Try not to destroy one another. Notice who you actually are.

Reflections on sheltering in.

Nap time. Stella finally fell asleep on the floor, in the corner of her room, behind her big, canary yellow armchair. She somehow got bikini bottoms over her sparkly black pants, along with a sweater on backwards. 

I come down and tell Maya, who is working on her 37th piece of art that day and she says, “Stella just has her own way of being a person.”

I’ve been working over that simple wisdom in my head a lot during the last week or so. Turns out, we all have our very own way of being a person. And nothing makes that more obvious than a crisis. 

Beyond his work, John is deep cleaning every surface and taking great, audible pleasure in it. The blinds were his pièce de résistance. As the dust fell away, so did his anxiety. 

Maya is wearing her footie pajamas all day long, and alternating between making art, creating little rooms for her Lego girls to live in, and eating heaping bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios.

Stella, in addition to sleeping in strange places (when she finally gives in to sleep), is cancelling various things because of coronavirus on her imaginary cell phone; doing a weird, made-up version of martial arts; and getting buck naked on any and every attempt at Facetime or Zoom. Her pièce de résistance was turning the ottoman over for said big, canary yellow armchair, and filling it with the water from her water bottle. When we discovered it, she explained to us that she was making a pool for her dolls.

Me? Well, right this very moment, I’m typing away only because I am hiding out in our vintage VW Bus, parked next to our house. But in general, I guess I’m realizing how introverted and weird I really am. I’m happiest, right now, when I’m flipping through long-forgotten art books, drawing something in my journal alongside the girls, or sliding down some Internet rabbit hole of research with them. (Did you know your kidneys can clean your blood in just four minutes? Or that Alice in Wonderland is considered part of the “literary nonsense genre?”

When I psychically step away from the news and all the grief and anxiety I feel in relationship to it, what I find is that I’m a woman in a very small house with three other humans (two small, one big) and we’re all being confronted with exactly who we are. I mean not who we think we are, or who we want people to think we are, but who we actually are. I am actually, at my core, this person who needs a shit ton of solitude and time with words and images and ideas, of the variety that I used to get while working from home while the kids are at school. I like to make things. I like people, but not too much. I like books, and there can never be enough of them.

There’s something weirdly clarifying about this moment of sheltering in. It’s like this pandemic destroyed the blank canvas and handed us all a very precise assignment. Stay within a certain number of feet with only the stuff and people you’ve got. Cook again. Take in just enough information to know, but not decompensate. Wash your hands a lot. Try not to destroy one another. Notice who you actually are. 

I’m in no way grateful for what is happening. (I’m enraged and devastated and scared as f.) But I am grateful for the assignment. At 40 years old, I feel more aware of who I really am than I have since I was a little girl. 

Maybe it’s also because I hang out with two little girls all day and all night, and they’re helping me get in touch with my own duende at that age. I am so inspired by how Maya is moving through the house. She doesn’t care whether she finishes projects; it’s just the act of initiating them and enjoying them as long as they’re enjoyable that matters. She builds worlds upon worlds inside of her room. Nobody else need participate or witness. 

Stella, meanwhile, is a corporeal fireball—someone who wants to move her body, preferably against other bodies, and provoke reactions. She scared me half to death running straight for the ocean yesterday afternoon. She wants to be in charge of something, something really important. She’ll make the list, even if she doesn’t know a single letter. 

  In any case, it makes me wonder—when all this is over, or at least over for awhile, what could I do to honor my own way of being a person more faithfully? How might I drag this comforting sense of limitation along with me into the moment when we finally gather in groups and hug again?

And I also wonder: what does my own quiet embrace of my limitations have to do with a more collective embrace of limitations? 

We’re burning less fossil fuels. We’re lowering our expectations for “achievement” (at least the sane among us are). We’re wasting less food and eating out less and growing things with our own two hands. We’re being gentle with one another, acutely aware that we don’t know what kind of burdens others are carrying on their backs (sick parent in far away places, unknown exposure, abuse or addiction ramped up in the isolation etc.). We’re all shrugging our shoulders and collectively admitting that there aren’t enough hours in the day for the caretaking and the working and the exercise and the cooking and the cleaning and the connecting, and letting one another off the hook for missed calls and deadlines. The notion of “work life balance” sounds so dumb now; it always was, in fact.

Maybe we’ll be less dumb after all this. Less dumb about what a given human is capable of in a given day. Less dumb about our ecological capacity and our individual ecology. Less dumb about our frailty and strength, our freedom and our interdependence. 

It wouldn’t make it worth it, but it would certainly make it meaningful.