Everything Happened | vol. 198

The winter wall

Monday is President’s Day which is real, I guess, sacred enough to close some jobs but not others. Nick and I have to work, Jane goes to school, but Desi is home. Desi is usually home, but at least today he is the version of home that doesn’t involve logging on and following rules at 9:20, 9:50, 11:30 and sometimes 1:20 for Small Group. I think of the days where I have more than one meeting and how utterly persecuted that makes me feel, and wonder how it is to be five and have your teacher and classmates peering into your home. I literally cannot imagine it.

Monday, we have three hours of babysitting and Nick and I have to split the rest of the day between us. Nick teaches four classes on Mondays and I am able to flex my day pretty hard, which during the pandemic means worrying about the things I have to do all day and not touching them until the next day, if we’re lucky enough to have childcare the next day.

I have been asked to move things out of my office on campus, which I have not set foot in since March. Another department is taking over that floor and I will be moved to a different building. I am agnostic to the office change in general, but the urgency of the request to move my things is irritating to me on a level disproportionate to the ask. Am I being Jokerfied?, I wonder, as I get another email about it that causes me to angrily launch myself backwards in my rolling office chair like a backstroker pushing off the wall at a time trial.

Since the first time I heard the request about a month ago, I have had my daughter’s daycare closed for two weeks due to COVID exposure, and had babysitters for my son have to call out due to COVID exposures, ice storms, and snowstorms. My son’s school, which he attends two days a week in-person, has twice closed on an in-person day because of what passes for inclement weather here in the mid-Atlantic. And then there is the fact that staff is not returning to in-person work anytime soon!!!!!

I take one of my precious babysitter-covered hours to go attempt to move my things on campus. The terrain is dirty snowmelt and spongy earth that swallows your shoes if you step in it. My ID badge doesn’t work to open the door to the building so I call Public Safety and they tell me I need to put in a request to access the building to HR. I don’t know what that could mean so I walk back to my car and think of what else I could do with the time I would have spent moving offices. Stop by the book store? Get a bougie latte? Go down to the river and walk the piers? Instead, I drive to a gas station, buy a dill pickle and a stick of pepperjack cheese and sort of black out in my car.

When the babysitter leaves at 2, I drag my laptop to the couch and attempt to supervise my inbox while Desi watches TV but he wants me to build a fort with him. He is begging me. “Ok I can play with you for 20 minutes then I have to get back to my work,” I say, knowing that I won’t set a timer, he won’t honor the time boundary, and nothing matters.

Tuesday starts with therapy. I had a list of things I wanted to discuss but I can’t find the list. I start to wonder if the list ever existed or if I just intended to make the list. I tell her something I have avoided mentioning in the nearly two years we’ve been “together”, which is that I am hung up on my weight. This to me is more embarrassing than admitting that I count my friends’ money or that I am the only person with impostor syndrome who is an actual impostor, running an exhausting decades-long con on everyone I know and love. Because doesn’t caring about my weight make me at best, a little stupid, and at worst, fatphobic?

She advises me to reduce my stress as an intervention and I take it to heart and scam myself another free trial of The Class. But when I go to start a noon stream, the idea of flapping my arms alone in my room is so sad to me that I actually retch. I go for a walk instead and think what I always think, which is, I should really do this first thing in the morning every day. Do I ever do that? No, please be serious.

Right before the babysitter’s shift ends, I get an email from my daughter’s daycare that they are closing permanently. I wait to feel something and no feelings bloom inside me. I am a potato, a jar of soil, a river rock, a warped Tupperware lid, a hard dry booger. My friend whose daughter also goes to that daycare texts me to ask if I saw the email. “Lol.” I respond. “Yup.” Is this when I do the Joker dance down the stairwell?

On Wednesday I get an email about the contents of my office that is marked, “high importance,” which is an act of administrative terrorism. Tons of people are copied on it, including my VP. The admin for my department opens up a back channel and asks me if she can just go clean it out for me? She has access. I tell her I’ll do it if she can meet me and let me in. She tells me to just stay put. She will do it. She does it.

I go pick up a soy candle in town from my favorite candle maker and deliver it to her office, which I am somehow able to access with my ID badge. I am happy to see her but giving the gift does little to offset the humiliation of her having to sort my life out for me. Later she sends me an email with a picture of it burning in her home. Why are some people so generous, I think, and other people so officious.

At dinner, Nick and I join a Zoom with other daycare parents while our kids do their Super Smackdown evening schtick. The purpose of the Zoom, I guess, is to air our grievances pointlessly into the void. We are pretty powerless here and it is depressing to see a grid of fellow daycare parents looking 25% translucent, mere specters of their pre-pandemic selves. By now, both of the preschools in the area have already emailed me back to say that they don’t have a spot but can put us on a waitlist if I come pick up some paperwork. Great, I think, because I’m so good at getting things done that involve leaving my house.

After the kids are in bed, I tell Nick that everything sucks and I’m dying, as we fold laundry together on the couch. I go to bed at 10 but stay up until 12:30 on my phone.

By 6 a.m. Thursday, our whole street is laminated with ice. I get the email from daycare first and then Desi’s elementary school. Everything is closed. At least we don’t have to pack lunches, I think. Desi asks me to play with him after I make his breakfast instead of getting back into bed. I say sure, but he just wants me to sit on the couch with him while he watches TV. I can do that.

yr mate,
Evie
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