I need to oversee, trouble shoot, offer encouragement, be a mom and a teacher. 

I need to run till my lungs ache with oxygen. I need to squat until my legs collapse beneath me. I need I need I need. 

My therapist says I need to own my needs. But here’s the thing about it: you have to know what your needs are first before you can actually own them. It’s harder to do with honesty than you might think. Today it’s running along the path by the creek; tomorrow it’s running away. Maybe?

It’s time for reading and they each settle in, kitty corner from each other, the sun bright on their knees that are draped over the wide arms of the chairs, and shiny on the tops of their dark haired heads. 

(I need to have another cup of coffee. I need to be with them. I need to fold the laundry. I need to go to the laundry room. I need to go. Somewhere, anywhere, upstairs, downstairs, outside, inside, upside down.)

After 30 minutes, the phone rings an alarm and they scramble to finish chapters before they stand to stretch their growing limbs. “You can just keep reading,” I suggest, my mind an eye roll on the thought that I want to say but don’t: “Because what else are we doing?” But we all thrive off the arbitrary parameters of this schedule, of a beginning and an end, and the implied overlay of certainty. 

Lunch. Rarely sandwiches. If so, then tuna. Or turkey and cheese on crackers. But usually more toast. Sometimes fancy, like avocado, with sea salt flecks and tiny puddles of olive oil and a slight smatter of crushed red pepper. Frizzled eggs for her, and pan seared grape tomatoes, both of which she makes for herself. 

It all feels so fancy for a 14 year old, but it’s creative, and she smiles and gets to sit with a painted plate, at a table cloth. It’s like she’s dining out, while dining in, and fostering another 30 minute moment in this very endless day. 

After lunch, Tik Toks, online dance classes, basketball on the driveway, YouTube or hiding in their rooms or texting friends or watching Netflix. I don’t mind, whatever they do, I don’t police them, I just let them be apart from me, however they are able. Our brains are on ice sometimes; we feel like zombies; our hearts are wrought, laced with the anxious swill of a pandemic. 

I order books again. I let myself have that. No guilt there; no library; I’m owning my needs. I print off recipes from the Food section. We replenish outgrown underwear and hole-marred socks found in the cervices of newly organized closets. Our daily life is a ritualistic act of spring cleaning. (What other project can we create?) And we walk the dog. Again and again. She’s never been so exercised.