Sleep Isn’t
Things that are not working all that well include sleep. It’s hard to make myself go to sleep, even though at like nine, I think I’m ready to do what it takes to settle down. Bedtime shifted to me. I seem to be able to do something (routine would be stretching it) that’s kind of working (kind of is operative here). I think the main thing is some nights are cozy and sweet and other nights are very grumpy, disgruntled, and sad. I have to be calm through either, and when, like last night, the grumpy was the ending note — not yelling, snapping a bit and more than that even, voicing frustration — I do not feel settled by the time I leave her. If we readily each have three good things to list in our shared journal (I made us start a shared journal for our confinement/historic moment/place to list her to-do’s each day) and she’s ready to read (and then we sit in there and read), I leave her room feeling content, too. I hold whatever it is. Unfortunately, holding someone’s deep disgruntlement just before trying to settle down makes it take me longer to calm down myself. But, hey, it’s a global pandemic; feeling unsettled is the territory (best case scenario).
In truth, overall, Saskia is having good parts to her days and pretty good days, despite too much screen time by far. She’s in a binge of a show she’s watched many times before called Liv and Maddie, mostly (thankfully) watching with headphones on, although the theme song is catchy, and I totally love it. I flashed back to how Law and Order got me through breastfeeding of my two original babies, how having a world that wasn’t my house and my chaotic mess of board books and breast pump, laundry, toys, blankets and piles of stuff I couldn’t get to functioned as escape. Sure, my escape was terrible crime and law in New York — Russian mob, abortion clinic bombing, the old school Lennie Briscoe, the parade of beautiful ADA’s to Sam Waterston’s gravelly, principled Jack McCoy, and of course Adam Schiff, 1.0. By the time Lucien slept through the night, I knew every episode by its opening frame. If Saskia remembers the Rooney family as her other household from the pandemic, that’s okay.
I have been listening to my favorite podcasts, and because I tend to run a little behind, I’m listening to episodes banked from just before the pandemic and its’ similarly comfortable to take a walk with my podcast friends, who are talking and thinking about things other than the weirdly dual experience of crisis, impending dread, which feels existential because it’s only beginning to hit (if you aren’t in an epicenter, a front line worker or already have someone going through it), but like charging into a bullseye collides with completely mundane stuff of this odd, boring exile at home, which has transformed (transmogrified?) our rhythms and sense of what daily life is. Glennon Doyle’s money line (on a video) yesterday: families aren’t meant to be together this much; she advocated for family in moderation.
For all the amusing drama — and she did real talk about how she flew into bitterness and resentment she refused to let go of because wife and famous soccer player Abby Wambach ate popcorn “too loudly,” that Glennon regaled her Instagram followers with, the dread we’re fending off is here: the US has the most cases (bitter: winning) and people are dying and our Mayor has Covid-19 and so it’s not the Rand Paul politicians who get it and the truth is I’d clean my kitchen up and deal with frustrated Saskia forever if the payoff was to avoid this.
On my walks, or in conversations with close people on the phone, I’m shocked at how little people want to acknowledge the reason we are all hunkered down. I mean, isn’t this the point? Not to stay there, just to hold it really mindfully with everything else, because for me at least, otherwise I’d be stewing in huge resentment to be quite as focused on my freaking house and the arduous nature of getting groceries when also wanting to avoid the physical store and there are few curbside pickup options to be had (and also a lack of lots of stuff) and of course everyone trapped and deferring all the things we’d like to do in regular life. Anyway, not to be a downer and not to say there’s a correct way to do this AT ALL (other than maintaining social distance). I am simply surprised. I guess I want to have people who want to talk about this.
Back to sleep: Barack Obama entered a little lounge room during my dream. I was waiting at the hotel with this lounge room (where I was, too) for a night before I could fly home from San Francisco and also in the room was a childhood friend (she lives there for real) and her mother (no idea if she’s alive) and the mother, who had mild to moderate dementia, tried to give me a hug and then an elbow bump. I backed away and then Barry walked in all big smiles and a few words of how we have to hang together and I was thinking, then what the hell are you doing in a hotel and why aren’t you saying something out loud to the country?
I am personally overloaded by all the cool things I could be doing with my time (isn’t cleaning the kitchen and trying to pull my daughter off a screen plenty?) and yet I’m so impressed, too, in a slightly resentful way to be honest. I could no more produce something wonderful than I could sew a mask (I can’t sew). My beloved Pure Barre has really been crushing the livestream and for that I am deeply relieved and grateful. A new-to-me teacher from a different studio said, “Solidarity, babes!” as she taught while she demoed the entire class (wow!) and so that’s my catchword for the day.
Solidarity. I think it works.
For myself, along with seeing my main focus as holding steady and still and staying home (save for occasional groceries), I feel like I can do very tiny things: I’m trying to thank someone each day for their help — a medical person, a person at the grocery store, like that — and I’m trying to hold out hope each day, and I’m trying to reach out and share my voice for a better outcome, so writing my senators, or helping a mask-making tutorial or beautiful plea for masks reach more people. Whatever I can do, that I can actually do, I’m doing. I’m trying not to judge myself for it feeling like NOT ENOUGH. It’s not enough. Nothing is. And that’s kind of the point of now.
