Already Alone
Social Distancing during a Separation
I feel alone in this time of pandemic, but I have felt alone for months. My husband travels internationally for his job, and, at the end of January, he returned home from a five-week, globe-spanning trip that included a stop in Hong Kong. At the time, the coronavirus was mostly limited to mainland China, with Hong Kong just beginning to see one or two cases. We called our doctor’s office when he returned to learn what he should or shouldn’t do. The nurse advised him to take his fever every day for two weeks, and to call them if it ever got above 101. Luckily, his temperature never got past 99.9, but, just to be safe, we self-quarantined him in a small apartment above our garage.
Of course, quarantining my husband made it easier for us to tell our five children that we were actually separating.
As I’ve come to understand, emotional separations take place long before physical ones, so that the physical separation, when it happens, is less a drastic change than an inevitable acceptance of a new normal. In this way, marriages are not unlike longtime friendships that slowly dissolve over the years, not the result of a misunderstanding or falling out, just the slow but steady pressure of time and place.
Ours is a common story: two broke but highly educated liberal idealists (idealistic liberals?) meet, fall in love, and get married, committed to a union of equals. Then children arrive, and decisions have to be made about how and where to allocate the family resources. Before our first child was out of diapers, we had jumped headfirst into the gendered roles that have been preordained since the beginning of time: my husband went out into the world to hunt for what we needed to survive, while I gathered our children close to my breast, stoked the fires, and kept us all clothed and fed.
Now that the coronavirus has hit our community, my husband and I find ourselves entrenched not only in social distancing, but also in our separation, and in our gendered roles. From his new home above the garage, he paces all day, headset on, placing calls and drafting business proposals to shepherd his businesses through these uncharted waters. Across the yard, in the kitchen that I still think of “ours” even though he no longer sits at the counter to drink his morning coffee, I bake cookies with our youngest daughter; check in with both of our mothers to make sure they have what they need; and get everyone’s Skype and online learning apps up and running so that our children can keep up with voice lessons, therapy sessions, college applications, and schoolwork. In other words, nothing has changed.
I have been living this new normal for quite some time: I have a great deal of anxiety about the future. I worry about people I love.
My days still include writing, reading, walking my dogs, drinking copious amounts of tea, and watching more episodes of Shameless in a single sitting than I care to admit. Every day I tell myself I will do a more vigorous workout, but I never do. Every day I commit to doing some yoga…and sometimes I do. Every day I commit to eating more vegetables and less toast with honey…
with mixed results. Langston Hughes once admitted that he couldn’t write through his depression, that he allowed himself fallow periods when he was feeling low, knowing that he would be productive when his mood improved. I suppose I should be grateful that I have kept writing, but it is clear that I can’t cook through a depression. Julienning kale seems to require a joy that I can’t muster, but I have become the kind of person who buys broccoli florets in plastic baggies in spite of what she knows about the harmful effects of plastics. Most days I meditate. I cry when I need to; I lean heavily on my people.
Strengthening my resiliency is no longer something I give lip service to — it’s something I must actively prioritize every day. Meditation apps have helped. Being outside, especially first thing in the morning or at sunset, even if only for a few minutes, is something I can almost always manage even if I don’t have the energy for a proper walk. And, sometimes, if the fear and despair are so strong that I can’t get any distance from my emotions, I simply sit and cry and try to narrate to myself the experience of crying: my stomach hurts, now my jaw. I can feel the tears on my neck. My eyelids itch. It’s a meditative technique that doesn’t require me to control my actions, only to give myself permission to notice them, to take inventory of what is happening in my body. Sometimes that’s the best I can do.
