During the early days of the pandemic, I allowed my children to take turns peeling carrots down to a filament in our small Brooklyn kitchen. One stood on a red stool by the bench, the other on the Squatty Potty they had dragged from the bathroom. Those days were endless. My husband was upstate; the three of us were in the apartment gazing out at a world on pause. We would set up obstacle courses, my son and daughter would fill in my legs and arms with face paint as I held up my job in one hand, little piles of raisins would appear in corners of the house as the sunlight moved from triangles on the floor to squares to daggers. At 7 p.m. we would venture downstairs to the front stoop and shake a cowbell for essential workers; for, more selfishly, making it through another day. Parenting through these days felt like watching copper sulfate crystals bloom incrementally on a string. I had my eyes on my children all day long; still they managed to grow the second I looked away. The carrots weren’t even to eat. My kids stood in the kitchen slicing off one translucent ribbon of carrot off after another. Eventually they were left with a wooden core, wet debris all around them. Nothing to be done. They started another carrot.
It was Another Time, but it was also just regular absurd life without the plausible deniability that workplaces and daycare drop-offs and supermarket aisles usually provided.
VLADIMIR: Sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer. (He takes off his hat, peers inside it, feels about inside it, shakes it, puts it on again.) How shall I say? Relieved and at the same time . . . (he searches for the word) . . . appalled. (With emphasis.) AP-PALLED. (He takes off his hat again, peers inside it.) Funny. (He knocks on the crown as though to dislodge a foreign body, peers into it again, puts it on again.) Nothing to be done.
It is easy to pass vast swaths of time as a parent waiting: for your baby to sleep through the night, to walk, to eat scrambled egg, to go to daycare, to safely pull a homemade ham costume over their head, to talk, to perform. At the same time, you are occupied. Consider the diaper change: laying your baby on the change table, undoing the onesie, lifting the bum, putting the new nappy under the old, swooping the old one off, wiping, wiping, applying a balm, fitting the new one, cleaning hands, doing up the onesie, lifting the baby up. It is the wax-on, wax-off of parenting, remaking you turn by turn. It is nothing at all.
VLADIMIR: (looking at the sky.) Will night never come?
“I saw my Grandpa tomorrow,” my son Japhy will reminisce, “tomorrow” having taken on the job of signifying any period of time that isn’t the current one. He is turning 4 tomowwow; he slept in a crib tomorrow, when he was a baby. Sometimes, he uses “last week” instead: “Remember when I was a baby and couldn’t talk, last week? That was so funny.” He laughs to himself.
VLADIMIR: A—. What are you insinuating? That we've come to the wrong place?
ESTRAGON: He should be here.
VLADIMIR: He didn't say for sure he'd come.
ESTRAGON: And if he doesn't come?
VLADIMIR: We'll come back tomorrow.
ESTRAGON: And then the day after tomorrow.
VLADIMIR: Possibly.
ESTRAGON: And so on
From the time she could hold a crayon and color, my daughter has been absorbed in drawing, in filling the white space and reproducing her signature motifs over and over again. She began to create the letters of her own name shortly before 2, and her artworks took on a more potent feel; little, crooked odes to her being could be found all over our house. Soon, she learned the points and loops that make up the word “MOM” and also the formula of a figure. She began to arise in the morning, take herself to her tiny particle board desk, and work. By the time we stumbled out for coffee, there would be pages of flowers stamped with MOM LOVE SCOUT, figurines holding hands, houses, chairs at some point. Each additional detail made it feel even more as though we could live in her representation of the world: eventually, there was even coffee.
She hasn’t yet asked who is in charge of the universe; she seems to take for granted that each day is simply for using. Her destination isn’t tomorrow, but rather “chalk” or “the penguin game” or “TV.” Yesterday there wasn’t a tree outside her outline of a house, but tomorrow there might be.
POZZO: There's an end to his thinking!
VLADIMIR: But will he be able to walk?
POZZO: Walk or crawl!
Beckett worried about the passage of time, man being as unable to stop it as stop a rumbling train along the tracks. Months back, the waiting felt more painful than the passing of time itself. The more I gave up and just built the tiny grotto for Ariel out of Lego, focused myself on attaching a helmet of red hair to the nodule on her head, the more comfortable I felt whizzing through the universe. Of course, it helped that I no longer had a job. Watching my daughter draw, and working alongside her, I saw how moments of time could open out like the aisles in a library’s compact shelving section. The trick was to zoom in in in on the thing.
ESTRAGON: Give me a carrot. (Vladimir rummages in his pockets, takes out a turnip and gives it to Estragon who takes a bite out of it. Angrily.) It's a turnip!
VLADIMIR: Oh pardon! I could have sworn it was a carrot.
How it happened
Birth order: My 3-year-old believes that he was in my belly at the same time as his older sister — she came out in 2015, and he simply bided his time a bit longer. If we look at a photo of me pregnant with her, he’ll append the conversation with, “and I was in your belly.” For his purposes, he was in my uterus for all of prehistory to December 2016, waiting. Then he came out! It’s almost four years since he did.
Notables + quotables
‘I thought about Merle. Two and a half minutes in, as the song built toward its last, diminishing refrain of refrains—“I knew you’d come back to me / And you’d come back to me / and you’d come back to me / You’d come back”—the exquisite memory of Merle, and her loss, finally hit me.’ — Sarah Miller on bridge dogs (and Taylor Swift)
I really don’t know what to quote out of this piece on the Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle by Michael Weiss, but here’s a grab: ‘“Also, Will Smith’s father voted here twice since he died.” I don’t know if Rudy said this before or after he introduced a convicted pedophile sex offender to affirm that a coup was indeed underway in the nation, but it doesn’t matter.’ (Newlines Magazine)
“Of course I thought I was a phony — that’s the way of the artist — but I also thought I was the realest thing you’d seen.” — Springsteen YES I’M READING HIS BOOK
And never forget how the great election of 2020 played out in pre-K:
This has been a dispatch from the existential sandbox.