This was originally going to be a post titled What It Was Like To Attend a Child’s College Graduation (long, boring, and uncomfortable, with about 10 seconds of huge excitement), but on our way home from that, spending 7-8 hours in the car together after spending another 7-8 hours in the car together two days before, Paul said he was feeling a little carsick (he never gets carsick) and wanted some of my little motion sickness patches. (I would never have bought these except that Chrissy Teigen said they worked, and other people replied that they’d tried them and also found them effective, and I don’t really believe that they COULD work, except that they seem to, and what am I to make of that?) By the time we arrived home, he felt Very Off, and took a Covid-19 rapid test, which immediately turned positive. I had not even had a chance to PEE AT HOME yet, and Paul was texting me a picture of the positive results.
I went to find him, and he was sitting, unmasked, in the indoor air of our house, looking glum. I did not scream “WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?? ISOLATE YOURSELF IMMEDIATELY!!!” but I did say, calmly and pleasantly, that he should perhaps do that, perhaps right this second. I preceded him up to our room/bathroom (he was so glum it took him a minute to heave himself up), got my not-yet-unpacked weekend bag, took the dirty laundry out of it, repacked it with a bunch of fresh shirts/socks/undies, got my towel and pillow, and skedaddled.
It has taken me a few days to tell you about this development at our house, because I have been so angry at him. It turned out he had stopped wearing a mask at work, without informing me of that decision, let alone consulting with me about it. He still would not have told me about that decision, even after testing positive, but he accidentally dropped a context clue while telling a work anecdote, and I asked him about it, and he took a long pause while presumably considering lying about it. [Edited to add: I feel the need to clarify that I do not KNOW he was considering lying about it. Perhaps his brain just got stuck on the puzzle of figuring out how I would have known to ask the question.] He knew the kids and I were all masking at work/school and in all public indoor places. I had told him I didn’t want him coming to stores with me unless he wore a mask. He knew how I felt, he knows he has an immunocompromised child, and he made two choices: (1) to not wear a mask, and (2) to withhold that information from the rest of his household, so that we didn’t have the information we needed to keep ourselves safe. Now I am wearing a mask in my own house, because he wouldn’t wear one at his desk job. Prom is this weekend, and if Elizabeth tests positive and can’t go, you should expect unseasonable storms to sweep the region/nation. We have made other risk decisions (whether the kids should go back to school, whether I should go back to work, whether we should attend Rob’s college graduation) together, often with the involvement of the kids, but this one he made on his own and it belongs entirely to him. If Covid had spread through our house as a result of one of our shared decisions, I would have accepted that statistical consequence of our statistical accepted risk, but what happened here is different.
I wish to communicate to you how serious this is to me. If I or one of my children experiences Dire Consequences because of this secret deliberate choice of Paul’s, my feeling is that it would lead to divorce. I am reminded of the book The Poisonwood Bible, in which (and it’s been a very long time since I’ve read it, so I am aiming only for the gist here) a woman puts up with her husband’s decisions (which, granted, are more dramatic than Not Wearing a Mask at Work), even though she feels they are bad decisions and tells him so, until one of his choices means something bad happens to one of their children, at which point she packs it all up and leaves instantly. Just: crosses that decision line, exactly at that moment, simple and clear and Done.
In the meantime, I am doing almost zero sickroom care: this risk of illness was his own private decision, made with ONLY himself in mind, and so presumably he was prepared to also deal privately/personally with the consequences, as I attempt to run the rest of the household and prepare for the rest of us also dealing with those consequences. (I will OF COURSE modify this policy if he truly needs care. But right now he is the type of sick where he would like me to check him solicitously for fever, and listen to him talk in detail about his symptoms and how they have changed since he last told me, and run up and down the stairs fetching him the foods his mother used to bring him when he was sick, and all of those options are OFF THE TABLE.) (I did BUY saltines and soup and applesauce and little yogurts and so forth when I was at the store, but I did not imbue that service with love, and in fact withheld it.)
Besides: it is better for his overall health and well-being if I am not in his vicinity right now. My rage diminishes a little bit with each day that goes by with no additional positive tests or symptoms, but it is in no way gone. And we are not in the clear yet, and I don’t actually know when we ARE in the clear. I tried to look it up, and found that a test will be positive 2 or 3 or 5 or 7 or 14 days after a successful exposure/transmission—so at what point could I conclude that I have NOT gotten it? Weighing risks/benefits as best I can, which is not very well, I think I might stop wearing a mask in the house after prom (assuming I still have no symptoms and am still testing negative), though I’ll consult with the kids about that. Not only is prom the current highest-priority event to anyone in our household, but by then it will have been 5 days since Paul tested positive, and presumably I was well-exposed before then.
And we can hope that the fact that we were away for the weekend at Rob’s graduation, leaving the other kids home, is what will spare the other kids. Paul would have been at home Friday and all weekend, breathing out air, but instead we left Friday morning and weren’t back until Sunday afternoon. And Rob had Covid at college a few weeks ago, so it is likely he is not yet vulnerable to it again. It may be that only I was exposed. And I am wearing a mask, staying out of rooms where other people are, testing regularly, and sleeping on the sunporch. I have had three negative rapid tests so far (Sunday, Monday, Wednesday), and have a PCR test scheduled for tomorrow. I keep thinking my throat is getting sore and that I have a cough, but it’s allergy season and the sunporch is full of drafts bringing salutations from the trees/shrubs/grass outside.
If you are interested, here is what the kids have decided to do. (The youngest turns 15 this month, and all of them can do some basic cooking, so it’s pretty different from the way we might have made decisions when they were little and needed more active parental care.) Rob and William are not masking in the house, and they would mostly be staying in their room / away from other people anyway, so not much change there; they are not very worried about catching it, I think in part because they have both recently come home from college experiences where “vaccinated young people getting Covid but recovering quickly and without much fuss” was common. Elizabeth, Edward, and Henry are all wearing masks except when in their rooms, and staying in their rooms as much as possible, except Edward will sometimes hang out by himself on his favorite couch spot in the living room. Elizabeth in particular, I have seen only out of the corner of my eye since Sunday; Edward and Henry are more casual, and I think are mostly wearing masks because Elizabeth and I are wearing them.