Chicken noodle soup and rising from the ashes
I’m upstairs with Gargantubaby — who, now age 6, needs a new nickname (perhaps Gargantufirstgrader) — setting him up to do art. It’s warm the way it always is up here, so I grab one of his bigger books to prop the door open.
Mommy, he says, you can’t do that. You didn’t get my permission.
You’re right, I say, surprised. May I have your permission to use one of your books?
No.
Um. What should I use to prop open the door?
He shrugs. You need to figure that out, he says.
*
GB has a routine of telling me how much he loves me, which I don’t hate. He often says, Mommy, I love you more than you could ever love me.
No chance, I say.
One night, he says, Mommy, I always wanna be with you. I wanna be with you even when you’re in the bathroom.
You are with me even when I’m in the bathroom.
I wish I were a magnet, and you were the fridge, he says. And I would always stick to you.
*
This is Strong Jawline in the morning, stiff and sleepy, descending from the loft in Gargantubaby’s room, where he sleeps on an old futon all by himself attached to three Apple products. I was curled up below with GB. I get endless pleasure from this carousel — who said aging isn’t funny? — but even more pleasure out of how terrible I am to live with.
*
The last few weeks have been a doozy. Although, honestly I can’t think of a time during the last six years when the previous few weeks were not a doozy.
First, I quit my job, after a trying two years that involved a lot of unexpected personal growth and Putting On Of Big Girl Pants CAN’T WE BE DONE WITH PERSONAL GROWTH FOR GOD’S SAKE I’LL BE 50 IN THREE YEARS. For the following two weeks, I mostly planned my going-away party, which I hosted at our house and which happened on a Thursday and involved all the things a party involves: planning, inviting, cleaning, demanding that Strong Jawline clean up the backyard, multiple Costco runs, mixing massive amounts of palomas. To my former colleagues: I LOVE YOU, thank you for the gifts, flowers, and wine and for buttonholing me to say incredibly kind things. That Saturday, my parents, my brother HI JESSE and my sister-in-law arrived; my brother and sister-in-law live in China, and we hadn’t seen them since before the pandemic because of China’s wildly successful no-COVID policy. All the following week we stayed in a rental cabin in Arnold, where ONE OF US I WON’T SAY WHO COUGHED THE WHOLE WEEK OK IT WAS ANDY WARHOL. Tuesday was my kid’s real birthday, so we celebrated (planning, shopping, wrapping, packing, decorating, baking, cleaning up). We all drove back the next Saturday, and then Sunday morning was my kid’s birthday party, with 40 people in a local park (planning, reserving, inviting, calling, texting, shopping, decorating, carrying, cleaning up). Monday my family flew back; Tuesday SJ and I packed for a camping trip that was supposed to start Wednesday near a beautiful waterfall, except early that morning I tested positive for COVID, and GB — and my mom, and my dad — tested positive in the following days. On Day 4 of isolating in the bedroom, I woke up with a full-body rash — from my neck to my knees — and discovered that my first drug allergy, at age 46, is, you guessed it: Paxlovid!
Have you ever been stuck in a room with a 6-year-old for five days, part of that time with a full-body rash? (Maybe you have, because COVID!) It’s so fun! I wouldn’t trade it for the world, especially, for example, for not being stuck in a room with a 6-year-old for five days! I started this blog post trying to write through my son’s complaints about me typing: Oooh, I can hear the clicking of that. I think the clicking is making me nauseous. It’s the same click over and over again.
Then, after he phoned in his breakfast order (OK, one cute thing about that week was GB calling his dad every morning and ordering room service), he happily narrated his consumption of the fruit salad SJ brought him in bed: Just a delicious plum. A DELICIOUS plum. Banana with plum! With apple. There’s just lots of soft fruit in here. Hum, hum, hum! Hum, hum, hum!
After the week was over, we were still testing positive so we missed the vacation that was meant to come after the camping trip, SJ’s annual family reunion, which this year was on the Oregon coast, which at this point I will never, ever see.
