Grounded

What is worse than being stuck at home for months during a global pandemic with no end in sight?

Being grounded while stuck at home for months during a global pandemic with no end in sight.

(Well, there in fact are many things which are far, far worse, but I won’t go into that right now, because I’m try to stay firmly over here on the lighter side after hauling myself up from the deep, dark depths of despair in which I’ve been mired of late).

My older daughter has just emerged from her first COVID-induced grounding. My younger one has just emerged from her fourth. I don’t know which harsh, overbearing, unsympathetic adult swooped in and imposed this torture on us all (for it certainly punishes the parents as much as or more than the child)…

Oh, wait. It was me.

While the first two months of lockdown went fairly well (we were prepared! We were creative! We spent Quality Time Together!), the third one took a sharp downhill turn towards abject misery. Zoom had lost its lustre, to say the least. The novelty factor of interacting with the screen in a new way wore off fairly quickly, and as my daughters’ previously busy, happy, social world shrunk and flattened to a small, two-dimensional shadow of its former self, they became anxious and angry, while we grew exhausted and impatient.

Wrestling matches became an hourly occurrence (and the participants were not always minor children). Threats and bribes became a constant, but lost their power almost as quickly: what’s the point of removing a privilege when there are none left to enjoy anyway, for anyone? As parents we quickly realised we had nowhere to go with these increasingly frequent revocations of privilege, just as we had nowhere to go at all in the world, anyway.

Nonetheless, our younger child left us with no alternative when she pranked her sister by offering her a glass of water…. which she had just scooped up out of the toilet. Thankfully it had been flushed and had also been cleaned just that morning (the latter is rather rare in our house, although luckily the former happens with reassuring regularity)… but still! My stomach still churns as I write: because our older child drank that toilet water.

We were completely horrified by the crime of our seven-year-old deviant (and also just a tiny bit impressed with her evil genius), and instantly imposed on her an unprecedented two weeks of no screen time and extra chores. The former would not have been so bad, but it also meant no virtual play dates on that same screen, and that truly crushed her in a way that makes me cringe with guilt even now. We always offer redemption, and she eventually earned her way out of prison on early release for good behaviour, but still, my initial judgement was perhaps overly harsh. Self-doubt and worry stalk us all now more than ever.

So I have a particular sympathy with Gavin Newsom: it’s really very difficult to parent children who are behaving badly. We Californians have been naughty, and so we’ve been sent to our rooms again, locked up, grounded once more. How do you deal with unruly children, when everyone is miserable and the stakes are so high? How do you avoid policing them too heavily, while also keeping them safe from one another? How do you comfort and support and uplift them, while also reprimanding them effectively when they become so self-absorbed they forget to behave kindly to one other?

We, like the small people we once were and whom many of us now parent, need social interaction to be happy and human. Without it, we become feral and angry and creative in our mischief. We turn on our own, brother against brother, bored and resentful little sister against toilet-water-drinking big sister.

We do sometimes need to be grounded. To reflect, to ponder what we’ve done wrong and how we might have done better. To learn from our mistakes. In a time when the world is in freefall, we need to feel grounded too, to know that the ground is — quite literally — right there beneath our feet, offering structure and solidity and a much-needed lower boundary.

As we peered over the precipitously, vertiginously high edges of the Grand Canyon a few weeks ago, the ground below was very, very far away. Sometimes it was so far down we couldn’t even see it. I had been thrilled by that mile-long drop when I’d seen it as a child and in my twenties; in my mid-forties, with boisterous small children whose joy at being a little bit freer meant they occasionally came far too close to fences that were far too small and meagre and even non-existent, it was sickening and terrifying.

It was also completely exhilarating and life-affirming and necessary.

As our world continues to fall apart, with a few well-meaning grownups trying to patch it together with a bit of tape and hope (and far more, less-well-meaning superannuated children trying to break it all apart), the consequences of taking even one false step becomes even scarier and more dangerous. It’s a very long way down to the bottom, and we just keep falling. We all need to know the ground is down there, somewhere, even when it feels very far away. We all need to stand on firmer ground, on solid ground, on common ground.

Last week when (far more briefly, because I’d learned my own lesson) I grounded our older daughter for some rare violence against her sister (she’d finally snapped, and who could blame her?), she went calmly to her room and said she was glad to be grounded and she was going to use her time productively.

Would that we all responded so well to our grounding. Would that we all calmly took our lumps, and found the positive. Would that we all learned and grew from this experience.

Because being grounded is certainly also a positive thing: we are bound to our home and to one another. Tethered together, we keep one another grounded: down-to-earth, secure, happy.

So I try to enjoy this process of being grounded-in-more-ways-than-one. I try to look up and out and beyond this time, backward into memory and ahead into the future. I try to keep dreaming, even as I feel myself tied so firmly down. I remember Theodore Roosevelt’s words: “Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.”

I have nowhere else to be, so this is where I am. On this ground, grounded.

State of Uncertainty

The covers of The New Yorker are usually wryly amusing. They often make me feel witty and cultured, merely by looking at them. (Though equally often they make me feel uncultured, excluded and slightly dim.)

But a couple of months ago, in an unprecedented moment — of which our lives are suddenly, constantly full — the cover made me cry. We are looking over the shoulder of a woman in scrubs as she says goodnight to her children and partner via FaceTime, on her way towards a scene of chaos. In the full-bleed illustration (that’s a fancy publishing way of saying it goes right to the edges and fills the space; no one is actually bleeding because this is not now what happens in an ER), we see gurneys ahead of her, a space full of healthcare workers, brave and bustling, and patients, frightened and alone.

