#88, Hidey corner
I do not exactly think of Eileen as a “pandemic baby” because she was born on February 2, 2020, six weeks before we all had to start staying home. Kevin was there in the hospital and I did not have to wear a mask when I gave birth and we did bring her to Hugh’s preschool classroom as a tiny tiny newborn and let the kids touch her and we did go out to dinner with some friends and bring her with us and nestle her in a banquette when she was one week old. In other words we got to have a few “look at us, the super chill third-time parents, so relaxed, so natural” moments that were very good for my soul.
More importantly we had six weeks of the older children being in school before everything shut down. It was the real old-fashioned kind of school, too, where they were there all day every weekday from roughly 8 to 6. You know, the kind of school I used to worry was too much school and was bad for them and felt sort of guilty that they were there so much, either in all-day daycare or in school + afterschool, and that they weren’t maybe getting enough unstructured time at home! Hahahahaha! What a quaint concern!
(When this is over, will we go back to that kind of guilt? I propose that we not.)
So yeah, she’s not quite a pandemic baby but she came of baby age in the pandemic. Almost every person she sees is wearing a mask. She has been in daycare since September and all of her teachers wear masks all day. She absolutely recognizes people she knows even though she’s never seen their mouths. If a stranger in a mask smiles at her she sometimes cries and they’re like “It’s because I’m wearing a mask!” and I can either choose to say or not “Nope, it’s because you’re a stranger,” but yeah it’s definitely because they’re a stranger.1 We just wouldn’t be very far at this point if she were scared of everyone who wore a mask.
Haha, “very far.” Like we’ve made so much progress otherwise! We have not! Everything is always the same! The first year with Alice and Hugh shot by. All those Instagram posts with the baby’s first birthday where the mom is like “And just like that she’s 1”? I would never say that about this year. When people ask me her age, my first instinct is always that she’s a month or two older than she actually is, because time moves so slowly these days, and because every day is the same. If you come visit us on a given morning at, say, 6 AM — PLEASE DO, I MISS YOU ALL SO MUCH — you’ll find Eileen and me sitting on the kitchen floor. I sit in what I have come to think of as my hidey corner, it’s the corner between the dishwasher and the cupboard and I couldn’t figure out why I kept gravitating there until I realized that when I’m in that precise spot the older kids can’t see me from the other room. Lots of phone checking goes on there. It’s me with my coffee in my hidey corner, Eileen crawling around and eating Cheerios off a little foot stool.
The sun comes up one minute earlier every day now, I guess. And she throws the Cheerios ever more nimbly.
And she is learning to talk. Or, as one of her teachers put it, she is “finding her words,” which I love so much because it suggests that the words were always there in her and are just now bubbling up to the surface.
[Alice wailing] “Mom, I drew a pig at school and everybody laughed at me! I think even my teacher laughed!”
“I would never laugh at you! I’m sure the pig was great! Show me how you draw a pig.”
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Testing out footnotes here, as if the newsletter is normally so structured that I wouldn’t put in an anecdote otherwise. Our next door neighbor Jack is one of the people Eileen cried when she saw and who said “It must be because I’m wearing a mask.” We love Jack so in his case I said, yes, it must be the mask. Alice and Hugh are pretty obsessed with Jack, who is in his 70s. I have never seen them want to talk to anyone so much. His husband, also named Jack, died last year. Every time we see Jack, Hugh has a new question thing to say about other Jack. At first it was “The other Jack died.” At first also Hugh’s speech was unclear enough that I could sort of shout over him when he started talking about other Jack. Now his speech is easier to understand — yet again, proof that time passes, I guess — and this week he said clear as a bell, “Hi, Jack. Did you get a new Jack yet?”