The stories we tell ourselves
Quarantine Week 7: Vol. 1
Beauty Awaits
There’s a dogwood tree right outside my bedroom window and two weeks ago, I could see from my bed each morning the buds at the ends of its graceful branches beginning to grow.
I’d moved into the new house around this time four years earlier and remember that first April how delighted I was every time a charming new feature revealed itself. The exterior, which is a Tudor style wrapped in brick and a chocolate brown cladding, is dark and somewhat gloomy looking. While I like to think the house looks like it's been plucked from a fairytale, my youngest complained when we first moved in that it looked like Gru's house in Despicable Me. (Google it, I'll wait.)
But the interior lighting is lovely. Despite the season or time of day, the casement windows make the rooms bright and airy. And when I sit at the kitchen table, I can look out and see the fuchsia flowers on the nearby rhododendron in late spring, or a cardinal hopping around the branches of the skinny evergreen that grows up along the side of the house. And one morning I woke up to a riot of dogwood flowers right outside my bedroom window.
Around the same time this year that the dogwood tree began to sprout dainty pointed leaves and the buds began to swell, I woke up one morning to find a swelling of a different sort on my right eyelid.
You know how when you’re concerned about an ailment and Google it and then you instantly regret the internet search when you’re presented with a screen full of horrifying images of said condition? I know I have. Over the years, I’ve unfortunately searched for conditions like “coxsackie” and “impetigo” and have seen examples of each ailment that I will never be able to un-see. It’s always the worst-case-scenario that’s held up as evidence for all of us amateur physicians to use for our diagnoses.
The stye that developed over the course of a week on my eyelid would have rivaled any image you could have searched for online. It was a case study in just how bad a stye could get. In fact, my children wouldn’t even look directly at me at one point. Not only was it painful to look at, the stye really hurt. By the end of each day, it felt like someone had blasted my eyeball with a hairdryer, making it feel bone-dry and sore.
Initially, it was just my two sons who had to deal with their mother, the cyclops. I’d complained about it to them initially, but they were like, “What?” and went back to playing Animal Crossing on their Switch. And then I came down one morning with it still kind of swollen and oozy from sleep and my oldest son passed me in the kitchen and was like, “Mom, what the fuck?”
My two daughters had decamped the weekend before to the younger girl’s apartment in Northern Virginia, the Saturday before Easter. There had been a row the night before and my attempt at intervening failed miserably. It seemed the girls had had enough of quarantining en famille and needed to get out of dodge on the double.
Here’s a formula I created to explain the situation:
(virtual friend Friday night happy hours + booze) x long standing sibling issues = mean words (tears)
I watched, a little shellshocked, as the two girls busily packed up my car to drive south the next morning, stuffing it with an old dresser I’d told my younger daughter in happier times she could take, along with some old framed artwork I’d said she could have as well. When I reported all this to a friend the next day, how the girls drove off in a huff in my car filled with all my shit, she laughed and said it reminded her of that old parenting book, “Get Out of My Life, But First Could You Drive Me & Cheryl to the Mall.”
I must have seemed pretty sad after they left as I headed outside to do some weeding, because both of my sons came out to help, something I could not have paid them to do under normal circumstances. I showed them the beds filled with overgrown weeds and handed them tools to use to gently coax the roots from the soil, and they spent the afternoon busily hauling loads of debris in the wheelbarrow to the street and asking me what else they could do. Later that night, we sat on the couch together eating pizza and watched “Fight Club.”
A few days after the girls fled, right around the same time that the stye started to make its presence known, I discovered a canker sore starting to form inside my lower lip. Those painful little ulcers always like to crop up and say "hi" when I’m going through something difficult. So it stood to reason that it would want to join its eye-stye-ovich comrade in miserable solidarity.
I was a bit heartbroken that the girls couldn’t find a way to stay. Even though it hadn’t been ideal, I had really enjoyed our month riding out the pandemic together. I loved all the puzzles and the nightly rummy games at the kitchen table. I liked meal planning with my younger girl and that I knew she’d happily run to the store to pick up anything we needed. That I didn't have to shoulder that alone. But mostly, I just liked having all four of my kids together under one roof. It certainly wasn’t perfect, but if I have to be sheltering in place for weeks on end, I’d rather do it with them than anyone else.
I mentioned this during a virtual session with my therapist after the girls left. I told her that our month together had been one of the happiest things to come out of the pandemic. “I don’t know if that means I’m mentally ill,” I added, which is probably a phrase you should use sparingly with a mental health professional. When she pressed me on why I’d assume enjoying my children’s company meant I had psychological issues, I told her I was just trying to be funny. "But it made my heart happy," I added.
