Paul, yesterday, drying his hands after washing them at the kitchen sink: “Do we all just share this one gross dishtowel?”

My dude. Do you see a line of seven labeled dish towels? Have you EVER seen such a thing, in all our years of living in the same apartment/house together? Then you have your answer without needing to bring me into it. Also: please feel free to take the dish towel and toss it into the laundry and replace it with a fresh one from the giant stack of freshly-laundered dish towels ANY TIME YOU WANT. I am so pleased to see others suddenly wanting to help with one of my million invisible tasks! That “one gross dishtowel” was replaced by me a mere hour ago, when it seemed like it was getting too damp!

I want to talk about one of our household’s pandemic dilemmas, but it involves a service we are lucky and privileged to have, and I think that makes it a little tricky. Like, people have been laid off / are dealing with the problem of working from home while caring for young children / have jobs in healthcare and are quarantined from their families, and here I am wringing my hands over what to do about our housecleaning service—a problem many people would perhaps love to have instead of the problems they do have. Well, but here we are. We all have our own batch of issues to deal with and this is one of mine, and here is the question: What do we do?

Actually, here is our temporary answer: We tell them not to come next week, and we pay them anyway. I found that one of my first reactive feelings to this idea was that we couldn’t afford to pay for a service we weren’t receiving—but the fact is, at this point we are in very nearly the same financial situation as before, and so we are nearly identically able to afford the money. It only FEELS like we can’t afford it, because it feels weird to pay money and get nothing in exchange. But buying a cleaning service isn’t like buying a product: it’s not like buying groceries or a car repair, where a person might not be able to afford to pay for food they can’t consume or a repair that didn’t fix their otherwise unusable car. In the case of housecleaning, whether we pay for it or not, we’re not getting something that was consumable/”usable” anyway. Do you see what I mean? I feel like I’m not putting this well.

The upshot is that at least in the short term, paying for housecleaning we don’t receive is exactly as affordable as paying for housecleaning we do receive. The only difference is in how much housecleaning we then need to do ourselves, and we are able-bodied and there are seven of us and we have some time on our hands. Meanwhile, for our housecleaners, this is an urgent crisis. Their situation (losing clients means enormous financial peril) outweighs ours (it’s uncomfortable and feels odd/wrong to pay for something you don’t get).

Furthermore, we pay for things we don’t get ALL THE TIME. We just got our 20-year certificate from our car insurance company: we pay thousands a year for insurance we have been fortunate never to have had to use. That’s a little different because we ARE getting something: we’re getting protection that’s there if we DO need it. But we’ve never used it. It’s like if we paid the housecleaners in case we wanted to call them to come clean, but then didn’t call them to come clean.

Or to reach a little further: it’s a little like when we buy something we then never use. Clothing we thought would work but it doesn’t, or a hair-straightening device that yanks our hair too hard, or jewelry we never end up wearing. We paid for something we then didn’t get value out of.

I know those aren’t great/comparable examples, but I’m trying to grasp all the threads of how I’m making it easier for myself to do what I think is the right thing in our case, where our income has not changed, but where it still feels a little painful to pay for something we’re not getting.

Furthermore, this is an excellent opportunity for a liberal/progressive to put her money where her mouth is. Do I think people should have enough money to survive on, even if they are unable to work for some reason (elderly, temporarily/permanently disabled, laid off, single parent of small children deserted by the other parent, global pandemic, etc.)? Why, yes I do! I am not in charge, and I don’t get to make those big decisions, but I can decide to personally pay the housecleaning service I personally use, even when we are experiencing an unexpected global pandemic and it is unwise for them/us to interact in our usual way. If Paul had lost his job and we really couldn’t pay the housecleaners anymore (which would be true whatever reason he lost his job), we’d have to stop paying them, and we would feel terrible, and we would wish our society was different, and we would continue to vote for legislation that works for us all. But Paul has not lost his job. We can still pay the housecleaners.

Long-term, I don’t know what this will look like: would we really just keep writing a check every two weeks for months/years? And what if our financial situation DOES change?? But this is one of those situations I was talking about yesterday, where I can get all worked up about something, and then I realize I don’t have to (and in fact can’t) make a decision right now. I can tell the housecleaners not to come next week, and I can tell them they will be paid anyway for next week; I don’t have to make long-term plans about that, or tell them what the long-term plans are. I can just make this immediate decision, and then wait and see.

Also, I have heard buzz that the U.S. government may be cutting checks to citizens, to alleviate the current financial burden of Covid-19. I saw a tweet saying that to help with the issue of “What about people who don’t need the checks?,” there should be a huge campaign suggesting that if you yourself are not currently financially affected by the pandemic, you can pick someone else to give your check to:

That idea instantly appealed to me. Since we are so far not much currently financially affected (I am sorry for that tangley phrase, I will see what I can do in future proofreads), we could use our checks to continue to pay our housecleaners to not clean our house.

Boy, it is going to take some time to adjust to the new way things are, isn’t it, especially when we don’t even know what the new way is yet because the new way keeps changing. I have found I keep getting my anxiety ramped up about some issue (“How is this online schooling supposed to work??” “What are we supposed to do about grocery shopping when our supplies run out??” “What about orthodontics??” “Is it safe to work in the closed library if they ask me to or is that still not worth the risk?? and if not, am I going to lose all the thigh strength I gained by getting down to the floor and back up again hundreds of times every shift??”) and then thinking that actually we can just let this unfold for awhile without trying to figure out every little future thing RIGHT NOW. Various people are working on things like how will graduation work and what will we do about funeral attendance and will there be normal school again by autumn (and what if not) and how will this whole thing affect when kids get their braces off and what about the airlines, and for MOST of these things there is nothing I need to figure out; all I have to do is wait and see. It’s a big mess and we all know it, and it’s going to take some time for the systems to figure out how to cope, and I suspect some of our current concerns are later going to seem naive/cute, but there’s no benefit to imagining that right now.

