The Day Covid Found the Crack Between My Mask and My Heart

Apr 14, 2022

It's Tuesday, March 29. Dan and I are on a plane headed east to visit our baby girl at college.

I call her my baby girl, but she's twenty, and from the moment she arrived on this earth she's been fiercely certain. When she was one, she'd throw me a look that disarmed me. I wrote this poem about it:

I know who I am

And what I want

And it is not this.

Because I was raised in a family and an era where children were to be compliant, I'd smile at her and say, "I see your angry face. Can you show me your happy face?" But then and now I recognize in that angry face the same look I myself threw out at the world when I was too tiny to have yet been made malleable. This girl of mine is second, third, fourth, ninth generation fierce. Frequently, I am in awe of her.

_____

She choreographed "Into the Woods," the spring show on campus, and we're flying out to see it and her. To simulate home we've rented an AirBnb and she plans to spend all four nights bunking with us.

At our layover in Salt Lake we get a text from her: "Just so you know, a cast member tested positive and is isolating. We're all taking tests." Dan and I glance at each other. My mother and I are at a higher risk of harm if we get the virus. For two years Dan, my mom, and I have actively avoided connecting with anyone in such a circumstance. For two years we've hardly left our house much, frankly. We're vaccinated and boosted. And we've diligently masked whenever we've gone anywhere.

We land, get our rental car, and zip over to campus. This youngest of ours, now a college junior, has spent much of these last three years away from us, making her way through the tribulations of young adult life amid Covid. It's devastated her, at times, this forced separation in a stage of life when all you want is to climb all over each other. I'm amazed at how she's coped. But it's taken its toll, and we are here for her show, and also to be ballast, a safe harbor, a clearing into which she can run and feel both safe and seen.

It's early evening when we round the bend to the student union plaza. She notices us coming exactly as we pick her out of the crowd, and I can feel the neurons in all three of us perk up with anticipation, like dogs wagging their tails. We quicken our pace. We embrace her. Dan first, followed by me. Covid concerns give way to this yearning to embrace our sweet child. "I can wear a mask if you want," she says. "I won't get my results back for up to 48 hours."

_____

We look at each other and slowly shake our heads. "We're here to be with YOU," we say. She goes off to rehearsal and we go off to the AirBnb and unpack. We get back in the car and mask up for the grocery store, proud of ourselves for no longer being parents who argue over what our grown children like best, and for not over-shopping, just confident that we are now practiced at the art of visiting a twenty-something, that we know after trial and error that we don't have to shower her with food or attention, that just to be near and with is the gift we bring and what she desires.

We return to the AirBnb and Dan checks his email. His office has just begun requiring employees to come into the office three days a week. Someone he was in a meeting with yesterday tested positive. He is now to work from home for five days, which is just fine since we are traveling anyway.

It's hours later. Our daughter texts, "I'm done!" I reply, "Are you hungry?" "YES." "How hungry?" "VERY." Dan drives to campus to get her. I stay behind to craft a culinary reminder of home. A hot sandwich of filet mignon and white cheddar on toast. She always complains about the fruit at her college, so we've bought bounteous amounts of berries, and now a bowl of them sits to the side of the sandwich.

She gobbles it down. We drink her in. We stretch and yawn and say our goodnights.

_____

It's Wednesday. She has sniffles. Probably allergies? Spring is in bloom here and a thin film of yellow pollen is draped on everything. There are no results from her test, yet. "They only contact you if it's positive." Seems to be the way this goes, here.

We drive our girl to campus for classes and rehearsals, and do our own work on our laptops while she is gone. When she texts that she's ready to be picked up, Dan and I go together to gather her up again, not wanting to miss out on a morsel of an update about how things are going in her busy life. We return her to our AirBnb and watch her favorite episodes of Schitt's Creek snuggled into the plush couch like a three-headed amoeba.

It's Thursday. She's taking DayQuill because she feels crappy. No word about her test, which all but guarantees it's negative.

