This past Thursday, I woke Polina as usual for her online class. That day it was a European-based all girl comics class taught in Russian. Most of Polina’s classes are taught this way. Each week the teacher presents a theme and the girls use software to illustrate the theme in a comic strip, which they read to the group at the end of class. The other two girls in the class live in Europe. For them, it’s an after school activity. Since their afternoon is our morning, as a homeschooling family, that arrangement works well for us.
After almost 19 years working for the same company, my husband, Peter, turned in his badge and left his gun-secured building for the last time. (I say gun-secured because a guard with a real gun sits at the reception desk and answers the phones.)
My husband began working for this company in 2003, during the Bush administration. He is leaving under the Biden administration. What, dare you ask, does the president of the United States have to do with my husband turning in his badge? Quite simply, Pete does not want to get the COVID vaccine, and because of that, the leader of the free world deemed he and people like him should be fired from their jobs, or at least that was the edict on September 9, 2021.
I recently completed a car trip across the US and back. I drove from western Washington to Philadelphia to see my grandmother, who wasn’t doing well health-wise. My trip turned into a period of goodbyes. It was about saying goodbye to my grandmother, who passed away five days after I returned home. It was about saying goodbye to my aunt, whose interaction brought home to me all the harmful subtleties of our relationship, and our family dynamics, throughout my life that I simply ignored, but couldn’t any longer. I said goodbye to my friend David, whom I’ve known since 2009, for similar reasons.
During this trip, I said goodbye to my mother and the relationship I wish I had with her. That relationship will never happen. We had an argument that laid on the table everything she thought about me. It came from her heart, and it wasn’t pretty. The end result is I will not allow myself to expect something from her which she is clearly incapable of providing. My grandmother told me a long time ago that my mother couldn’t provide what I wanted. She told me that once, on the phone, when I was a teenager, crying for what turned out to be a weekly occurrence, and it stuck with me. I now realize that expecting more puts her in a torturous situation, and so I say goodbye and with maturity, mourn that loss.
I am determined to have a good summer this year. It’s time.
The last few years I have fallen out of shape, physically and emotionally. Fatigue became a synonym for laziness. Few things, if any, went my way. After what seemed like a lifetime of fighting, I gave up. If my body wanted to keep breathing, that was its business. I, as a matter of choice, didn’t want to do anything.
So in the evenings, after caring for my daughter, I would vegetate on the couch, cover my head with a blanket, and create a small hole for breathing, which my body still compelled me to do.
As much as we get tired of hearing or talking about coronavirus, it may be with us for some time. After all, the summer Olympics were postponed and spring has only just begun. That means the big wigs at the top didn’t think bringing people together was such a great idea.
More than that, the coronavirus will forever change this generation’s view of microbes. (By this generation, I mean people who live through this and remember it, including my seven year old daughter.) I remember when the biggest and scariest contagion was HIV. You had to get bloody intimate with people to get this virus, either through unprotected sex or a contaminated blood transfusion. Even so, there was anxiety in the air. The rapidity with which the virus spread was indicative of how intimate people were with each other. Turns out there was more intimacy in the world than I imagined in my naivete. I had no idea there was that much body fluid sharing going on.
Now, the contagion is spread through air. Air. What we took for granted has now fallen into the realm of intimacy. I sat in a chair about four feet away from another woman while waiting for an oil change for my car and the woman stood up and moved to another seat. I was the leper, or the potential leper. I have to live with that. If before I lived in a community that largely ignored me, now I’m in an environment where people move away from me.
