Day Three

It's only Day Three and I've already started missing meetings because I have forgotten what day it is (Wednesday, it turned out.) Maybe "forgotten" is the wrong word because, frankly, I never knew. My household's COVID-19 experience is that we have an almost two-year-old and an almost-four-month-old and two adults with jobs and absolutely no childcare. For most of the winter, I had been on maternity leave, anxiously awaiting the moment when I could put normal clothes on and go to a job. Instead, I got about three days of "normal" life before one, and then the other, child got sick and yanked me, like some giant hook, back into my indoor life of dirty shaggy rug and the absolutely endless cycle of making a bottle and then washing a bottle and then somehow, needing to wash five more bottles.

Little did I know that an even bigger hook was coming. We are so lucky, so privileged, so downright blessed to have two healthy kids. And yet, this situation is impossible. It is impossible to work and take care of two small children all day long. I can't even construct a facade to maintain: I look insane in the video meetings, with falling down ponytails, eyes constantly sweeping the room to find out what that noise is. (Oh, it's just Edgar, eating a penny.) I do not know what Days Four and Five will be like, and Days Eighteen and Twenty exist in another dimension. My therapist tells me that through her institute (????), she has been in touch with some people in China who are coming out of isolation and doing okay. She sounds confident but now that we all know that we can be plucked from our lives and sent into this nether world--an interior lifestyle that new parents often ostentatiously claim to forget or they wouldn't have more than one kid--I don't know how far we will ever venture out again.