Dispatches From A Mom, On the Outskirts of a Pandemic

I put on overalls again. Simply. Unceremoniously. Unfolding them from the pile of skinny denim and vintage 501’s and leggings—the costumes of different women who are all me. I love those women too—I love those coverings, but they’re not right for today. Today I slipped the overalls on so effortlessly, the cotton worn soft from years of work and wear that it barely touched the dry skin of my legs. 

Still, the softness was familiar. The weight of the straps along my shoulders just right. It was like putting on an old uniform and suiting up for battle. I am a worker. I am a soldier. I’m a citizen. I am a mom. I am a woman. I will fight.

It feels purposeful, to do this again. To be busy like this in the mornings. To be at home with my kids on a weekday. Load after load of laundry—all the bedding, all the sweatshirts balled in the corners of the closets and the unpaired socks hidden under beds and tangled in pant legs. Every linen in every bathroom. All of it. So much of it that I sort it outside the laundry room, similar colors and textures in piles that are orderly and satisfying, while the breeze from the open window brings with it the scent of detergent and the hint of spring. Something fresh and alive in this time of our own sort of cholera: in this time of coronavirus. 

Home isolation. Home school. Home. I slip back into mothering my teens like they are toddlers as easily as I slipped back on overalls. Life feels like it did when they were little. When we had the whole day to while away in between four walls and 12 hours and enough mind space and clay and blocks to really imagine. I am informed every day first thing, cracking my laptop to the news and looking up an hour later to what feels daily like a new world. But a new world where we are still only armed with the old basics to navigate us in this uncharted territory. I am making breakfast, wiping down surfaces, starting the dishes again and again, touching the tops of still-warm bed-heads, asking about dreams, reminding hand-washing and hydration, vacuuming, dusting, lighting candles, opening blinds, cracking windows. The countertops sparkle with Clorox, the panes sparkle with Windex and the morning sunshine. It feels soft: the light, the air, the cushion underneath me, the way we handle each other. Just soft. 

The teachers have sent schedules and so the whole home-bound thing feels more purposeful at once. Like we are doing our part to fight the war in an orderly and color-coded way. We are reading school assignments so that this break won’t require summer school, and we’re patient with each other because life is fragile (and are you getting a runny nose?) and we’re not going out to the gym or the coffee shop (because that runny nose probably means you are a carrier!) and we’re making the most basic and nourishing spaghetti on the stove, and solving high school math equations online as a way to combat a pandemic. 

I feel guilt that I am enjoying the ease of it. That I am enjoying them—these once upon a time little people who so quickly have grown into big people—and these slow days. I feel guilty that we have the privilege to, as a family, collectively exhale. We don’t worry about how the mortgage will be paid or where lunch will come from. We order new puzzles on Amazon and the next book in the latest series. But this too feels like part of the fight—the part where we control the demand end of the supply chain, where we do our part for the economy. 

I can let things go, I can add things up, I can buy; others can’t. I worry for them. I’m moved by the way the schools offer free meals to grab and take. I’m moved that they offer hot-spots and Chromebooks to check out. I’m moved that we pull together for the greater good and that the need of the struggling and hungry is tantamount in any decision to close anything down. It makes me pine for ways to strengthen those that can’t do it alone, for none of us can. Not really. It’s been the great unfolding in my mind, these past few days, as the nation frets and plummets and reacts and rises as a whole, as every facet of all of our lives is touched by this virus, in this moment. 

I wonder whether this will change our life forever. Not in an emotional sense. I mean it will, although I know we’ll go back to busyness and business as usual the way we fall into sleep and dreams: without much consciousness. But in a practical way, I wonder how this will change the world. Will school and extra-curriculars be done online? Will more work be done mobile? Will universities be able to charge less tuition for remote classrooms? Can we do all our doctors’ appointments via video conferencing? Can that lack of overhead mitigate medical costs? And what about the toilet paper? Will it force us to rethink necessity? Will we be more grateful? Will we share more and hoard less? And in sharing will we learn to sacrifice? Are we willing to forgo self to benefit the whole and aid the other? Will we be shown the truth of how little pieces on each of our parts will lead to impactful change? 

We really are all in this together, reduced as one to the essential struggling, the fight of all fights, our most basic element: health. Our very next breath. This day.