Denial

There has been a lot of discussion in the media about the 1918 flu pandemic and what we can learn from it as we manage today’s coronavirus. But as I’ve been listening to Erik Larsen’s Dead Wake, I can’t help but notice some other parallels from that completely unrelated disaster. On the surface, it’s tough to see connections between the two: the sinking of the Lusitania was a tragedy of humanity’s own making, motivated by a wartime agenda, while the coronavirus is a natural disaster that in many ways is completely out of our control. But there’s one underlying theme that runs beneath both events: denial in the face of concrete evidence.

Trump’s recent declaration that he wants the US open and “raring to go” by Easter (just a little more than two weeks away) flies completely in the face of what the medical community and public health experts are telling us about where we are in the trajectory of the pandemic. Each day, confirmed COVID-19 cases and related deaths rise, and some experts are predicting we’re at least three weeks away from the peak of the outbreak. But it’s a well-established fact by now that Trump doesn’t really care about data or facts the way most people understand them. What’s really fascinating is how he’s far from alone in this tendency. As described in Dead Wake, the denial of many, many people on the Lusitania, including a lot of the crew, as the ship foundered, is a striking parallel. If you’ve seen the movie Titanic, you’re familiar with the hubris of people stating confidently, “This ship can’t sink!” literally as the water is rising up to meet them. What is is about the human nature that we cling to hope and optimism, often past the point of rationality?

Today the stock market is on the rise as a result of the stimulus package rapidly making its way through Congress, promising $2 trillion in aid to individuals and companies. But realistically, if we’re facing down another four, six, or eight weeks of much of the country being shut down (which seems almost inevitable if you listen to the people who actually know what they’re talking about), it’s obvious that amount of money isn’t going to prop the economy up through this whole ordeal. And in a couple of weeks, when it becomes impossible to deny that fact any longer, we’ll be right back where we were a week ago, with investors freaking out and the market plummeting. It’s just so interesting how short-sighted we seem to be in the face of disaster and how desperately we want to believe that things can’t be nearly as bad as the evidence clearly shows they will become.

I don’t really have a point to make here—just musing about how very different events in very different times seem to bring out the exact same emotions and thought processes in people.

At our house, we’ve been taking walks, making pancakes, and painting with watercolors. Alice got a scooter as an early Easter present, and I don’t think there have ever been more people out wandering around the neighborhood. Clearly we’re all bored and just looking for something to do!

Casual unicorn out for a stroll

Quarantine - Day 3

It’s only Day 3 of our self-isolation and the days are already starting to blend together. This is exactly why I’m blogging—to be able to remember my life, especially this extremely strange period of it! We went through our morning routine of breakfast and Camp Kindergarten. Alice and I made a trek to the basement to get our guitars and brought them up to the living room so we could play band together. Then Will woke up from his morning nap and I loaded Elton John and Adele into the CD player. One of my goals for maternity leave was to organize our very large CD collection (we’re so old school!) and it hasn’t happened yet but I think it will over the next week or so. Thinking about what music to put on for the day is a little bright spot, and it’s fun to go through all the CDs and remember forgotten favorites.

Nap was kind of a disaster, after the first fifteen minutes when I laid down between Alice and Will and had many grateful thoughts about how lucky we are to be together and healthy and have everything we need. Both kids were simultaneously asleep for only about 20 minutes and neither of them slept nearly as long as they should have, so I didn’t get to learn the bass part to “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” the way I had planned. I’m trying out a FaceTime band practice with some friends tomorrow!

It rained most of the day so we didn’t go outside, but Alice did a great job playing by herself and with me, and the screen time was reasonable, probably two hours or a little less. She cracked me up wanting to play “Miss Megan” from Camp Kindergarten and give me lessons and homework to do. Fish sticks, baked potatoes, and frozen vegetables for dinner, nothing fancy. Matt let her take the longest bath ever but I didn’t fall asleep putting her to bed, so now I get to go read!

It’s supposed to be warm tomorrow and we need to get out of the house (and I need to get some exercise—this is something I need to find a solution for and build into our routine). I don’t know how I’m going to keep Alice away from her friends if we see them in the neighborhood and I don’t think she’ll understand if I try to explain why we can’t go to the playground. UGH. Not being able to see her buddies is going to be the worst part of this whole thing. In some ways I’m glad my kids are so little while we go through this—the social isolation would just be worse if they were older and I would feel a lot more stress about school being closed and feeling the need to do educational stuff at home, but it’s so hard to explain to Alice what is going on in a way that’s not scary. And then of course there’s the constant physical and emotional drain of caring for two kids nonstop in a closed environment!

I didn’t do a very good job of staying off the internet today, which is probably why I’m feeling blah. Time to stop computering and go do something else!