The subtle suggestion is that she is heading into danger and, like her, we don’t know which of our digital interactions with our family will be our last. It’s all a great gamble, a terrifying round of roulette (round after round after relentless round), which we are all being forced to play, whether we are frontline healthcare workers, whose cards are fairly badly stacked against them these days, or whether we are mere mortals. Fate and fortune and the future in general are more fraught with uncertainty than ever before.

Part of this life-and-death lottery with which we are all learning to live is geography — which matters more so now than ever. When I first wrote this piece back in early April (because pretty much everything you will be reading for the next while was written many weeks before I finally get around to posting it, because life is just like that these days, as time becomes amorphous and fluid and weirdly meaningless, yet also vitally important), Georgia’s governor had just made the shocking and profoundly dubious decision to open up the entire state, notwithstanding the graphs showing the rates of infection soaring, Everest-like, toward an unknown peak.

At the time, I thought, aren’t we lucky to live in the Republic of California, where our forward-thinking, science-led leaders are truly looking after us? Mired in this state of uncertainty in which we all find ourselves, constantly and in every area of our lives, I was initially enormously relieved and rather proud to be in this particular state: California, as ever the forefront of progress and progressiveness and all things liberal and lovely, shut down first. We were brave! We were self-sacrificing! We won the “What Shape Is Your Curve?” contest with the flattest curve around!

Silly, silly me.

Because all of those excellent qualities remain true, and yet now here we are, in a Georgia State of Mind… and health. Because, inevitably, we had to reopen, because life goes on. We need to eat and move and do all of the things that make us human. (There is, of course, a wild degree of differentiation about what actually matters to each of us, but I am not here to judge whether your tattoo or highlights are vitally necessary, because I know they are to the person who gives them to you in exchange for money that puts food on their table and keeps a roof over their head. And who am I to judge anyway? We just crossed state lines. From a hot spot! To a hot spot! To visit people over the age of 65! And then a major tourist site! But more on that adventure next time).

So I can now laugh, wryly and sadly (because nearly everything is tinged with some degree of sadness these days) at my smug naïveté. COVID, like death, eventually comes for us all — at least in this crazy country. And I should clarify that I don’t mean that we will all catch it (can you tell I’m having a down day?), but that it will touch us all in some painful and personal way, if it hasn’t already.

California is crashing and burning, slower than New York did but just as surely. We opened ourselves up, to a tentative return to normal. To life. To protests, to collective mourning, to freedom of expression and movement, to pleasures and griefs both great and small.

And now we are paying the price. For living, for others’ poor choices, for our neighbours who live down the road but may as well come from another planet.

It is sad that every action has now become so judgement-worthy, so divisive, so indicative of who we are and how we vote.

It is sad that my far-flung family and friends are all having such profoundly different experiences and facing such dangerously different risks, all because of an accident of geography.

It is all just very sad. Indeed, it is becoming pathetic and pitiful. (For a brilliant piece on how the world now pities America, see Fintan O’Toole’s incredible piece in the Irish Times; he says it all so much better than I ever could).

So, what state are you in these days, other than a semi-permanent state of sadness?

New York, New York? I don’t want to be a part of it. Not at all. My brother fled the city with his partner just in time, and rightly so, to live in his in-laws’ Massachusetts basement for the duration. They can make it anywhere, just not there. Not now. (Though as the extraordinary people of New York climb their way out of their nightmare in a positively European fashion, their city looks vastly more appealing than ours, here in the deeply divided, downright dangerous OC).

Carolina on your mind? It’s very much on mine, because my mother lives there. Out of all the suffering Sunbelt states, the northern one (and for anyone unlucky enough never to have lived in North Carolina, the differences between it and the southern one are vast and, these days, life-or-death) seems to be doing marginally better, at least in my mother’s city, thank goodness (though what is true today may well change by tomorrow, so that tentative relief is also uncertain).

Fancy some moonlight in Vermont? In this increasingly fraught time, it would seem that those of who have the good luck to live somewhere quiet and well-led stand the best chance of recovering soonest from this insane onslaught — and there liveth my sister and her family, down a peaceful country lane outside a serenely small hamlet, which in turn lies just outside the diminutively dainty capital of Montpelier (population 7,436). So while she is a physician on the frontlines, her battles have been remarkably quiet and small and safe. Thank you, Bernie and friends.

Arizona, anyone? By the time we got to Phoenix, it was a hot mess…

And by the time we got back home to California, dreamin’ was all we could do: our previously beautifully flattened curve now looks like the sheer vertical trajectory of a rocket ship destined for the outer reaches of space and all the unfathomable mysteries contained therein.

Whatever dis-united state (or luckier land), you chance to live in, it is certain that you are living with a profound and soul-altering state of uncertainty.

But whatever state you are in, I hope that you also find yourself — at least in those small moments that we cling to so tightly to carry us through — in a state of grace.

Because some amazing grace — and luck and cataclysmic change on an epic scale — is what we need.

Now, please.

Not Silent

This is not my moment to speak, so I have been deliberately quiet these last weeks.

But I have not been silent.

I am reading and reflecting, learning and listening. I am also taking actions that might be louder than words: I am donating, signing petitions, striving for solidarity. I have done all of this for many years, yet I am painfully aware that it is still not enough — especially now.

The road to all this trouble we are in is paved with good intentions, much like mine. So I intend, now, to do better, be better, be more.

More active. More receptive. More self-aware. More aware of others’ struggles, and more constantly sympathetic to them.

More committed to change, more helpful in making it happen.

More is, after all, more.

We need more equality.

More freedom.

More justice.

More understanding.

More peace.

More love.

Let us all work together to make those things happen, so that the next Juneteenth — which we should all celebrate together as a national day — is a happier, better day than today. This should be a day of celebration, but also one of reckoning, of sharing joy about how far we have come, but also acknowledging how far we have yet to go.

Let us work, and let us hope.

Let us never be silent again.