For some reason (for all the reasons?), this has been a hard week. My older son got a Covid test yesterday--not because he is symptomatic but because he's been at protests in Chicago and is concerned about carrying it to us when he comes east. States continue to relax public health protections, even as cases are rising again. Americans' boredom with the pandemic feels like just one more nail in our social coffin. And meanwhile the righteous anger rises, and the ruthless take advantage of that call to scalp and hamstring.
Here at home, we stutter on. Paul applies for jobs and combs through recipes. Tom hammers and saws and lugs and fits. I scrape away at manuscripts. Everything and nothing. That's what this time feels like.
I started rereading Iris Murdoch's The Bell. Paul and I pruned a lilac together. Tom beat me at cribbage. I listened to a podcast about the making of the film version of The Last Picture Show. I chopped onions and peppers for chili. Tom and Paul fussed lovingly over the webcam they're setting up for my Frost Place conference. Family life, in all of its dull pedestrian sweetness. And yet we are treading water.
Here's a little poem.
Two on the Sidewalk in Front of Catholic Charities
Dawn Potter
What’s your problem what’s
Your fuckin problem?
She gropes for his hand.
She clutches air.
[from Blood]
3 comments:
Hmm . . . One thing that has become clearer to me over the past three months is our default mindset on "normalcy" and our expectation of what daily life is supposed to be. And my feeling of these days that have passed by is the memory of my childhood, when we had one car and one phone with one party line and one TV with one TV station and one roast on Sunday that then was turned into six different meals as the week went on. Life was slower, less frenetic, with fewer expectations of movement (one shopping trip per week and that was just groceries). I have fit pretty easily into this groove. I don't feel like I am treading water; I feel like I am swimming slowly, rather than fighting the waves (and feeling like I am almost drowning, as I often do during "normal" life).
I think knowing that our son is trapped in a Netherland is contributing to my sense of treading water. He's so ready to move into adult independence, but instead he's webbed into place in his parents' house. He's mostly cheerful and always kind, but clearly he is exactly where he doesn't want to be.
And your other one you can't see (or hug!). I get that.
A colleague who is newly pregnant experienced the overwhelming fierce mother protective instinct back when the virus "hit." She asked me how long that lasted. Forever, forever!
Post a Comment