The Monsters in the Streets

I don't ever want to forget the way I felt last night. 

So much has changed in the four weeks since we entered quarantine. The knuckles on my hands are no longer dry, white and brittle to the touch as they were in the first two weeks. I've become better accustomed to washing my hands though sometimes I forget and I’ve already touched something else and I curse out loud, sometimes in front of the kids. I use paper towels to open doors and to touch the buttons on our communal laundry machines. I carry a large bottle of hand sanitizer with me in the car. I spray disinfectant on everything that I bring into my home, including the bottom of our shoes. I yell at my kids when we take walks to keep six feet distance from people and NOT TO TOUCH anything. We wear masks when we leave the home now and there is a quiet quality to the air outside that is both eerie and surreal for someone used to the hustle and bustle of living in a large city. 

The change to our physical world around us is deafening and profound.  The sadness washes over us when we walk down Clark Street on a Sunday afternoon, where families would stop to view pop up puppet shows and drag queens once spilled out of bars dancing out into the street while antique shoppers buzzed by with new found treasures. 

No more.

All gone. 

Quiet. 

When the rare stranger walks by you now they make expansive rainbow shapes around you with their feet, stepping off the sidewalk into the vacant street to avoid getting too close to you. The windows in the restaurants and shops are covered and closed with signs that either communicate their hopes to reopen soon or the hours when pick-up or delivery can occur. 

Life as we know it is completely changed. 

But I think the change that has surprised me most in the last four weeks is not rooted in the physical  circumstances of our environment but rather the emotional change inside of me. Now I want to be clear, I am not a stranger to emotional uprooting. I have endured significant shifts in my emotional intelligence in the four years since my last post. I have walked through fire and back again on a journey to find myself.  I found the courage to step out of a marriage that was harming me, shattered my family's expectations and visions of me and picked up the pieces to form a more conscious, independent and intentional version of me. I have taught myself how to get in touch with my feelings and respond to them with compassion and grace.  But I have never endured a roller coaster of emotional health quite like the one I've been through in the last four weeks. 

 In the first week of isolation I found it increasingly difficult to breathe. I recall one night having to take a break in the middle of our bedtime story so that I could shut myself in the bathroom, turn on the hot water in the tub and try to focus on calming my racing heart and controlling my breathing. The anxiety had me cleaning every surface in the home with chaotic disorder. Nothing could hold my attention for longer than 10-15 minutes. I developed a strict ritual whenever my heart made the leap into my throat and blocked my ability to function. Hot shower, tea, neti-pot, essential oils in the humidifier, a tall glass of cold water, calming yoga meditation video, repeat. This method had the miraculous ability to soothe ME, but sadly the damage of my panic had lasting effects on the smaller members of my family. 

Somehow my panic party was contagious enough to exhibit its symptoms in all of us within the first 48 hours. And panic seems to only come out two ways in our family unit:  a) physical paralysis with labored breathing or b) sheer monster madness. Sadly the physical paralysis symptom only seems to effect the adult in our family (aka me) and so there was an ungodly amount of monsters running around our 1100 square foot apartment for weeks. 

Now these monsters come in a wide variety. There's the blame monster and the defensive monster, these two are mortal enemies. There is the entitled monster and the "you're not the boss of me" monster. There's the whiny monster who is best friends with the "negative Nancy" monster.  There is the "I forgot the rules" monster and the "I lost my hearing" monster, the "I don't care what you say,  I do what I want" monster and the "I will control you" monster and the family favorite "I don't know why but I'm screaming all the time" monster. Now I am very familiar with all of these monsters and I have spent the better part of the last two years learning how to cage them...but something about the uncertainty of a global pandemic has released them all back into the wild without warning and I have not really had the capacity to wrangle them back. The absolute worst part about being familiar with the monsters that are running loose in your apartment is that they know how to push your buttons. And wild monsters really only have one dominating emotion...ANGER. So...there has been a significant amount of anger running amuck in our home for the last few weeks, taking laps, constantly.

At night however, the anger would go to bed with the children and make way for brief moments of connection, reflection or sadness typically sprinkled with hints of more anxiety. At night I either hold it together by talking with friends or lose my mind as I attempt to numb the feelings with excessive cleaning or binge watching reality tv.  On occasion I have allowed the sadness to creep into the daytime hours while monsters are distracted by the gods of hypnotic technology. I listened to the saddest music I've ever heard for three hours straight and squeezed out every salty tear left in my eyes. Both kids came into my bedroom to witness this phenomenon at one point or another and both offered comfort. 

All of these heightened moments of feelings are terrible PR reps for our personalities. They can take a toll on our personal perception of our worth and fool us into believing that we suck at managing life. And yet, I'm finding that allowing grace for these moments of raw humanity are also pushing me to be more present with my feelings and the feelings of my children. Grace for human realness is seeing my fears and emotions reflected in the eyes of my children. And one day it all flips like a switch. Like that Tik Tok everyone was doing three weeks ago. Flip Flip. Suddenly the lights go off and come back on and the feelings and our physical selves are reversed and you can suddenly see yourself anew with a brand new humored and humble perspective. 

And so instead of attempting to cage them I have embraced the monsters. I've made them my friends and instead of putting them in cages I have given them nicknames and acknowledged their feelings. I have let them try new things and laughed with them at the silly results. I have hugged them and kissed them and told all of them they are welcome here because this home is a safe space and here they are free to experiment with what feels best in their bodies. I have praised them for trying something new and for communicating their feelings. And how we have laughed. And this shift in me has effected us all for the better. 

Last night the monsters, the kids and I all experimented together in making a new recipe. We took turns and shared the responsibility of layering a lasagna we invented with our favorite ingredients. We popped it in the oven and waited an hour for it to reveal itself. While we waited we each picked up our personal monsters and retreated to our private islands to wait. My youngest turned on Frozen II, my oldest returned to his comic making station and I went out on the porch to sit in a hammock and read a book. Successful collaboration requires us each to honor our unique selves fully and in order to do that we need time to allow ourselves to just be whoever we want to be. When our lasagna came out of the oven it was perfect. It tasted perfect too. And when we finished devouring the fruits of our labor we indulged in dessert while watching the lightening storm from the comfort of our back porch while swinging on swings. Together on that porch our individual personalities amused one another. My daughter the quiet comedian made us laugh so hard I almost choked while my son dreamed up new ideas for a video play and together we all decided to go running out into the night under the umbrella of a brilliant light show playing in the sky. We went on a search for the super moon and although we didn't find it anywhere in the sky, we did find joy and laughter and the freedom to be ourselves amidst isolation and deserted streets. In that moment our monsters joined hands and danced with us under a unifying super moon that even we couldn't see.