Over the course of the pandemic, the rules about sleeping in Mama's bed slackened. The allotment for Beatrice doubled, from once to twice a week. I say this as if I had nothing to do with it, as if the rules slackened themselves. As long as she remembers how to sleep in her own bed, I reassure myself, this is totally fine, even though she has been surreptitiously trying to move into my bedroom full time for awhile now. She sneaks off to my bed with an iPad when no one is paying attention, reads in a spot on the floor obscured by my bed from the vantage point of the doorway so she cannot be easily discovered when it's time to set the table, or digs into my basket of scarves when she needs to accessorize. Last night before I said goodnight I gave her a stern talking-to about respecting my space when I found some dirty dishes on my dresser - no one can bring crumbly snacks into my room Beatrice! Okay, okay, sorry, she muttered, staring at the ceiling, totally disregarding that this talk ever happened before it was even over.
And when she is asleep in my bed and I crawl under the covers - after I say goodnight to Frances and Gabriel and shut the cats in the kitchen and the dog in her crate and head upstairs to the hum of the dishwasher in the dark - I am glad that I resisted the urge to burn the old king size mattress purchased to fit a four poster frame that no bedroom has been big enough for since we moved in 2008, a bed so enormous Mike and I often commented on how ridiculous it was to have to inch and scoot across its wide expanse to find each other at night. After Mike died and I bought this new house, I felt absurd sleeping in our big bed that crowded the few other pieces of furniture in my room. Besides the scale problem, why sleep in a spot that exaggerated loneliness?
But it turns out to be an ideal bed in which to weather a pandemic. There's room for the dog to nap, for the whole family to snuggle, for just about any vaccinated friend to sleep over comfortably. And there's room for a lanky eight year old to sprawl across it in sleep and still not touch me when I slide into my side, worn out by the day and unable to tolerate anything but clean sheets grazing my skin.
But in the morning when sleep - even lackluster sleep - has worked its wonders, the sight of her body, slid down past the pillows in a nest of covers with her long hair spread out around her sweet cheek-squished face, opens up a tender nostalgia in me for a moment that is in the middle of happening. I go downstairs, I feed the cats and empty the dishwasher and help Gabriel get breakfast and pack his lunch, listen for Frances getting ready upstairs, and head back upstairs to my sleeping girl. Today I woke her by opening the blinds and pulling out clothes.
Mama?
Yes.
She stretched and reached in my direction, and as I was reluctant to start another busy weekday I dropped the pants I was about to pull on and climbed in next to her. She slid over to me, half asleep, and I felt the warm solidity of her skull nestle against my sternum, bone fitting against bone, just so. A thin arm slid around my back, her tangles tickled my neck and face, I held her heavy breathing body against mine. My heart dropped and pooled and released everything it had been holding onto inside me. I felt a contentment that defies description. It's actually amazing that I've held the line at two nights a week.
Early on in the pandemic I seemed to encounter media stories about how we really know now how much more women do at home. There are so many problems that emerge when one is in the house with your co-parent and life partner who also grew up in this dumb misogynist world all the dang time.
Those stories really broke me. I began avoiding them because they hurt. All I could think was are you fucking serious? I mean, I know what it's like to do too much at home, to live in an unequal domestic partnership. Totally sucks, definitely. Sucks even harder in a pandemic. Men, be better, okay? (Also, one quarter of women are raising kids alone and this oppressive narrative that assumes heterosexual partnership, no matter how messed up, really makes a widowed girl feel like a weirdo). But anyway. I would hear and read about these challenges from women and think: your partner is alive, and right there in your house, with you. You get to touch him.
Because you can endure a lot when you can touch and be touched. When I think of my husband and my dad, the people I have lost and miss every day, I don't think of what I want to tell them. What is there to say? Everything and nothing. Words are just a series of strange sounds coming out of my mouth.
No, I long to speak to them with my body, to touch their singular selves with my hands, arm, face. To be enveloped and to envelop in a hug. To feel their warmth again, and that contented heart-settling together. A felt, shared sigh of peaceful nervous system entwinement, of loving connection. That is what I miss.
I've been thinking about this a lot in the past months. My heart breaks daily for my student-clients zooming class alone in their dorm rooms, far from the kind of hugs I'm talking about, for my kids who can't bear hug a friend at school, and for my friends - and really, for everyone in the whole wide world - who has lost a beloved person to Covid, unable to kiss their hands at the end, unable to cry in each others' arms in the days that followed. What deeper wells of resilience are running dry in this screen-mediated world, deprived of physical contact?
On Sunday afternoon, I plucked a tiny kitten from the engine of our friends' car. It had been trapped there all day, and a group of neighbors gathered in response to the pathetic meows we could hear coming from under the hood. We tried tempting it out with food, cream, and an alluring piece of purple yarn, but the poor scared thing just backed itself further into the awful black engine-forest. In the end our friend disassembled part of the engine so we could free the kitten. When my hands closed gently around its tiny panicky body, this soft gray kitten whose distress calls had been echoing inside me all afternoon, my knees shook. I wanted to cry and laugh. It surprised me, how overwhelmed I felt, from head to toe. Such a tiny being, such a huge feeling.
As I held her against me and she quieted and even purred, my own body quickly settled too, not unlike the settling that spread inside me with nursing babies, or with a steadying gentle hand on my chest, or my dog's warm body stretched out next to me, breathing slowly in sleep. Or when I invite a student to put a comforting hand on their own body and I do the same while we practice a short meditation together. Or what happens to me in a long overdue hello or goodbye-for-a-long-time hug, if it is the lingering sort; a greater settling and sense of safety unfolds inside until a hidden door swings open in me, and I start to cry.
I've really missed you. We might have to hug for my body to tell me just how much.
