Your mum?

Last month we flew to London with our children and all our parents for a family wedding. It felt surreal as it was happening, to hover over an ocean with the kids asleep in my lap, the very concept of an airplane felt surreal, felt wrong, won’t somebody please get my babies down safely from this metal can in the sky? It still feels surreal to me, as if I am viewing it back through fogged glass, which in a way I am because I got Covid. We all got Covid, after nearly two-and-a-half years of dodging it, and it turned out all we had to do was enter an airport, enter a plane, travel to a large city where no one is wearing masks, get sloppy with our own mask-wearing, ride the city’s public transportation, dine inside its restaurants, let our small children touch everything in its toy stores and transit museums, attend indoor social gatherings of more than fifty people, all the while saying to ourselves, this is fine! This is totally fine, this is pleasant, it’s nice how wearing a mask isn’t, like, an identity here. Dumb. I am approximately the five hundred millionth person in the world to have caught Covid and still it felt uniquely terrible to lick the back of the spoon after I made the kids their PB&Js on Day 5 and taste nothing. Today I tested negative at last and can more or less taste things and if somewhere in the greasy Tupperware of toxic sludge that now passes for my brain I have a distant worry that the virus has lodged in our cells like a mine and will at some unforeseen future moment detonate our bodies, well, that’s on me for reading the dark prophecies of unverified Twitter users with thirty-two followers for fun at two a.m. Why suffer twice? is a philosophy I am lately trying to apply to my worries. (“Glad I didn’t suffer twice!”—me, as my body detonates.)

In London, our vehicle-obsessed son asked to sit alone at the top of the double-decker bus because “[he] just [needed] a little privacy.” Watched the cars pass below, communed with the traffic, his almost three-year-old legs sticking out so straight. Our daughter climbed to the top of the crow’s nest of the enormous pirate ship in the Diana playground in Kensington Gardens and beamed down at me and I gave her two thumbs up, proud mom, chill mom, definitely not suffering twice. We ate unfamiliar chocolate bars and read inscrutable issues of Hello! At the very posh wedding they sang “Jerusalem” and many ladies wore hats. I was introduced to a member of Parliament while holding mini beef Wellingtons in each hand. Kevin and I went out for seafood and pisco sours and wandered around admiring the architecture, and a group of lads rode past us on bikes. “Do you know who lives in that house?” asked the leader of his mates, gesturing to the house at which we’d just been gazing, and one of them said, “Your mum?” and the leader said, “No, the creator of Peppa Pig!” We drove to Dorset and ate fish & chips and on a rainy afternoon in the Airbnb I read my girl an old copy of James and the Giant Peach we found on the shelf, nearly every chapter of which reduced her to hysterical giggles. Was this memory alone worth Covid? I think so! Maybe! Ask me again during detonation.

Still, between the virus and the parenting and most especially the cursed device I routinely carry around on my person, I’ve been feeling more unglued than usual. I took fewer pictures in England than I would have liked to, wrote almost nothing down, struggled to stay in the moment. Most moments I was thinking of future moments, the potential crises contained within, the snacks required to diffuse said crises. On our drive we stopped at the house in Chawton in which Jane Austen wrote her novels and the overtired children clung to me like shadows and I knew that at another time in my life I would have felt awestruck and mystical, which made it especially hard at this time in my life to feel like let’s buy me a pen and get the fuck out of here. I am still having stress dreams in which we have to somehow pack up all our shit and get back on the plane. It is so embarrassing to think this much about how I can’t think.

Before we left I went to the cursed device store for a new cursed device, because my old one had no storage left. I bought the simplest version they sell, which the cursed device store employee assured me was perfectly functional, even if it was the one that almost exclusively elderly people use. The transaction was nearly over when she noted wistfully that I was missing out on a few features, i.e. screen size. I said, “That’s okay! I really want to look at my [cursed device] less, so I honestly prefer if it’s not as stimulating.” Up until then we’d been having a particularly pleasant interaction, and I didn’t consider this (I like to look at other things) a controversial position, and again, I was literally in the process of exchanging hundreds of dollars for the cursed device, but: a pall was cast. The cursed device store employee frowned. Stiffly, she handed me my credit card and said, “Well, the only thing I’ll say about that is that you’re living in a technocratic future and you don’t want to get left behind.” One of the most chilling things I’ve ever heard from an actual human being, but the joke’s on me; I caught Covid and spent more than seven hours on my phone the other day!

Happy August; stay safe; touch grass!