Do you ever feel like, just when you have everything under control and are the master of your fate, fate pulls the rug out from under you? Of course you do, because that is a hallmark of living on planet earth. It actually makes me believe in an evil force -- a devil if you will -- because the timing of it is always just so freaking perfect. A professional spy couldn't plan sabotage any better.
So as you may recall, a few days ago I was waxing purple on the new peace I'd found amid COVID? It was lovely. And then this happened:
Yes, we have a serious leak somewhere in between the kitchen and formal dining room. It started when I went over to that corner of the room for something and noticed the carpet was wet under my feet. Really wet. We moved the furniture, pulled up the carpet and pad, and found a soaked area about two feet by three feet.
(In a completely unrelated but kind of cool anecdote, I once had a friend with this issue who noticed the problem when mushrooms started growing out of her carpet in a little-used guest room.)
The good news? It's water, not sewage or grey water from the sink. The bad news? It's still slowly leaking, and the one plumber we've had in just said he had no idea where the leak was coming from, and just suggested a mold remediation company to clean up. Which would be great if, in fact, the leak had been stopped.
We called the insurance company (our insurance company is USAA, and can I just say we have left a phone message AND filled out a claim, and have heard nothing in 48 hours. Guess you never know who your friends really are until you need them).
We called a second plumber, who will come on Monday morning, and in the meantime, we live with it and keep fans on it to help it stay dry. We may end up having to hire a contractor to tear into the area, bit by bit, until he finds what it is.
And so here I am breathing and trying to stay at peace through another challenge. It's surely going to be the Murphy's Law of the next year or so...."if the COVID don't get you, the (fill in the black) will."
In our case, the water leak will. Ah well. This too shall pass.
So Big Ag and I are officially in our 12th week of Confinement In The Time of COVID (which would be a great title for a novel if I didn't think 120,000 people were already working on their own novel under the same working title, since so many of us are now home and have the time to pen their Great American Novel).
We've got enough miles in the rearview mirror now that I feel like I can look back, in retrospective fashion, on the evolution of this whole weird, endtimes-ish experience, and see my progress from the beginning until now. Not to imply that it's over. Oh, not by a longshot. At best, we're at the end of Act One of a play of unknown length (and genre).
Month One I was afraid. It was that feeling of going up that long, first climb on a rollercoaster and knowing you're on the ride -- the steep downhill drop coming up -- for the duration. I stayed up too late (too keyed up to sleep), drank too much wine and was subject to trap-door depressions that were very hard to get out of.
In the midst of that first month, my eldest son got a probable case of COVID and we had to watch from afar while he rallied and relapsed over about a month's time.
Month Two I was angry. Angry at the deniers, the "open up" protestors, and angry at the President and almost everything that came out of his piehole during his so called press briefings on the crisis. Also, I fell slightly in love with Andrew Cuomo during this time. But mostly I was just irritable. Andrew would not have been impressed.
So here we are in Week 12 of a global pandemic where we've lost a quarter of a million souls who were all alive on New Year's Day. And I'm not sure how, but lately I find myself going about my days and into my nights with a strange new, weird kind of peace. Not feeling at peace with the lives lost or damaged, of course. But at peace with my place in the world, and the knowledge of my own personal limits to change the course of this virus, or others' behavior.
The trap-door depressions are gone, as are the feelings of helplessness and frustration.
But where is all this peace coming from?
I think it's a combination of adjustment and acceptance. And also, a forced scaling-down of my life to a very easy and undemanding place. To use a cliche, I've noticed I do "stop and smell the roses" more. Without regular lunches out on the town with new friends, I have living room zoom cocktail hours more with friends and family. Bit Ag and I sit and have breakfast, lunch and dinner together almost every day now, which we've literally never done except on vacations. And it's all been great.
The garden is producing plenty of great, fresh food right now -- onions, broccoli, strawberries, spinach and peas, so there's more on the menu. I've also gotten better at just living without whatever the store seems to be out of on any given day. I do plenty of home improvement projects, but on a more relaxed timeframe than I used to hold myself to. I guess I've realized there's no point in the projects if you don't stop and enjoy what progress you've made already.
