We’re all still alive. The shorthaired cat we call Tootie may die soon. Let me rephrase: I may throw her out a window, where she will escape and be eaten by a badger or a fisher cat. I’d never heard of a fisher cat before moving to Vermont, but now I know that they are real and they will eat your pets. Good news for me, as I currently need a pet to be eaten. It’s difficult to get any work done when Tootie is climbing on your keyboard and patting your chin with her paw. Have you ever tried to type an email with a cat’s ass in your face? I see some raised hands out there. You know. You know the issues I’m facing here. In truth, I could never hurt my dear kitty. I have an old Baby Bjorn from Boychild’s younger days. I’ll just put her in that and wear her around like a newborn. That would be her paradise. 

Boychild is doing well. He loves being home with us, and I get about a hundred I love you, mamas a day. It’s wonderful. We’re playing, gardening, learning to ride a scooter, and throwing dinosaurs. We can spend a solid hour blowing up a balloon and watching it “pppptttttthhhhhhh” through the house. He’s pretty happy throwing hard plastic items at his parents and running furiously around the yard, house, road, etc. He’s also begun to ask us about our day, which is incredibly charming. “How was your morning, mama?” he’ll ask, all snuggly and cute. I’ll tell him, “well, this morning i sent a bunch of emails and got a bunch of bird photos from the internet.” Then he’ll ask, “Were they under copyright?” and I’ll say, “Nope. Free use, honey.” 

Boychild  asking about our day shows that he’s either interested in us or he’s parroting our interest in him. Both good things. The bad thing is that we’re spending our days with him, so I repeat what we did together. “Well, this morning, we got up at 5am, had a banana, toast, yogurt, and cheese and read a book. Then you watched Gerald McBoing Boing and sat on my chest while I slept on the couch. Then I had some coffee and you got mad at the cat for not wanting you to pet her. Then she scratched you and you cried and I threw the cat out the window.” Then he’ll say, “Oh. So, how was your morning, mama?” And on and on. And on. And. On. 

I’m lucky. I have a family whom I adore and I am not in life-threatening situations every day. My part-time job is fun. My health is good. But. There’s a restlessness I feel that I can’t quite pinpoint. Am I bored? Stressed? Tired? Anxious? Nothing’s, like, acute. It’s all just a sense of I should be doing something that I’m not. I guess there’s no certain future right now, so there’s nothing to plan for, really.  Like a purgatory of mediocrity. It’s laundry. It’s watching the babe blow bubbles. It’s cleaning. It’s whatever. I dunno. Not bad, just, ya know, static. Combine that stasis with a sense of loss that we’re all feeling and that’s a recipe for quarantine. 

Everyone’s getting a little short with each other. In my house, I’m clearly annoyed with our cat. I’m also refusing to read certain books to my child because they annoy me. Tootles the Train is a stupid book and I hate it. I just want Tootles to be happy! Why can’t he run in the fields and roll around in the grass and make daisy chains with the butterflies? The ethos of “staying on the tracks no matter what” deeply offends me. My other friends are getting snippy with their kids, husbands, parents, etc. Have you ever tried to Zoom with someone over 70? It’s brutal. A friend of mine told her sons “you’re grounded.” She’d never grounded her boys before. Ever. After a beat, they all started to laugh. What’s the point of grounding your kids when they can’t go out? It’s all ludicrous. It’s all surreal. I told her that we’re all grounded. We came home past curfew, smellin’ like weed, and the universe grounded the lot of us. The Universe isn’t mad, just disappointed. But she wants us to think about what we’ve done.