Our family has crept through the last few weeks much the same as millions of others have. I keep forgetting it’s not just a month of inexplicably stressful Sundays. Then I remember: Right, right right right. Global pandemic. I usually remember right around the time I have the idea to take the kids somewhere. Turns out, their hobbies included a whole lot of non-essential activities. Plus Pokemon.

We’re adapting to new norms. We’re inventing arbitrary structure to give our days and weeks the semblance of recognizable routine. We’re eating our weight in Juanita’s tortilla chips and ice cream.

And each day we remain absolutely stumped when we reflect upon the question that used to kick off all our dinner table conversations:

“How are you?”

Speaking of dinner talk: have you ever played high/low? It’s a dinner table conversation starter wherein everyone goes around and shares their day’s high and low. A month ago, our family’s answers might have gone like this:

My kids’ highs: they got to watch Pokemon.
Mine: I finished a piece with potential.
Ryan: great burger for lunch.

Ryan’s low: a slow bus ride home from work.
Mine: I forgot to pick up TP at the store.
The kids: they didn’t get to watch enough Pokemon.

The scale of a day’s goodness and badness used to be about as wide as Russell Crowe’s singing range. Five, maybe six notes, all of them middling chatty sounds, the highest only really a bit higher than the lowest.

A bad day didn’t used to be all that bad, really. And a good day was rarely all that great.

At its face-scraping low, a run-of-the-mill bad day was usually made terrible by the unexpected presence of regurgitated fruit snacks in my duvet after I let the boys watch Wild Kratts in my room. At its soaring high, a good day was made good when I finally finished folding all the laundry and I could take a moment to gaze upon the rare wonder of my empty counter tops.

On a bad day, a fight with my husband would blacken my mood; on a good day, he’d text me to see if I wanted Indian takeout for dinner.

On a bad day, I’d be pissy about the way my pants fit. On a good day, I wore stretchy pants.

Of course, a bad day isn’t the same as the worst day. The worst day is one in which someone or something dies: a relationship, a career, a person, the future you took for granted as possible. But if you’re lucky, and I am, worst days are few and far between. Used to be.

“How are you?”

Great. Terrible. I baked fresh bread today and posted a picture of it to Instagram in a feed of hundreds of pictures of fresh baked bread. I read about the death of a child today on Twitter, in a feed of hundreds of deaths of people’s children. Terrified. Hungry. Adrift. Freaking out. Melting down. Trembling with rage. Or caffeine? I’m grinding my teeth. Falling asleep on the couch. Waking up in bed. Everything feels like a knockoff version of normal: Close, but… does that say Louise Vuittong? Yeah… I’m not sure that’s legit.

The Overton Window is a term used to describe the range of what we’d consider to be acceptable norms. As society changes over time, extreme points of view can shift the Overton Window, essentially dragging our ideas of social norms further in one direction or another.

For example, Bernie Sanders made Medicare for All the centerpiece of his campaign in 2016, and many, many Democrats thought it was a Vermont fever dream. Come 2020, Medicare for All is not a fringe idea anymore. The idea of universal health care has been accepted as a mainstream possibility, albeit still a pretty far left one. Nevertheless, it’s in the window now.

My family’s emotional Overton Window used to be a porthole. A square foot of swimmy glass like you’d find in an enchanted cottage. Today I feel like I’m leaning against the yards of 360-degree glass at the top of the Space Needle, not a solid wall in sight.

The Overton Window hasn’t shifted so much as it has expanded, exponentially. Maybe even existentially.

Move over and get off the stage, Russell Crowe.

Today’s emotional range is brought to you by Whitney Houston and her five full octaves.

The face-scraping low of a bad day is now the real possibility of dying alone. Me. My partner. My parents. My children. If we were playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, “death, alone” just became John Lithgow. That's a bad day. The worst, for too many people.

And even though we’ve been spared (at least for now), the death we fear remains at our doors: already, I’m mourning the loss of stability, predictability, fearlessness. Already, I’m grieving the near future I took for granted as possible, so long as I set my alarm and had the character to actually drag my ass to the gym.

The window has expanded so far that a bad day has become synonymous with the worst days, the days in which someone or something ceases to exist.

And conversely, but also by extension, a good day now is made transcendent by life, something we’ve always heard was fragile but have only just begun to treat as precious.

“How are you?”

We’re all healthy. You?

The impossible part is this: We’re living in this emotionally expanded time in which everything is exponentially more intense (including trips to Costco, which were already about as intense as I thought shit could get). YET we still experience, and have the impulse to share, banal everyday highs and lows. These daily whoopsies remain heartening and irritating, and have now been three-dimensified to include “guilt-inducing” as well.

I still have two children to raise not to be flaming assholes. I still have to update my flipping dental insurance so they’ll cover my pre-Covid cleaning. I still love that first hit of cold store-brand seltzer water, straight from the can.

Shit! And I did forget to pick up TP at the store.

That’s an irritating low in the old sense because it’s another trip to the freaking store when I’d really rather be watching Tiger King like Twitter told me to.

And it’s a fearful low in the new sense, because it’s another trip into a world radioactive with the threat of death (alone), and I only have this tiny bottle of hand sanitizer to keep me from bringing the wolf back through the door with me to bite everyone I love.

