It would be a lie to say that I have had a good week. Not that it’s been completely awful, either. But the gods seem to have decided that I was due for a little drowning, a little you-are-only-as-good-as-your-family’s-needs episode.
As I think I mentioned last time, my husband recently had shoulder surgery. Which means, of course, that somebody needed to be home with him for a few days, to help him get dressed, and shower, and all those nursing home things that I thought wouldn’t be part of our life for another twenty years. Thirty if we’re lucky. Someone also needed to drop off the boys at the school bus stop every morning. And to do all the post-dinner clean up that is usually my better half’s job. And to be in Brooklyn at 7:30 am on Sunday for the nine-year-old (seemingly weekly??) soccer tournament. Followed by the 3 pm six-year-old class bowling party. Not to forget the weekend laundry running and folding.
I’ll let you guess who that someone was. Definitely not the nurse who would have undoubtedly sent to our house for twice daily visits in France. As it happens, my husband was sent home a mere two hours after waking up from anesthesia, with nothing more than a brace, a painkiller prescription, and some words of encouragement. It was up to him to figure out that he wasn’t going to be able to get dressed on his own for a couple of weeks, and that sleeping on his back would prove to be impossible. Up to him, also, to figure out how to change his bandage twice daily after the first week. All he got was mail-in supplies that came with a small, one-video screen device with instructions for a different product than what we had. And a few packets of loose collagen powder that is supposed to magically stay on his arm while applying the too-small bandage on top. I guess this is what private equity medicine looks like. Whatever it is, I have been in charge of it, and I have not done a good job. I did not receive a degree in nursing, but I guess it could now be attempted and might come in handy in do-it-yourself medical America.
Then came the virus attacks. Those guys always show up at the best moment, don’t they. Last week, on my way to picking up my husband from the hospital, my eye was scratching a little. Then I got that text from my son asking if he could come home from school. He’d been feeling miserable since coming back from a school trip. Suddenly I had two sick or injured people at home. And I was starting to not feel perfect myself. The next day, both my eyes were bright red and virtually impossible to open. The next, my daughter came back from school with an itchy eye and a sore throat. Soon enough, she was also facing the double-conjunctivitis assault and spent the weekend sleeping and complaining that there was absolutely nothing else she could do. We both ended up at the doctor’s office on Monday, begging for eye drops. And she stayed home, of course. I was hoping that by Wednesday, everybody would be back in the office, or school, with their contact lenses on and a fully restored vision for the entire household.
Alas, that night I was brutally reminded by my Apple calendar that Wednesday would be dedicated to parent-teacher conferences. And that my teenagers would therefore be at home. Alongside my husband, who had planned to go to the office but had now changed his mind. I now had to contemplate the bleak landscape of a dozen Zoom meetings at random times of the day. Some lunch to plan for hungry people. And a boy to take to soccer. What I did not anticipate, though, is the violent rainstorm that unleashed at exactly the time we had to leave for that soccer practice. Which takes place in a high-security religious building where parents are not allowed to enter, condemned to wander aimlessly for an hour, no matter what the outside conditions can be. Whoever planned that joke was not being funny at all.
Thursday came, finally. Which, for better or worse, made it possible for me to sit down and write this post. Butwhere is one supposed to find relief, and personal space, in the middle of weeks or months like these, when all of one’s energy is channeled towards taking care of other people? Why do women somehow always find themselves turning into the shock absorber of whatever virus, or injury, or latest school struggle, befalls the family? I was grateful to be in a position to help my husband, and children, without endangering my own job security. But I also see the trap this could become, as the help I can’t afford while I am not earning enough money, reduces the amount of time I can spend finding work. The things I do need to be done, and I wouldn’t want to not do them. But doing them keeps me away from what I want to do. I know we’ve all been there. And, sadly, many American women, especially, have been there. The help one can get through a robust medical and childcare system in Europe, make this problem a little different for women there, as I have found firsthand over my two years in Paris recently. For those of us who suffer through this situation, I wish I had an answer to this care conundrum, but right now I do not.
Strangely enough, and maybe infuriatingly, the only solution I have found to not lose my mind in the midst of this family chaos, and the larger political chaos that has engulfed the United States as of late, is to focus on my children, my home, and my kitchen. Everything that grounds us in the middle of the storm. With the caveat, of course, that I am sinking even deeper into domestic life and the potential trap I mentioned above. Again, I don’t have the solution. But I know that this week, at the risk of not sounding sane at all, one of the small things that has kept me sane is a humble set of nesting baking bowls.
©MadeleineDiaries
They have been sitting on my kitchen counter since we came back from Vermont, as a promise of the comforting dough-kneading I haven’t been able to engage in since my house has turned into a clinic. Some simple white ceramic bowls, that called my name from their shelf at the Stowe Mercantile. I used them once when we came back, to make banana bread with the brown, mushy mess I found in the kids’ travel backpacks. That’s right, once again I thought that bringing bananas on the trip would be a great idea, only to have them turn into an interesting science lab decay experiment. But they have been untouched ever since, reminding me daily that I meant to photograph them at an advantageous angle for this blog but haven’t found the time. Reminding me, also, that one can always go back to baking when everything falls apart. And that there are good things about America even when you don’t happen to be able to see them sometimes. These bowls keep Vermont in my kitchen, and the Stowe Mercantile.
There are few things I love more than a good old American general store. I might have said that before. And I should write something about my favorite general stores when I have more time and haven’t been boring people for too long already. Suffice it to say that the Stowe Mercantile is one of our family’s favorite places in the Northeast, and that it is always a comforting spot for the whole family. Since my older kids were little, they have always spent their last day at Stowe stocking up on candy from the big glass jars at the end of the store, and lining up to have their bounty weighted on the old-school scale – and priced accordingly, at what I think is a properly scandalous rate. This time, it had been seven years since our last visit. Driving up for six hours for a ski weekend with a third, and then a fourth baby, somehow had lost some appeal. Which means our youngest had never been there, and his brother couldn’t remember it. But they quickly caught up on the candy thing, and I suspect that the Stowe Mercantile will always be a cherished place for them as well. If it’s not, it will be for me, at least. I do not always eat the candy – although I have been known to fill my own paper bag and not easily share. But I will always carry the sights and smells of this quintessentially American place with me. It is one small good thing in the ocean of all the crazy stuff we are immersed in these days. But it is one thing that keeps me going, and for that only I am ever grateful to my nesting bowls.
©MadeleineDiaries
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