Ariel Rivera
Observations About My Mothering In A Pandemic
Some days I am up before everyone else, sneaking out the door for a run, the day’s color-coded schedule already on the wall, twenty-four plastic Pokemon figures ordered from a factory in China frozen into a muffin tin for my kids to excavate with tiny hammers at the breakfast table.
Some days my screen time notification suggests I’ve been on my phone for over half the day! The audacity! Some days I am mentally mailing my children to the Bermuda Triangle. Every night I am white-knuckling it through the 4AM sweaty panic of preemptively missing them and this when it’s over.
My physician brother was hospitalized with Covid pneumonia. He called me from an isolation room, shivering. I held my breath for 48 straight hours. He checked himself out, stubborn, terrified. I cried into a stack of folded, slightly mildewed towels until I turned purple. He recovered. I made eye contact with my kids. He went to work in the Emergency Room of the hospital that treated him. Life, which screams at us like an ambulance siren every 5-7 minutes that it is not promised, goes on, blessedly, for now.
Speaking of which, my neighbor said that Greenwood Cemetery is the new Disney World. My kids slide down actual grassy knolls surrounded by tombstones wearing surgical masks that they pull down to make dandelion wishes. Like footage from WWII or something.
Most of the time if my house were a sandwich it would be the Italian combo from Defonte’s. It’s high tide. A junk drawer. I replace couch pillows and then I walk away and nine times out of ten they’re on the floor when I pass the couch next, and the kids are off crushing toys and papers and crumbs with their bare caveman feet and sending them out in an impressive blast radius. I am not kind about my exasperation, even though the watercolor-painted family bill of rights on the wall reminds me that I should be.
I was driving home from the farmer’s market where I waited in a socially distanced line for heritage bacon when petals from my responsibly-grown forsythia bunches blew out my window as I passed the refrigerator truck morgue parked outside the hospital where my kids were born.
How am I doing? On the fifth week of quarantine my middle son created a tiny clay baby version of himself. He gave up and started over three times —wild, raging. Several days later when it had hardened, he carefully splatter-painted it and let it dry. And then he picked it up and dropped it and it broke into six pieces. He didn’t cry — he who has the Biggest Feelings about the Smallest Things. I — she who Must Fix Everything — was so heartbroken that I masked up and went to the bodega just to get the Krazy Glue which successfully held my clay baby son back together. The next day my husband and I screamed at each other the entire day, gloves off, and I sobbed in front of my children twice. Later they contentedly and quietly painted a box while I drank wine and listened to Bob Dylan. We contain multitudes.
We make toilet paper roll marble runs, egg carton bunnies, mid century modern cardboard houses. We wear swimsuits “on vacation” in the bathtub. We play ping pong in the dining room. We do scavenger hunts, obstacle courses, and team-building exercises like we’re a millennial start-up. We write letters and draw pictures and send them to elderly relatives and friends who are alone. We take walks around the block. My youngest always begs to go home because he’s scared of the wind or because he has Stockholm Syndrome, my middle kid pretends to summon even more wind to create a hurricane/tornado hybrid and my oldest sings the songs we can’t get out of our heads.
And we have rituals we rely on: the 7PM clap to thank healthcare workers and mainline that famous New York electricity through our open windows; my solo Saturday trip to the farmers market to buy groceries and mostly: flowers which I arrange in many vessels at home over the course of the next 7 days, refilling water, snipping stems, and trimming leaves until we’re down to one single vase of remaining flowers the day before I go to the farmers market again; kicking the soccer ball into the neighbor’s backyard and checking to see if its been returned; saying our Highs and Lows around the dinner table.
We want to be seen. We want to be mirrored and we need to be mirrors but we have to believe there will be plenty of time for that. These days the only cure in my house is opposites: rage gets a hug, fear gets a confident dance, doubt gets an extended, reassuring hand. Mothering is providing an antidote until an antibody is produced.