It's Friday. The three of us sit together, masked, at her show which takes place in a campus auditorium. "I did this next part," she'll say periodically as the musical unfolds. I see her body lean and sway along with the rhythms on the stage. I see her face light with delight when a cast member does something particularly right and wonderful. I see the pride she feels for having orchestrated a set of moves other humans make manifest. The cast member who tested positive is masked, as is half the audience.

It's Saturday. I wake with a sore throat. We check out of the AirBnB at ten a.m. and take our girl and two friends to brunch. Then we take her to a rehearsal for a different show, an original play she is acting in, and we wait for her by mooching around this college town. Masked everywhere. We pick her up from rehearsal, get a snack at a campus restaurant, then head to her dorm room where we laze about watching more Schitt's Creek until it's time for us to leave for the airport.

At three, she stands outside her dormitory and waves as we walk down the path toward the center of campus beyond which is the parking garage. Long ago I taught the kids "we're wavers," which means that when someone has come to visit and is now leaving, we stand at the end of our driveway and wave until we cannot see their car anymore. As Dan and I walk to the car I keep turning around and our baby is still waving and she continues to wave until we have rounded the corner. It fetches a tear when I see her standing there on her makeshift driveway, this pathway that leads to her home far away from home.

_____

We fly back to San Francisco, with a stop in Los Angeles this time. I watch the last few minutes of the Duke v. North Carolina final four game in an LAX bar. We arrive back at our house around midnight. After a long day of travel my mask finally comes off. I hug and kiss our eldest, our twenty-two year old son, who has waited up for us.

_____

Sunday morning I feel like shit. It's a bad sore throat and a tiredness that sits upon me like the weight of a hundred blankets. Dan organizes the various pieces of the rapid test kit and I plunge swabs deep into each of my nostrils. I go back to bed. Eight minutes into the fifteen minute wait period Dan says, "Uh oh."

I notify our baby, who takes a rapid test in her dorm and it comes back positive. Dan helps her figure out where she is supposed to go and what she is supposed to do. And he moves himself into her vacant bedroom.

Dan feels ill soon after I do, and tests negative. Our son, who works as an aide in a local school district which is now on spring break, becomes our caretaker. He brings plates and drinks to our doors. Goes shopping for NyQuil. I watch his emotions move from worry, to infuriation that his spring break plans have been so dashed, to solicitous and even munificent. I think of the time when he was a toddler with pneumonia, and to help him sleep I'd settle into an armchair for the night, with him snuggled practically upright against my chest and shoulder to assist his labored breathing.

I think of my mother.

_____

My mother, eighty-three and fierce, too, is co-owner of this property, and lives in an attached cottage. We are determined to keep this from her.

I have fever for only two days. I feel restless after five. The lethargy is now the weight of only ten blankets. Dan is still across the hall, we are still not certain that what he has is Covid. We keep behind closed doors.

On Sunday April 10, Dan tests positive.

On Monday April 11th, I resume my morning coffee with mom, masked, distanced, outdoors. My only job right now is to protect her from these germs.

On Tuesday April 12th, our son comes down with a high fever. Sore throat. Cough. The tables turn. We now serve his needs. A role that is more welcome and familiar.

On Wednesday our son tests negative.

On Thursday he tests positive.

_____

A few months ago, I tempted the universe by saying "We're probably all going to get this thing." And so I did. I made my choices. I did what I needed to do in the moment. The cruelest thing about this virus, other than that it kills us, is that in order to remain safe from it we have to keep ourselves from each other. Yet humans need humans in order to thrive. I'm glad I'm alive. I'm glad I'm a mother. I'm glad for my mother. I'm grateful for the vaccine flowing through my bloodstream as I know it made my road an easy one. Once Dan and I know we have had and are recovering from the same thing we unmask and kiss ravenously. Isn't life a love story?

_____

The house is still not well. But we are on the mend.

What is your Covid story?

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