The kitchen trash can in my house is filled up and has to be taken out to the barrels every single day. The dishwasher is filled and running, every. single. day. Someone is always doing laundry, and anyone who thinks dog groomers aren’t essential hasn’t smelled my dog.
So goes life as we end the seventh week of sheltering in place.
There is only one other person at our home, but when you’re home all the time, it’s amazing how much more “stuff” accumulates, whether you’re cooking more, ordering out more (certainly not cleaning more), or just arranging and rearranging the junk that you still can’t part with.
Our personalities have evolved — or maybe they’ve just been revealed.
One of us works from home, another still goes out to work nearly every day, and the third is doing online classes that tests her self-discipline (and she is so much better at it than I could ever be).
When we were empty-nesters nine months out of the year, my husband and I more or less took turns being at home, and our meals together were catch as catch can. Now, with at least two of us at home nearly all the time, we eat more frequently, at all hours of the day (and night) so the dishes are constantly being used. And my husband has turned into my dearly departed father, who once he retired, made daily trips to the grocery store. I hesitate to ask my husband to pick something up these days, for fear I’ll be rewarded with 10 bags of groceries that I’ll be tasked with putting into an already full refrigerator. We all have our anxieties and we’re finding out our own individual coping mechanisms to deal with them, whether it’s stress shopping or stress eating. (And many of us will be outgrowing our “fat” clothes if the pandemic stretches into the summer months.)
The instagram feeds on tasty at-home meals, tasty at-home workouts and tasty at-home arts and crafts are never ending. We’re giving each other lots and lots of tips on how to properly and safely binge-watch, binge-read, binge-do, while trying to keep from growing ever more distressed, anxious and angry. (Is it justifiable if I stab my spouse for sloppily stuffing the kitchen towel into the handle on the oven instead of folding it nicely? Oh, that’s just me? Never mind.)
Yes, this is difficult. And we’re turning into people we never thought we would be.
If you’re a masker (and we all should be as of yesterday’s mandate from Gov. Baker), you’ve been giving the side-eye to everyone you see who jogs, walks, or bikes past you with a bare face. If you’re a bare-face rebel, your fellow citizens may soon be snitching on you for daring to show said face.
And sure, you feel stupid putting on a cloth covering. We all do. But since the people who had coronavirus (many unknowingly) were spreading it, we all have to be responsible for not emitting or contracting this disease that has already claimed upwards of 67,000 lives in this country alone.
Strange thing this human nature. We’ve gone very quickly through the stages of grief — denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Some of us may still be stuck in the denial/anger stage, others have moved on to depression. None of us want to accept this as the “new normal.”
We’ve learned that we are social beings (most of us), that we’ve taken human contact for granted, and the essential people are not the ones we imagined in our capitalist economy.
Are we more divided as a nation, or have we achieved detente as the television and movie stars assure us “we’re all in this together?”
I’ll let you decide as we watch, with either admiration or disgust, people storming their capital buildings or governors’ homes, waving confederate flags and brandishing weapons of war while screaming about opening up the economy because they need a haircut. I need my nails and hair done too, but it’s not worth dying, or killing someone else, for. Can we all just be ugly together?
Then there are the emotional costs of working really hard — only to be denied your momentary place in the sun.
I’m talking graduations.
The other day I heard the stirring music of Pomp and Circumstance. Now, I’m the world’s biggest crybaby and graduations in my family are a big thing. That song always makes me tear up, but the last time I had those happy tears were when our daughter graduated high school. The fact that so many high school, college, and yes, even younger graduates, won’t be able to march proudly for their friends and family fills me with so much sadness. I only hope that more schools will look to rectify that unforced error with a ceremony — be it six months or a year from now. It won’t be the same — but these graduates all deserve something.
In the meantime, let’s try and keep it together. We may not see light at the end of the tunnel yet — but let’s look for the light wherever we can find it — in each other and in the good people who are working to make sure there are better days ahead.
