On all the places our hands go, spinning a cozy cocoon, and unscrambling that egg
March 27, 2020
Dear Eva,
I will begin this letter by pretending that all is normal and reporting a bit of life news. I am officially going to be teaching this fall at the University of Iowa. It is just a single class, so no major career shifts or other professional changes, but I am excited! As my first foray into teaching, I think it will be a challenging and enriching new adventure. Law & Ethics for MBAs, here I come!
Beyond that, this week in my world looked a lot like last week in my world, for which I am grateful. We are healthy and at home, and we are settling into what is starting to feel like a comfortable routine most of the time. Jonah gets stressed if we don’t start our “morning meeting” right at 8 AM per the hand-scrawled schedule on our easel, so we aim for finishing our breakfast and morning dog walk by then. Then it’s an hour of learning time (thank god for free printable worksheets and Bill Nye and Scholastic at Home), an hour of art (thank god for Mo Willems and his free Lunch Doodles), an hour of free play (thank god we have two children, not just one, and they mostly have fun playing together), and so on. Bill and I take turns managing the situation while the other one goes off for some uninterrupted work. Meanwhile, our dog Marlowe lives in bliss having us all around all day, particularly his precious boys. We have, for now, spun a cozy cocoon to wait out this storm. I am trying to end my thinking about the situation there, rather than letting my mind wander out into the uncertain future. How long could we possibly keep this up? The answer, I suppose, is: as long as we have to, and we are so darn lucky to be able to do this. It is not enough to just be grateful though. Like you, I am trying to determine what and how to do things that can help people who are suffering in this moment. Most things feel small and inconsequential, like ordering a stack of books through a local bookstore even while they are not open for me to pick up the books, or paying for services even after we cancel them. It is hard to know where and how to help in a more meaningful way, hard even to find many uninterrupted minutes in which to think about it, if I am honest.
Last night marked a poignant moment for me as a mom. Jonah is reading the Judy Blume book, Superfudge, a book I remember reading when I was a kid. It was my turn to read with Jonah before bed, so I was tucked under his covers with him while he read out loud to me. He stopped to tell me that earlier that day, he had read a part of the book where the main character sees his parents putting the presents under their Christmas tree instead of Santa Claus. Then he said, “I don’t believe that though. I think Santa is real.” He paused for a beat, and then put out his hand, “Will you pinkie swear me that you don’t buy the presents we get on Christmas morning?” I froze. I knew I had just about three seconds to decide what to do, before the silence would give away the answer even if I didn’t. I thought back to his statement last year that the Easter Bunny was a fib, and how I had tried to explain to him then—inarticulately—what the difference was between a lie and something imaginary. I thought I recalled that Bill and I had discussed at some point and decided that Jonah was old enough that if he asked a direct question about Santa for which a “what do you think?” sort of wishy washy answer wouldn’t fly, that we would tell the truth. So I did it. I told him we were Santa Claus. He got tears in his eyes, but they did not fall down his cheeks. He had a look of slight embarrassment, slight shock on his face. Then he said, and this is really funny in retrospect, “Ohhhh, so that’s why we don’t get what we want.” I told him he now had a big responsibility—he had to help us make/keep Santa real for his little brother. He nodded. He asked if Bubba (his 13-year-old cousin) knew. I said yes. I could see the wheels turning in his head as he thought through what this meant, a bit of the magic in his world dissolving before me.
It felt shitty.
I am not sure I made the right decision as a parent, but as Bill said, “you can’t unscramble that egg,” and amid a global pandemic, one child’s quotidian loss of innocence around a holiday tradition is the least of concerns. But I still had/have feelings, a little bit of an ache last night and today. I guess maybe it is one of the first very palpable singular moments as a parent where I could watch a piece of childhood wash away in my child. So many changes happen so gradually that you can’t really see or feel them until after they happen, but not this one. In some ways, that is the way of things generally right now as the entire world is transforming before our eyes, often in unknowable ways. Still, we can all feel the plates shifting beneath our feet, whether out in the world or within our cocoons, reminding us not to cling too tightly to the way things are.
I hope you are settled in at home for your shelter-in-place stint, which I recall you saying begins tonight. What a world, my friend! I wish you lots of coziness, yummy food, and maybe some tasty cocktails if you’re in the mood. I look forward to reading your words soon, and then hearing your words on the phone in a few days!