I’ve been looking for the silver lining. I have. Although I’m excited AF to start as the West Coast copy editor for The Guardian US YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW EXCITED I AM, I’m aware I’m going into the firehose of a new job without having truly gotten away this year. But I did use the time to “prepare the house,” using every minute I wasn’t blinking through brain fog, shivering, or coughing to put up coat hooks (and by that I mean harassing SJ to put up coat hooks, since he also was at loose ends because COVID ruined his vacations, too) and hat hooks, putting together a shelving unit in the garage for our new Costco habit, giving away all the furniture we’ve finally accepted will never make it from the garage into the house, hanging all the pictures that have been stacked in the hallway, getting someone in to clean the carpets (after we tested negative, I’m not an animal!), and generally taking care of some house projects I’d been putting off because I didn’t really know how to do them or didn’t really want to. So there’s that.
*
Before I got COVID, I was complaining to SJ about perimenopause symptoms and how none of them are good: rash, fatigue, nausea, brain fog (pretty similar to COVID, as it happens).
Why can’t a symptom ever be good? I whined.
SJ: Yeah! Like, unexplained giddiness. Or, a sudden ability to save money.
*
I tell SJ about all these silly contestants on The Ultimatum: Queer Love, who are trying to decide whether to put out in their trial marriages and saying things like, I want someone to be able to tell me they want to be with me for the rest of my life.
Jenny: Jesus! All you need is somebody you get along with pretty well.
SJ: We should star in our own reality show: Time to Settle.
*
SJ, after a lifetime of no interest in sports, develops a sudden need to watch live Women’s World Cup games. I’m baffled and sort of charmed. His whole family, like mine, is sports-averse.
Jenny: Have you ever even been to a professional sports game?
SJ: Yeah, once, I think? My dad took me to a Portland Trailblazers game in the 1970s. We sat for the national anthem and spent most of the time trying to find unlocked doors.
*
SJ: Want to have sex? It doesn’t have to be very good.
*
One last thing has been keeping us in stitches these days: SJ’s trailcam.
Sometime last year, SJ decided to get creative about figuring out exactly which vermin are poaching the apples and vegetables in the backyard, and he ordered a trailcam. It’s a box about the size and shape of his hand, a couple inches thick, decorated in a camo pattern. It takes black-and-white photos that are triggered by motion.
When he was still learning how to use it, he saw the cats sleeping on our bed and set up the trailcam on a bookcase at the foot, hoping to catch them move. But he didn’t tell me, so after I’d crawled into bed that night, I looked over the top of my book to see a not-very-hidden camera pointed at me, and wondered if I had in fact married a pervert (no such luck).
A year later, he keeps hiding this fucking thing in the garden and not telling me. He also sometimes leaves it around the house and forgets to turn it off, with the camera facing the ceiling, which means if something passes above it — something such as me, or him, or our son — it takes secret pictures that, as it happens, make all of us look very much like the vermin it was intended to catch.
*
Normally, when my son is ready to fall asleep, he slides his head off my shoulder and turns his back to me, his right arm turned backward and still draped across me. But one night, somehow, we curl up face-to-face in the dark, and I realize he’s still a little baby — my Gargantubaby.
He fights to keep his eyes open. I watch him, our noses a few inches apart, as he looks at something on the wall over my left shoulder. His eyelids droop, close, and stay closed for a moment. Then they flip open and he focuses on the wall again, and this repeats for a few times, until he finally turns over, and I pull his back into my chest, and I’m the big, big, big, big spoon to his little bare-chested spoon in Minecraft pajama leggings, and my baby falls asleep.
*
It’s true that I made this chicken stock myself months ago with lemons and fresh herbs from our backyard (rosemary, and maybe both oregano and thyme), but it’s also true that SJ grew those herbs and that he made this soup simply because I asked for it because I was so sick. For six days he did all the shopping and the cleaning and lots of child care and was on call for endless cups of tea and cut-up watermelon and sandwiches and trips to the pharmacy and the corner store and basically I’m going to keep pretending I have COVID to see how long this lasts.
You need:
Chicken stock (boil chicken carcass with lots of yummy things: a whole lemon with juice, salt, pepper, fresh herbs)
Handful of rotini
Cut-up mushrooms, celery, and carrots
You need to:
Put it all together to cook (if you season the chicken stock well, there’s really nothing more to it) and then deliver it steaming hot on a tray for your wife with a big glass of red wine and sourdough bread slathered with butter, plus cinnamon/ginger toast for your son. Et voila.