Quarantine - Day 2

Posting this just after midnight! It was super sunny this morning, which helped me feel a little less doom-and-gloom, although both Alice and Will were up and ready to start their days before 7:00. We played for a bit, had breakfast, and joined the Facebook Live for Miss Megan’s Camp Kindergarten again. Alice was much more engaged this time! My favorite part about it is all the new kid-friendly songs I’m learning. After “school” was over, she played by herself while I cleaned up the house a bit and made lunch. Something puzzling—she almost always does a good job eating her lunch, but we often struggle at dinnertime to get her to eat more than a few bites of whatever we’re having. One contributing factor could be that lunch tends to be less of a “real” meal and more of a snack plate. Today was, for example, was carrots and cherry tomatoes with salad dressing, sliced pear, cheese, and veggie straws on a plate. But I’m not sure whether the difference is because of the food we eat or if she’s snacking more than I realize before dinner. ANYWAY.

Will was already snoozing in our bed by Alice’s naptime, so I tucked her in with him and told her I was going to take a shower. By the time I came back, she was asleep! It was amazing—usually I have to lie down with her to get her to go down and half the time I fall asleep myself. But today I was clean and then had more than an hour to read and putter around with both of them unconscious. Win!

We had planned a playdate with her swim buddy before the social distancing recommendations got so strong and I didn’t have the heart to cancel it, so he and his mom came over for what will likely be our very last social interaction for some time. It’s so hard to explain to Alice what is going on, and I’m expecting many, many questions about why she can’t see her friends. Ugh.

Matt came home, realized he forgot to vote and went out again to take care of that, and then he and I tuned in to a webinar by my investing guru Phil Town while Alice watched a show. Chicken stir fry for dinner, a long, drawn-out bedtime that resulted in me falling asleep in Alice’s bed again, and then some anxious social media scrolling rounded out my evening.

The only thing I did to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day was to take a picture of Will in the same onesie Alice wore three years ago. Who wore it better??

Quarantine - Day 1

This weekend included a wild trip to the grocery store with insanely long lines, cleaning the laundry room (and enjoying our new dryer!), band practice, helping my mom test her work-from-home capabilities, and voting. And now we’re heading into at least two weeks of self-quarantine and social distancing.

With all schools closed in Illinois, activities canceled, and social distancing highly encouraged, we’re entering a weird period of “figure out any and all potential fun stuff to do at home.” Yesterday (Monday) wasn’t too bad. Alice slept in until nearly 8:30 and then we had breakfast and tuned into a Facebook Live event at 9:00—Miss Megan’s Camp Kindergarten, which was a fun school-like hour, even if the content is a little advanced for a three-year-old. Will snoozed on the couch through most of it, so I was able to focus on Alice and do the activities and songs with her. Then we played Barbies for a bit before I loaded the kids up in the car for a quick trip to the bank drive-through to deposit a check. Then lunch and nap (I fell asleep with them despite wanting to read instead).

When I woke up from the nap I had a bunch of texts on my phone from a neighborhood group thread with rumors that Illinois will go into lockdown soon in similar fashion to San Francisco (there has not been any confirmation of this yet). I freaked out and texted Matt, who had heard the same thing from a different source. Imagining the absolute madness of the grocery store after this potential news breaks, I got the kids back into the car and went to our small neighborhood grocery store, hoping to avoid the massive lines that have been standard at the larger stores around here. I was able to get a good amount of stuff, including eggs, milk, and bread alternatives (pretzel rolls, focaccia loaf, etc. because they were out of regular sandwich bread). So now we’re pretty well-stocked. Then I had a really frustrating text conversation with my mom, who is still in the denial/this is all ridiculous/there’s no way we could go on lockdown state of mind and insists on taking the commuter train to work even though she could work from home. Gah.

Matt came home and wanted to get quarantine cigarettes as a treat for himself (gross). I was dying to get out of the house by myself, so I went to the tobacco store/hookah bar, which was completely empty of course. The store owner was obviously stressed about the current situation and had a lot of questions for me about where I worked and whether my business was still open. When I told him I work in book publishing he looked at me quizzically and asked, “How do you make money”? I was like, well… we publish books and people buy them? It was odd. But he had roll-your-own American Spirit tobacco, so I bought the cancer leaves and went on my way. Picked up A&W for dinner because I needed to eat some feelings, and it was delicious.