Yours,
Sarah
Saturday March 21 and Friday March 27 2020
Dear Sarah,
I’ve been collecting bits and pieces for my letter to you this week since reading yours last week, and now I am seeing what I can do to glue some of the bits together! Today I find myself comfort-eating. M has been baking bread since he’s been home during the days to bring the bread through its preparatory stages. He baked two loaves last week of a favorite dough with rye flour and fennel and caraway seeds and citrus zest — we are eating the last of a defrosted loaf — and last night he baked two sourdough loaves, one now in the freezer. So today I am bread-snacking and I am glad it is Friday. Even during a pandemic, everything turned on its head, I am glad that the week can still end, and with bread!
Last week when I read your letter I was struck by its humor — bringing your own pen to the refinancing closing, the “fashion back in the old days” of touching another person’s breast (I am laughing again as I think about this) — and I wondered what other moments of humor might be waiting for us in the coming weeks. I hope there are more such moments! In last week’s issue of The New Yorker there was a reflection by Geoff Dyer on the new reality of daily life in virus times, and I was on the same page with his initial befuddlement about the newly essential requirement that we wash our hands — easy enough — mixed with the new awareness of all the places our hands go and all the things they touch, and the question of how many other things we need to wash and sanitize. In my household we've separated our essential cards from our wallets (not that we are going out to all that many places) because cards can be easily sanitized, as opposed to the leather folds we both carry in our pockets otherwise. (Though, in the way that we’ve all been receiving coronavirus action and sympathy emails from every company whose email list we ever subscribed to — I received an email from the leather goods company that produced my wallet, with information about how I could disinfect my wallet. I didn’t explore further!)
I wrote in a letter last fall about how spaces can have such an effect on our sense of being, of wellbeing, on the way we see and experience the world. Usually our spaces include the spaces that are definitively ours — our living spaces, our rooms, our apartments, our houses — as well as spaces like the street we live on, the loops we walk in our neighborhoods, the public places we regularly go like coffee shops, bookstores, museums, parks, restaurants, schools, workplaces, work spaces. “Our” spaces are maps of interconnected spaces that belong to us and that we share with others. I have always been a little bit interested in and a little bit confounded by people who build massive complexes for themselves, homes that would be better labeled compounds, that include all that a person could need within the confines of a symbolic set of four walls. Now we are all, or nearly all, encouraged — if not decreed — to stay inside for at least two weeks and likely more, to stay in our own spaces only, our homes. Now the people who are fortunate enough or strange enough or rich enough (or royal enough, as I’m thinking of Prince Charles quarantining through his illness in a Scottish castle) to have prepared compounds for themselves, have their own interior villages to continue to frequent, rooms within rooms. The question of how much space is yours, how much time you would previously have spent in your space versus shared public spaces, is now foregrounded, and has much to do with income and equity. Last week I mentioned the small apartment where M and I first landed in MPLS, eight months in a tidy little windowed box of a space. It was a pleasant space, and a fairly pricey space for the MIdwest, and yet I wouldn’t want it to be the place where I had to spend weeks on end, indefinitely, only. I imagine many people, for all kinds of reasons, may not be looking forward to spending their extended, indefinite time in their own spaces only.
Today, I appreciated an article from Harvard Business Review that Ann Friedman linked in her newsletter: “That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief.” In the interview, David Kessler — co-writer, with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, of On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss — said,
There is something powerful about naming this as grief. It helps us feel what’s inside of us. … One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse. We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad. Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something.
I felt different on different days this week, better than last week, better depending on how much the sun shone. I am still tired even though I am getting plenty of sleep. The days are tiring even when I stay away from much of the news. And yet my personal daily reality is very bearable, very comfortable. I am adapting, as we all do — what is new quickly becomes old — and spring is here and starting to show itself. There are green and burgundy shoots all around the yard, pushing up in the last week or so since the weather has started to shift. There are robins walking around in the backyard, enjoying the sun, and nibbling on what the yard has to offer. There are new birds at the feeder augmenting the winter population — red-winged blackbirds, a huge blue jay disrupting the delicate balance and causing the smaller birds to scatter, a glorious woodpecker with a long beak and a startlingly red-orange head.
It’s going to be a weird time for the foreseeable future, but we can be grateful that we are heading into warmer months, and that we have each other and our friends and family and health and these letters! I’m wrapping this now in the final hours of the day and I hope you are relaxing into the welcome weekend!
Your friend always,
Eva