Eventually, my older daughter came home but her sister stayed in Virginia. We didn’t talk for about a week, which was ironic because I haven’t talked to my own mother in over three years. In fact, I’d recently made the girls promise me that we’d never go three years without speaking. “Even if we are the biggest dicks to each other, we need to promise that we can get past that,” I’d said to each of them in dramatic FaceTime sessions. I simply could not imagine not being a part of their lives for years at a time.
Eventually, I texted my baby girl to tell her I loved her and missed her so much and asked if we could talk and really listen to each other, and she immediately responded in the affirmative. She even called me “Miss Penny,” one of her pet names for me. When we finally FaceTimed, I think we both came from a soft place. We both knew we were a little wrong and a little right, but that we 100 percent wanted to move past it and be friends again.
That was last week, just when the famous stye began to subside and the canker sore disappeared without ever getting too crazy. The three kids and I have settled into our new quarantine dynamic, with less puzzling but still the occasional rummy game.
But the dogwood outside my window this morning was magnificent. The branches’ fingertips have exploded in tiny greenish-white blossoms and they curve up towards the sky, reminding me of the mudras you make with your hands while practicing yoga. You can touch different fingers together and place your palms up or down, and each mudra is said to help balance and regulate the body’s elements: fire, air, space, earth and water.
For the Buddhi Mudra, the thumb and pinkie are brought together, palms up, with the middle three fingers outstretched towards the sky. The gesture helps to channel communication, and brings together fire and water elements to help strengthen intuition. During quarantine, with all the personalities and long-standing issues brought together for weeks at a time under one roof, we could all benefit from learning to communicate and balance both the good and the bad we each bring to the family dynamic. The fire and the water.
The outstretched dogwood reminds me each morning the importance of being able to hold it all — the bare branches of November and the riot of flowers in April. That we can be the same family playing Sorry together on a Saturday afternoon that also yells at each other late on a Friday night.
Through it all, the dogwood is there, greeting me every morning, as it did today, the branches swaying in the spring wind, the outstretched flowers promising that the cycle always swings back around. That just around the corner, beauty awaits.
xoAmy
My 17yo has been getting up and going to the beach to watch the sun rise lately and on Tuesday I joined him. We left the house around 5:30am and drove the 4 miles from here to the beach. Well, you can't actually park at the beach right now, so we parked in Rumson and walked over the bridge into Sea Bright and onto the public beach where, other than two women who walked by, we were the only people. Believe me, the dog was on the lookout for any life to pounce on.
The surf has carved shelf out of the sand down by the water and it was the perfect perch to sit and watch the sun slowly make its way over the thick layer of clouds along the horizon and finally peek out on top. He sat with his sweatshirt hood up, not entirely thrilled I was there, and I was bundled in my warmest dog-walking parka and my favorite Dolphins knit cap. We quietly watched as the sun lit up the ocean, the light coming all the way up to the shallow surf before us and took pictures while the dug frantically dug in the sand.
"Ready?" I asked, and he nodded and we hoisted ourselves up off the sand and headed to the exit. I asked if he wanted to stop and get a breakfast sandwich at our nearby deli, and suddenly, he was cheery. Pork roll can do that to a person. He even let me have a bite when we got home.
All in all, a perfect way to start the day.
The Friday Faves
The upside of miladies hitting the road Easter weekend was that, aside from weeding, I also read an entire book in two days. Delightful.
I also finished this book the other night. Obviously, I am reaching for all things funny during quarantine. This one had some amazing lines and observations. The protagonist has just turned 50, churns out "content" for a health & wellness website and has taken to wearing her sheltie in a sling. If I start toting my goldendoodle around in a Baby Bjorn, you'll understand where the inspiration came from.
Do you love Brene Brown as much as I do? Well, so does my dearest friend, Phyllis. She and I go way back and have also over the years shared a love of less healthy things, like Riunite and Merit cigarettes. She recently told me about an episode she listened to of Brene's new podcast about grief and finding meaning, featuring the very lovely David Kessler. My girl Phyllis knows grief all too well. Her son, Gus, took his life about 18 months ago, and she has found solace in Kessler's words. She told me I should listen, which I did, and so should you. Not only does the episode address the loss of a loved one, but it also circles around to talk about the grief many of us are experiencing right now. Of course, not the same grief as losing a child -- for sure -- but as Kessler tells Brene during the interview, "The worst grief is your own."
Another thing I started while the girls were away was finally sitting down and watching The Wire. My oldest (who's already watched it once) is watching with me and it's excellent. But also, if someone had told me five years ago that it starred the hot guy from The Affair, I would have started watching that day.
Sometimes, I feel like I'm Kelly Corrigan's publicist (not that she needs one). Or stalker (fair). But once again, I was moved by something she created and wanted to share her beautiful vision of what life could look like post-pandemic.
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