It wasn’t a bad day, but definitely different from what our Mondays looked like a month ago, which included story time at the library in the morning and swim class in the late afternoon. Alice has only been going to school Tuesday through Thursday since I’ve been on leave, so today (Tuesday) will mark the first true disruption in that she will be home when she was supposed to be at school. Matt’s work is still open and will continue to be, I think, even in the case of a lockdown, since plumbers are on the list of essential workers. I’m happy he will still be working because $$$, obviously, but having him out of the house all day every day means all the childcare falls to me. Being confined to our house and yard makes this more challenging than it would be normally (and will become extremely challenging when I go back to work on April 6th). Because he’s going on jobs, I think his risk of contracting COVID-19 (and bringing it home) is fairly high. We’re not able to completely self-isolate the way families with both parents working from home are, and that means we really shouldn’t have contact with anyone else because our household isn’t a closed system. So that sucks—both the risk of contracting the virus and the social isolation our potential exposure necessitates.

I hope we don’t get sick (or if we do that we have only mild symptoms), I hope we’re all doing enough social distancing to slow the virus’s spread. I hope in four or six or eight weeks things will get better and we’ll look back on this time as super strange and temporary. Fingers crossed!

A little Peppa Pig to help get us through the day

COVID-19 on maternity leave

On Wednesday I took Will to his two-month well baby check (he’s tall and skinny with a big head, just like his dad!), then stopped by work afterwards to show him off. I had gone back and forth over whether to take him into an office building of 100+ people in the midst of coronavirus panic, but decided the risk at this point was probably reasonable as long as I didn’t let anyone else hold him and was careful about my hand-washing. It seems likely that a week or two from now things will be much worse, so I took the opportunity to see some friends and also grab some stuff from my desk in the event our physical offices are closed when I return to work in April.

Being on maternity leave during the rise of COVID-19 has been kind of a surreal experience. I have a lot of time to read the news, for better or worse. Initially just the thought of the novel coronavirus would send me into a tailspin of anxiety, but since it has become clear that the virus is not as dangerous for children as for some other groups (although there isn’t a lot of data on infants at this point), I’ve been able to mostly move past that emotional reaction, although my mom and Matt’s parents are in the 60+ age group and I worry that my mom isn’t being as careful as she should (she has a strong Bah humbug this whole thing is ridiculous attitude right now). I cruised around Target and got us stocked up on supplies last weekend before things got really crazy—definitely didn’t go into full-on prepper mode, but made sure we were topped up on TP, laundry detergent, diapers and wipes, etc. The price tag kind of made me choke (I don’t usually spend $150+ at Target!), but I’m glad I did, seeing all the pictures of empty store shelves on social media now!

The governor decided to close all Illinois schools starting Monday, so I’m losing my precious three days a week of Alice being out of the house. Honestly, it’s going to be a challenge being with both kids literally 24/7 for the next three weeks—I’ll need to make better use of nap time for my mental health maintenance rather than just passing out in bed with them for 90 minutes every day. But I am SO LUCKY to still be on maternity leave and not having to deal with worrying about childcare or working from home with them underfoot for at least a few weeks, and I’ll be offering myself up as a back-up babysitter to friends who are still working. We’ll do playdates and hang out with families in our neighborhood, but not having park district and library programs and all the fun things like children’s museums, etc. open will definitely change the way we move through the world. I hope the weather warms up a little so we can spend more time outside.

It seems like the news changes every day, so we’ll see how things go from here on out! For now, we’re happy and healthy and doing just fine. I hope everyone is able to stay safe out there.

Reading Update:

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell: I grabbed this audio book from OverDrive and actually managed to remember to listen to it! I like Gladwell’s stuff (although I wasn’t crazy about him as a narrator) and reading TTP felt particularly apt right now because the book opens with an example of how viruses gain momentum and “tip” into epidemics. Relevant to life right now! Overall I didn’t come away with any life-changing takeaways (maybe because the book is 10 years old?). Some of the topics, like the power of word of mouth, are things that I’ve thought about pretty extensively in relation to my work already. Finished on 3/12/20.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: After seeing the excellent movie, I had to dig out my childhood copy and re-read it for the first time in probably 20-ish years. I have really specific memories of reading Little Women as a child because it was the longest book in my elementary school library and I REALLY wanted to get through it so I could take the Accelerated Reader test and get all those sweet sweet points. The story was just as lovely this time around, and as an adult I have more appreciation for how well the content holds up. It’s pretty amazing to think that Alice will most likely read and love a story written shortly after the Civil War, and find a reflection of herself in the characters and their lives. The human condition!! Finished on 3/13/20.

Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner: I started this one around the same time I cracked open Little Women and have kind of neglected it, but so far so good! I haven’t read any of Weiner’s novels before, although I’ve seen her stuff online and followed her feud with Jonathan Franzen, so I’m looking forward to digging into this one more. I haven’t looked up anything online about it, so I don’t know—are the character names Jo and Bethie coincidental, or is there an overarching allusion to Little Women running throughout the book? Very funny if so, considering my timing for reading it!

Who wouldn’t want to self-quarantine at home with these two??