Three weeks ago, I told my boss that effective the next day I was going to be taking leave to do childcare full time for a few weeks. This was a mental health move for me, and an act of solidarity with my husband. It was starting to become clear that we were in for more than a few weeks of kids at home with us. Since he has a nine-month academic appointment, he could get his semester more or less wrapped up and then take over care work from there.
It was Desi’s idea to make a quilt for his favorite stuffed animal. I quilt! I used to quilt. For a few years in my late twenties, I was bored and I got to make quilts again. I had learned as a child but got busy for the decade or so I had to spend grasping for adult stability. There is a thing that happened to me, and maybe it happened to you, where in the span of a few months in my late twenties, my friends shifted from binge drinking four nights a week to waking up at seven on Saturdays to go to plant sales….permanently. And what I did was make quilts! It was my version of going to plant sales or doing yoga teacher training or suddenly having a professional head shot on LinkedIn. I made the quilts, I loved them, I gave them away.
Desi has been interested in quilts for a while — my mom made him a really stunning vehicles quilt for his 2nd birthday and I like pointing out to him how all the little fabric shapes are stitched together to make pictures. This was the perfect thing to carry us through the two weeks we’d be together. Quilting takes forever, even a tiny quilt for a stuffed animal. I’d do most of it but we could talk through the steps together and I could find developmentally appropriate ways for him to help. He’d feel proud of the quilt, at having made something, and we’d always have that evidence of our time spent together. FOR SURE I would post to Instagram, not my first rodeo, guys.
I went back to work today and I hope it’s obvious that we didn’t make the quilt.
We got started, we washed the fabric and I pre-cut the split triangles and let him design how it would look. I got everything pinned and ready to do our first pass of sewing.
It was the sewing machine that was the issue. I made my mom dizzy on video chat trying to diagnose the problem but eventually we gave up. I told Desi we needed to wait until “the sickness” was over so we could have someone else look at my machine. He seemed only a little disappointed, one more on a stack of the many disappointments of the last six weeks of his life.
It was a reminder to me that even the most home ec of hobbies, emphasis on HOME, can require help from outside. There isn’t help from outside anymore. Every single call is coming from inside the house.
With my kids trapped at home, I find myself wanting to keep them insulated from this heartbreak. I am quick to switch off NPR reports of death tolls. My four-year-old had the opportunity to join his first Zoom call with his class, and I considered skipping it. Would all the faces of his friends be too sharp a reminder of what he’s missing? I thought of times that I’ve been homesick and calling home made me feel even more sad. He joined the call and it was great but my first instinct is always to be the kneeling hockey goalie, frantically swatting away flying pucks of pain.
There was an Atlantic article that came out last week about anxiety in children. I avoided reading it because am I, a person with anxiety, really supposed to be taking on MORE anxiety ABOUT anxiety RIGHT NOW of all times???
But yesterday I went out for an errand and found myself in the decadent position of being alone in a parked car and I read it. I can give you the toplines: kids are more anxious than ever, anxiety in adults begins in childhood, kids are not being given opportunities to overcome disappointment or discomfort, leading to avoidance, leading to becoming withdrawn, and eventually “failure to launch.”
I appreciated that this article was able to, for once, call out that broken systems exacerbate all of this. Usually, we just get finger-pointing at “parents”, which always really means mothers. American parents don’t have the time-freedom to address their kids’ phobias so they avoid them or accommodate them. Last fall, Nick and I paid an expert $600 to help us stop lying on the floor next to my son’s bed at night! I can’t think of a parent I admire who doesn’t sometimes pick the path of least resistance out of sheer determination to survive the day. We’re all mired in the same muck.
My favorite part of the last two weeks has been riding scooters around the neighborhood with Desi. When we’re bombing down hills, I don’t feel like I’m doing caregiving for a child. I feel like I am a child again myself. We were out the other day and we came across a dead squirrel. I knew I could distract him so he wouldn’t see it, and I almost did. Again, I am a phenomenal goalie. But I let him see it.
My sensitive little man wept for this squirrel. It derailed our whole ride. We had a long talk about death and I ended up carrying him home on my shoulders, both our scooters tucked under my arm, my trap muscles fiery with pain. One of the rules on our rides is that I don’t carry him home, but I guess this felt different. I let him experience some discomfort with the rotting squirrel carcass but then I failed to maintain consistency with the no-carrying thing. It’s hard to get everything right. I’m aiming for a C-average. Cs get degrees.
I finally packed away the sewing machine that had been sucking up a lot of precious real estate on the dinner table and reminding me of what cannot be. I accepted that no progress was going to be made. Maybe we can come back to it someday, when he’s a little older and more suited to the detail work. Better yet, my mom can teach him while I stare at the wall in a different room.
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If you don’t follow me on Twitter or Instagram (good choice tbh), I wrote an essay for The Cut about having a shitty attitude in quarantine! Hope you like.
Going from being carefully edited to writing these haywire lil newsletters again gives me that feeling of when you have to unexpectedly drive a coworker somewhere in your car. Like, Sorry, Dave, it hasn’t come up before in the Monday all-hands but I’m actually the trash heap from Fraggle Rock!
Some recent faves:
-Buy and read Emily’s engrossing new book Perfect Tunes from Bookshop or your local indie and then tell me who you would cast in the Netflix series of it that needs to be made!! I have my picks!
-I love Julio Torres and his quarantine Instagram content is such a weird perfect gift.
-Jordan Firstman’s impression of a straight guy brings me so much joy. I just walk around the house doing it now. I’m fun to isolate with!!
-Chelsea Peretti’s comedy concept album about coffee, Foam and Flotsam.
-It seems pretty on the nose to recommend the new Fiona Apple but you should listen to the new Fiona Apple. I know her first two albums very well but later moved into a place of just appreciating that she exists but not seeking out her stuff. This album is so good and we don’t deserve it but maybe we do??? Do we accept the Fiona we think we deserve??
-To be a Kid in a Seventies Chapter Book by Mara Wilson.
-You’re either a celebrity gossip person or you’re not but I enjoy that Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas’ couple name is BenAna 🍌
-Just need to weigh in that you can definitely fuck who you marry in FMK !!
yr mate,
Evie
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