SOL

So, this whole pandemic pandemonium is terrifying, right?

It is my nature to always turn to the light, to try to find something positive to focus on. This pandemic makes it harder and harder to find or create beauty and sparkles, but I can’t help it. Like a slot machine, my brain keeps spinning until it finds the jackpot of something positive to focus on.

Marci’s Brain Sample:

It’s raining again! The flowers will be especially vibrant this year!

Someone spilled red Gatorade all over my favorite duvet! Well, now I have the fond memory of family movie nights in my bed forever stained on my favorite monogrammed linen duvet.

It’s a global pandemic! … This one is harder to find a landing spot. I’ve planted tomato seeds and rejoiced when the tender sprouts burst through the soil. I have cheered on my flowers that are bursting and blooming in my greenhouse. I play my piano, write up a storm, teach myself to stencil, to play the mandolin…

Still, my panic attacks and sleepless nights, don’t stop.

And then there are the school closings.

I see a constant barrage of posts online about how terrible it is to have the kids home from school, how hard it is, impossible to work, etc.

So I felt almost ashamed to admit my own opinion on this matter, but then I thought, what the heck.

I LOVE HAVING MY KIDS HOME!!

Is that completely crazy of me?

I absolutely love it. I love sleeping a little later, putting on our sweats and fuzzy slippers and stumbling downstairs to make my famous pumpkin muffins so the whole house smells like pumpkins and cinnamon and melted chocolate. Baking is my stress reliever and the kids love eating them, so it’s a win-win.

Most of all I love knowing we three will be together all day and all night.

I know my babies are safe and warm and close for today. Knowing this is like a soft cozy blanket on my heart.

(Or a warm melted chocolate muffin in my mouth–same feeling.)

They are growing teenagers, so my days knowing these things are numbered. (Note to self: need more muffins)

I will blink my eyes and they will be adults and I will no longer be able to watch over them.

I value their education of course, but when they are in school, they Barely have time to eat dinner with me, much less memorize poems, and really, shouldn’t everybody have a few amazing poems they can rattle off over a bottle of wine with someone they love? When they are over 21!! They typically ridicule my poetry and staunchly refuse when I assign them poems, but then I overhear them reciting or singing their own poems when they don’t know I’m listening and I smile to myself while eating a muffin.

I know the entire point of parenting is to raise them to have wings so strong and brave and majestic that they fly off on their own and flourish. I call it the cruel dialectic of parenting— if I do my job right, they will leave.

These miraculous beings that I cherish and love and protect and hold and love with my whole heart and soul and being will slowly stretch their wings, then flutter, then flap, and finally fly away.

It’s crushing and cruel and also so beautiful. It teaches that damn lesson life seems to bang me over the head with again and again—the lesson of letting go.

Because when you really boil it down to its essence, isn’t all of life loving and letting go? Loving with your whole heart, soul, body, but staying open wide to let your beloveds fly away when they are ready.

Sigh.

It’s terrifying and beautiful.

It’s heartbreaking and wonderful.

It’s staggering and stunning.

Like a gorgeous translucent wave that crashes on the shore and disappears.

The most beautiful flower you’ve ever seen blooming for a night, then dying.

A spoonful of pumpkin batter baked to golden perfection, then poof! It’s gone.

Here and gone.

Here and gone.

But the love remains.

And the muffin top remains.

And right this moment, the perfect gift that this horrible pandemic has given to me is that most precious of all things: time with my great beloveds.

They are 13 and 16 now, and ferociously independent.

So this quarantine has given me my children back.

We sit down for breakfast together. We make omelets, or waffles with berries and whipped cream. We light candles and talk about their schoolwork for the day, the books they are reading, how they slept, about their dreams. They do their online school, exercise outside or in the living room, water the flowers in the greenhouse, pick up paintbrushes or sit down at the piano. They pull out board games that have been gathering dust for years. We take long walks every day by the sea and talk the entire time. We play basketball, prison rules—meaning no rules! Just make as many baskets as you can. We walk in the rain and stomp through puddles like we did when they were little. We make popcorn and watch movies together and talk about them over dinner.

We wander outside at 11pm to look at the moon and listen to the waves and sing every song we can think of with the word moon in it: Moon River, Moondance, There’s a full moon tonight, Blue Moon, That’s Amore—When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie…

We make a lot of homemade pizzas.

If no one has to get up early, we haul ourselves out of bed for a pajama parade to the kitchen for midnight snacks and a dance party.

I don’t watch the news, but I read the headlines a few times a day and the kids hear various things from their phones. We talk about the realities of the outside world and what we can do to help.

And we take turns breaking down.

I invented a new abbreviation. Instead of LOL I now write SOL—it stands for Sob Out Loud and also means sun in Spanish, so the duo meaning of sobbing out loud followed by a burst of sunshine is pretty perfect.

Because, let’s face it, there’s a lot to sob about right now.

And sometimes you just have to.

But there’s always a burst of sunshine around too.

It’s also a great time to show the kids all those movies from your own childhood.

My kids don’t like to watch anything sad or tragic. I gushed to them about this hilarious comedy called Steel Magnolias —I’d forgotten the whole “cancer dying part” and only remembered the funny one-liners, which just illustrates how my brain edits out the bad and highlights the good. As soon as the character of Shelby went into a coma, my kids looked at me accusingly with tears running down their faces. “I’m sorry!!” I said. “I forgot!”

I lost my movie-picking privileges for a long time after that, but I regained my cachet when I made them watch another of my favorites, The Breakfast Club, which they loved, followed by another favorite, Tombstone, which we all loved.

I’ll be your Huckleberry.

They are finally old enough to watch more of my favorites, like Fried Green Tomatoes, minus that pesky cancer part, Cabaret (minus the Nazis), Thelma and Louise (minus the rape)… Well, maybe we need a few more years to get to more of my favorites. (Or I’ll just skip the parts I don’t want them to see, like when we watched Jurassic Park and I tried to skip the part where the severed arm falls on her head, and I paused it right there, so the severed arm was in full view of the kids who were screaming while I threw my body in front of the tv trying to block it… alas… I thought I had traumatized them forever but now it’s one of their favorite stories to tell over our candlelight dinners.)

Recently Annabelle watched Jojo Rabbit on the plane. I thought, “Really? I hate watching movies with Nazis.” But then I had to watch it, because she said it was her new favorite movie. (While Henry’s new favorite movie is My Cousin Vinny.)

Jojo Rabbit was incredible.

The last thing seen onscreen in the film is a quote by one of my favorite poets, Rainer Maria Rilke. It said:

Let everything happen to you.

Beauty and terror.

Just keep going.

No feeling is final.

Beauty and Terror. Well, the terror is all around outside at the moment, and the beauty is in inside our home, our hearts, and our loves, so I’m going to savor every magical moment.