It’s also a low because it’s another trip to a store that confirms that scarcity could become a part of my life, my children’s lives, in as much time as it takes to clear an aisle of Charmin. I don’t care about toilet paper. We can wipe our butts with lots of things.

But I used to say my kids would never know hunger. Now the window has expanded and I can see the fragile, precious lie I didn’t know I was telling.

I have to make another fricking trip to Costco; I’m afraid for my life. Both are lows, but only one feels anachronistic, and it’s the wrong one.

Fearing for my life? From grocery shopping? The plague is supposed to be history, not news.

I would be lying if I didn’t mention that I’m homeschooling my children and that shit is a tragicomic farce, people. It’s 10% printables, 90% screen time, and I won’t apologize for it. I have never before needed so much time to process my own thoughts and feelings to get my ass back to zero. I have never before had so little time to dedicate to that work. If I don’t get back to zero, then I spend my time trying to stabilize my lowkey flipping-out children while standing on the deck of a tilting ship.

After all, we have no playgrounds, no babysitters, no soccer practice, no gymnastics coaches to run the feral out of them in padded rooms. God, I miss gymnastics. The way they’d come back to me, limp and sweaty… Enter Wild Kratts.

“How are you?”

Well, you remember that story The Yellow Wallpaper? About a woman who goes slowly insane as she stares at the yellow wallpaper in the summer house where her controlling physician husband has isolated her? Family betrayal, claustrophobia, a descent into giddy madness? I’ve written a follow-up. An update. A coda, if you will. It’s called “The Pokemon Discussions.”

Today he asked me to play twenty questions, but about Pokemon.
“No,” I said.
“Please,” he begged me. “Pleasey please please please please please please pleeeeeee--”
“FINE, yes, sure, love to,” I said, refilling my coffee. “I’m thinking of a--”
“No, I get to pick the Pokemon.”
I gulp the coffee.
“Okay.”
“Okay, I’m thinking of a Pokemon.”
“Is it a Pokemon I know?”
“No.”
“Go watch TV.”

“I’m thinking of a Pokemon.”
“Is it a… grass type?”
“No.”
“Is it… a… fire type?”
“No.”
“OK, what type is it.”
“MOM.”
“Is it… Pikachu?”
“No!”
“Go watch TV.”

“I’m thinking of a Pokemon.”
“What letter does it start with.”
“N.”
“Okay… and the next letter is…”
“I”
“And the next letter?”
“MOM.”
“Go watch TV.”

They miss their friends. I miss their teachers. These are still lows: yesterday’s lowest lows, today’s privileged whimpers.

My Buster’s adorable phonetic spellings are still a high; the paint stains on the couch, a low. I feel them in my body: both the weightless joy and temper as tightly gripped as a dog who’s nipped before.

Yet it feels obscene to to bitch about paint stains or unwinnable guessing games in a conversation about “how we are,” a conversation that has become a space in which strangers exchange prayers for life and condolences after death.

How can I take up space in that conversation to request sympathy for my couch, or celebrate the ordinary, non-fatal miracle of my five-year-old’s literacy? Again, obscene.

At the same time, those small moments, both good and bad, compose the foundation of my intense gratitude for fragile, precious life. My couch is spattered in paint! How lucky a fuck am I!?! The written world is coming to life for my baby! He spelled “barf” with letter beads the other day!

Kind of. He spelled it b-o-r-f.

Reader, I think we all needed to know that out, in this world, even as you shelter in place, a five-year-old has just performed the miracle of improving on the word “barf.”

“How are you?”

Buster spelled barf with an O. BORF. BORF! The world will never be the same!

(I can’t believe I just joked, “The world will never be the same.” Obscene.)

“How are you?”

An impossible question. As impossible as old games we used to play, as impossible as believing I could promise my kids a hungerless life. As impossible as winning a round of Twenty Questions: Pokemon edition. God, they need their friends back.

As if there’s a singular thing any of us could be right now, as we acclimate to life inside this slowly-collapsing sponge cake of a reality.

As if I could summon the right words to answer that impossible question, the instant someone asks it more out of habit than curiosity.

“Me? I’m processing my newly-acquired keen awareness of my own mortality, while cultivating a thriving personal library of Zoom meeting pet peeves (if you are not talking: mute. your. self.), and tending to the emotional, intellectual, and physical health of my family, while trying to keep my shit together because everyone keeps saying it’s more important to be loving with your kids than it is to homeschool their faces off, but I don’t know if those people know that one of the hardest things on earth is to be patiently loving to inflexible kids in the throes of a society-wide disruption. Do you know how many times I day I have to say no to things I’d normally say yes to? School? No. Soccer? No. Fruit snacks? We’re out. Can we get some more? No. Why? Coronavirus. Play dates? HAVE YOU LOST YOUR SENSES MAN?

And I’m trying not to drink too much.

And grappling with the paradox of yearning to connect over comforting everyday business, while experiencing crushing guilt that I have even a sliver of comforting everyday business left. And because even though this is hard on my family, it’s devastating to others, and who the hell am I to chit-chat about these everyday annoyances when thousands of parents are grieving?

You know, just trying to make the days seem normal when they’re anything but, and never will be again.

You?”

“Girl. Same.”

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