Everything Happened | vol. 181

Quarantine Mag

Some articles for my quarantine lifestyle magazine:

Pancakes
I figured out how to make consistently non-tragic pancakes. I use a box mix, obviously, because I didn’t realize you could make pancakes from scratch until I was maybe 23 and lived with my friend Michelle and she was like, I think I’ve perfected my pancake recipe! And I was like ????? it’s on the back of the box, homes ???

Anyway, I had previously been greasing the griddle with butter or oil and then because I’m an inattentive line cook, I would let the oil and especially the butter burn. Or the pan wouldn’t coat evenly because the pan was crooked or, in the case of our last apartment, the entire stove was on a slant. And the pancake would be raw or scorched or neither.

So what I have been doing, these unhurried quarantine mornings, is adding a generous blorp of vegetable oil to the batter and then leaving the griddle completely bare. Nothing on the griddle! And I have been getting these reasonable little tan discs with assembly line consistency and I feel like a genius, despite this probably being something everyone else already does. But it doesn’t matter what everyone else already does! There are only four people in my world anymore ergo I make the best pancakes in the world!!!!

Flowers
During the first week of this, in early March, maybe it was mid-March? Desi was playing outside unsupervised on one of the first spring-like days. He rushed inside and gallantly presented me with a bouquet of purple hyacinths, yanked from the earth, the first flowers of spring and every last bloom that our yard had yielded thus far. It felt like my heart got flushed down an airplane toilet.

It’s not his fault, really, we do a lot of picking dandelions and wild violets and presenting them to each other. How is he supposed to make a distinction at age four between some flowers and some other flowers when the distinction is mostly cultural. They went in a glass jar with water and I told him somewhat sternly that flower-picking was not a good idea, not from our yard, definitely not from anyone else’s yard.

This is our first spring in this house, so we’re being treated to a little theater with the rising temperatures. First it was the hyacinths and daffodils, now there are tulips, big yellow ones with blooms the size of bell peppers, smallish cheeky magenta blooms, white and red tulips, too, nodding in the breeze. I’m thankful to whomever it was that planted them, a gift from the past. I would have loved the flowers under different circumstances, too, but we really need them now.

Sunday night, I went out with shears into the side yard and clipped some of my favorite flowers to bring inside for the dining room table. Most of the flowers are planted in our side yard, where we rarely walk and where even our next door neighbors probably don’t have a great view. What is the point of flowers if not to look at them? I wondered, seriously. There are plenty of flowers still in the side yard to be pollinators or whatever, but when I emerge from the bedroom each morning to do another day of whatever this is, it smells like tulips now. Desi asked me why I picked the flowers, aren’t we not supposed to do that? and I told him, you know what, I don’t really know what we’re supposed to do anymore.

PTO
Friday was my first day of temporary SAHM-ing. (We….certainly hope it’s temporary.) I’m taking a few weeks of leave to do caregiving full-time for Desi and Jane.

Not being able to focus for my brief work windows was making me anxious. I’m leading a big project and it was pretty obvious to everyone that I wasn’t getting anything done. I don’t know how swaggery I present here, but I don’t quite have the cojones to say to my VP, hi someone without kids needs to be leading this, instead, I will answer one in five emails and collect my usual pay biweekly, thank you for understanding during these ~troubling times~. So PTO it is. Ugh.

My work flow in normal life involves a lot of “wasted” time vaguely thinking or worrying about things on my plate while storing home goods in online shopping carts scattered across the web. I don’t usually buy these things, I just collect them digitally and visit them. Sometimes the price drops and I congratulate myself. Again, I still do not buy them. My process. Please respect it.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this; ultimately my focus tightens up, usually from panic, and I get it all done. But going from this M.O. to needing to flip into supercharged productivity mode OR ELSE wasn’t as simple as I’d hoped. It turns out that even if your livelihood depends on it, you can’t just reboot your brain in one day. Alas.

I wrote out a little schedule for me and Desi on construction paper with Sharpie. We both love a list and he can sometimes bow to the authority of something that’s been WRITTEN DOWN over me simply telling him something. (Jane doesn’t need a schedule, she just kind of chirps around in the background being cute.)

He was resisting the schedule pretty hard, mostly because it involved me turning the TV off after breakfast. I tried to stay firm because I know that shifting things on kids is a long game, where the work is front-loaded. In a week, this will just be what he expects, I think. Must stay firm.

By 11 a.m. we were watching YouTube.

Later he and Jane played without mauling each other for a good 45 minutes, allowing me to sprain my finger refreshing Twitter. I guess what’s the point of the schedule if that you can’t deviate from it—it’s your fucking schedule, you literally made it up.

Friday kind of sucked. It was windy and cold out, as it had been all week. I kept taking the gang outside, becoming miserable from the cold in an instant and feeling powerfully doomed. I regretted my “choice” to take PTO and be a mom all day. Being a mom is more fun in short bursts. For example, from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. and on weekends.

I never had a fantasy of being home with my kids full-time. I barely had a fantasy of being a mom at all, I just started noticing babies everywhere in my late twenties and the chaos appealed to me because I’m damaged. I had a life before all this where I controlled nearly every aspect of my experience and had bottomless free time but guess what? The power and orderliness was wasted on me. I was anxious and bored.

My point is that I don’t have a domestic fantasy as source material here. I think the longest stretch without childcare we’d experienced previously was over holiday breaks where there were plenty of activities and travel and no one was trying to make a life of it. It’s strange to feel like you’re playing “house” when it’s….your….house.

Last night we swept and mopped and unburdened the dining room table of the stacks of things that land there so Jane can’t reach them. The bouquet from the yard on the table, wild and starting to droop. It was sweet to wake up to this morning. This is real life.

This morning, I put on a record and watched Desi play with play-dough while sipping hot black coffee. Was this my fantasy of motherhood? It didn’t feel bad!!!

I’m both dreading going back to work later this month, of having to wedge myself back into the false universe of work without childcare, and dreading having to continue being full-time caregiver. Nick’s semester is winding down and he will take over, I guess, for the rest of the summer?

I worry, pretty much constantly, about one or both of us losing our jobs. But I hardly have the energy to play out anxious scenarios of financial ruin. I’m very tired. As of this day, we both have jobs. And where can we live but days?

yr mate,
Evie
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