Somewhere through all this, the house was able to become less of an ongoing makeover and more of a home, to just be relaxed in and enjoyed.
And, somehow, the repetition of the days, instead of being a source of frustration, is now a comfort. Tomorrow I will rise, I will work and then I will rest. All without artificial deadlines -- without a calendar or a clock to take me to task. The calendar and clock don't means as much as they used to anymore.
And what doesn't get done this week will get done next week, because there's nothing on next week's calendar either. It's a strange time to be sure, but within the strangeness, what a sense of quiet and peace, if I only remember to seek that out instead of my to-do list.
Gabriel Garcia Lorca may have found Love in the Time of Cholera, but I seem to have found Peace in the Time of Pandemic. Hope you have, too. But if you haven't I wouldn't worry, because the playbook for what we're going through is literally being written as we live it. There's no correct or incorrect response to it all.
Well, I'm guessing this is probably going to be the most...uh...different Mother's Day any of us have experienced en masse, ever. Oh sure, we've all had Mother's Days that were a bit off. Maybe you had a sick kid, or were sick yourself, or you had that first strange Mother's Day after your own mother had passed.
But these days whenever they say, "we're all in this together,"(which is pretty much all the time now; somehow this became the official hashtag of 2020) on this weekend that fact holds especially true. We're all in this strange, new, slightly uncomfortable place -- together. But also apart.
Including some moms and kids.
I haven't always had all my kids (two steps, one bio) with me on Mother's Day since they all grew up and spread their wings; but I often had the option to travel to see one or more of them. Or sometimes they came to me. Getting to celebrate Mother's Day with your adult kids is a pleasure not to be missed, in my opinion. All the pleasure and none of the secret work.
Secret work, you say? Oh yes. Secret work involves eating the undercooked eggs and overcooked toast your nine-year old brings you, smiling like it's the best thing you've ever had. And then cleaning the scalded egg pan afterwards, because no one gets it clean quite like you do, including your husband. Secret work is finding the right gift to suggest to them (usually homemade) because you know just how much they can actually afford to spend and don't want them to exceed that and deprive themselves of anything.
But once they're grown, it's all up to them. I flew down to see my oldest son last year and we went to brunch at The Sagebrush Cantina in Calabasas, a place I spent many, many nights when I was younger and have absolutely no memories of. (That's how good those days were.)
But over time, the Sagebrush, like everything else in Los Angeles, has gentrified. Now the sawdust on the floor is gone and the Sagebrush does an amazing brunch, so my son and I ate our fill of waffles, shrimp and crab's legs, and perfectly done eggs benedict, then moseyed up to the special tequila bar they'd set up just for Mom (a.k.a. me!). And my son and I shared a celebratory shot of tequila sweetened with something delicious and watermelon-y. New memories, and ones that I will actually remember.
And I thought, "this is the day I was waiting for, all those years ago." That's right, that day when he grabbed all the cat turds out of the litter box and drew little brown cat-turd portraits all over the laundry room wall while I wasn't looking. The day he took a magic market to my favorite quilt while I was grading papers. The days he came home from first grade crying and I realized the best thing would be to hold him back another year to reduce his stress levels and let him catch up academically.
Those days, I dreamed of some future day I could raise a glass, smile at him and think, "well, we made it." Ditto for my stepkids. Stepmoms usually need to earn the right to be called "Mom," and that's not always an easy road. You're the third or fourth wheel the poor kids got in the divorce game of Parent Roulette, and you not only have to worry about instilling discipline and order, you also have to worry about being liked. That's a tough road to travel, and the day your stepkids start spontaneously telling you they love you is a day of honor, believe me.
So to the parents of adult kids, moms, and anyone who is like-a-mom to someone, let's look forward to future brunches and a time when the family can all be together. And to the moms of little ones, your day is coming, too. Smile and throw those undercooked eggs in the microwave for 30 seconds, scrape the soot off the toast, and just know that you're loved.
It won't always be cat turd pictures and magic marker-ed quilts, luckily. Time will fly, and before you know it, it will be all about the watermelon tequila shots and eggs benedict. And if they're well into their 20's, you won't even have to worry whether they have enough dough to pick up the tab.
Happy Mother's Day, all!
