Here's Your Daily Affirmation from 2020's 17th month

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The chicken run is muddy, slick. Our days are small with light; the chickens have slowed their laying, and only one or two days a week do I have three eggs (one pink, one green, one brown) in the nest. The baby has started to grow her comb, has started perching on the feed bin outside my office window to peer at me while I attend Zoom meetings, or write faculty evaluations (YOU'RE ALL DOING FUCKING GREAT; ANYONE GIVING A SHITTY EVALUATION TO SOMEONE WHO IS TRYING RIGHT NOW IS AN ASSHOLE.)

 

In a few days, J. and I will board a plane and fly to the current epicenter of the pandemic so he can spend the week with his father. We have decided it is smarter and safer (what is safe? more and more friends who are being safe are being diagnosed with COVID19) for me to quarantine in an AirBnB rather than fly home and then fly back. R. and I have not been apart this long since we were dating and went a month at a time without seeing the other. We will be as safe as we can be: i will see no one, not my family that I haven't seen for over a year, not my friends; I will order groceries and hunker down by the Lake and write and work and speak to no one, and then we will fly home and quarantine for two weeks and then in three weeks, do it again. We will be as safe as we can be, which is not safe, which is flirting with danger. Numbers are rising here too, and we're under lockdown for three weeks (as is Michigan, but we do not get to listen to science).

 

I know that 100 years from now, people will look back at this time and wonder what was wrong with those who don't believe in science, who walk into death like idiots. I am often ashamed to be an American, now more than ever before. I was raised to believe in American exceptionalism but now I understand that what we are exceptional in is idiocy. We elected Tr*mp, after all; a large portion of us don’t believe science and pledge allegiance to QAnon and believe COVID is "just the flu" and not a big deal while their communities (their families) are dying from it, believe in conspiracy theories. We are a nation born of white supremacist patriarchy.

 

Anyway. There is a lot to say about our collective ignorance, the cruelty of it, the stupidity. But as I was running today, trying to rationalize what J. and I have to do on Saturday, I realized that there is much about these eight months that I have loved, and that have surprised me. I love being home with my family, love having the boys here, love walking the dog with J. every afternoon, love being able to listen to him play guitar in his office above my office. I love baking and cooking for the family, something I never thought I'd like or be good at and I am pretty good at it. I love running when I want to run instead of squeezing it in after work; I love how time stretches and thins, love watching the chickens through my office window (though those fuckers have literally eaten my entire yard; where the small lawn once was in a vast expanse of mud and shit). So much of my identity has been forged through my career, through learning who I was outside of my home (because for so very long, coming home was danger, was where I had to be someone I was not). I love quietly moving through the house with R. and the boys, love playing card games when the power goes out, love discussing politics with the boys (both of whom have decided they are socialists, though J. placed so far left on the spectrum he's essentially a radical communist). I know I'm enormously lucky to be quarantined with my family, and I am lonely for friends and singing and choir and I cannot wait to not have to look at my face in a Zoom square for hours at a time (when did I get so old? What's happening with my neck?). This is what I am trying to hold on to right now, and do everything I can to not hurt my family by getting sick, by getting them sick.

 

What I want, I said to R. a week ago when I was having a massive panic attack, was not to feel responsible for all of this. For someone to fix it for me. I want someone to tell me it's going to be okay and make it be okay. That I'm doing a good job. No one is coming to save us; I know this. All we've got is us.

 

Look, you reading this: you're doing great. You're doing the best you fucking can and I'm so proud of you.

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