Here is one of my more minor fret traps, if you are interested, and you can tell me your minor fret traps if you want to:

1. I fret that we will run low on something like, say, Little Debbie cakes, or yeast.
2. I look online to see if we can order it there, and find that we can.
3. I remember the poor overwhelmed online stores / delivery people, and decide not to order now, because we don’t need the yeast yet, and in fact wouldn’t yet have even put it on the shopping list in ordinary times. We can wait.
4. But…what if by the time we DO need it, it’s no longer available, and I wish I’d ordered it now??
5. But reports from other countries indicate that grocery stores will stay open, and in fact soon we will be able to shop again fairly normally, and our local stores will need our support.
6. And we don’t NEED the yeast yet. There is no need to increase the burden/profit for online stores.
7. But what if when we DO need it, we can’t get it??
8. That would be okay: we don’t HAVE to have yeast.
9. I fretfully go online again, just to LOOK at the yeast, and find it is NOW SOLD OUT.
10. OH NO OH NO OH NO OH NO
11. But there is every reason to believe that it is sold out only because of people like me who are fretful and/or thinking ahead, and that soon it will be widely and easily available again.
12. BUT WHAT IF NOT

And so on.

I find another type of fretting can be dealt with by remembering we are all in this together. This is not just happening to my personal household or your personal household, it is ALL of us—each in our own personal combination of ways based on our own set-ups, but still we are all in this same world where this is happening. Everyone’s schooling is getting messed up. Everyone’s work is getting messed up. Everyone’s orthodontic/surgical/therapy schedule is getting messed up. All of us are missing appointments. All of us are having plans ruined. All of us are going to have to figure out groceries. None of us know what things are going to look like in the upcoming months, and so all of us are having trouble making decisions. And some of this stuff is changing from day to day, and so we Really Can’t figure it out right now. In the best case scenario, we are all going to enjoy telling our Pandemic stories as much as we enjoy telling our Where Were You When Kennedy/Challenger stories and our Pregnancy/Labor/Delivery stories.

Rob was freaking out a little about the deposit we put down for his fall college housing, and that is something I am not really fretting about at all: it’s not that MY FAMILY put down a college deposit and now the future is uncertain; ALL ACROSS THE WORLD families have put down college deposits and now the future is uncertain. The college will have to figure that out, and the college KNOWS it will have to figure that out, and no one has the information to make a decision yet, and so we don’t have to (and in fact should not) contact the college RIGHT NOW and ask what the plan is (which is what Rob wants to do). We can instead safely fret about the theoretical future need for yeast.

My library finally closed, to my huge relief. I am relatively new there, and also the very lowest level of employee, and also if I’m not there my work MUST be done by someone else, so I have no standing to say that I am not coming to work because I am choosing to isolate/distance/quarantine. I can call in sick, or I can quit; and I couldn’t do the former indefinitely, and I didn’t want to do the latter. But it was also pretty clear to me that the library, which rightly thinks of itself as an important community resource, needed to switch to thinking of itself as an important community virus-transmission hub. Especially when the public schools closed. Some teachers were sending emails urging students to go to the library to get study materials and even just fresh books for free-reading time, and in normal times teachers ABSOLUTELY should be encouraging library visitation, but these are not normal times.

The children are starting online schooling, and it is so overwhelming to me. I am trying to just be chill and not worry about it, which with my temperament exhibits as avoidance and denial and letting the children figure it out. I am spinning this as being good for the children’s independence and self-reliance, which has the ring of truth to it as well as being justification for me to keep playing games on my phone in another room.

Paul’s workplace is still getting set up for him to work from home, so he is using a vacation day today while they finish that up. He should only have to go back once more, to pick up the equipment. After that we will be staying in.

Meanwhile Paul’s sister is still posting scoffing, mocking, eye-rolly things on Facebook about how “idiots” are “panicking for no reason.” That’s heartening. Yesterday she reposted something making fun of parents for worrying about their children missing school, which then went on to suggest parents spend the time teaching their children to cook, clean, check the oil, balance a checkbook, “treat others with respect,” etc. Okay, honorary boomer.

I ordered four pounds of chocolate-covered dried cherries and have no regrets.

Did I tell you that our last grocery store trip was done by Paul, because I was heading to Rob’s college to get his things? So I made a very careful list, with explanations. One of the things on that list was, and I quote, “SNACK CAKES!!” Reader, he came home without the snack cakes. WITHOUT. THE SNACK CAKES. I am respecting social distancing so I will not be consulting an attorney at this time.

I see that I can order various snack cakes from Target (Little Debbie strawberry rolls, which I used to find revolting but somehow in middle age have come to treasure! Hostess chocolate cupcakes! I assume given two examples you can find the rest yourself!), but the upside of an empty snack-cakes cupboard is that the prowling-for-snack-cakes children are now planning to bake cookies and that seems like one of the most perfect isolation activities ever.

Both of my older kids’ colleges have closed. Both schools started out by saying classes would go online but students could either go home or stay on campus, as they chose. Both schools then pivoted within days of that decision, saying all students must leave, and must remove their possessions; both of my kids were home by then, with only some of their stuff, and we had to decide whether to go back for the stuff or abandon it. In one case, we went back: the college was in a lower-risk area, and the stuff left behind was more extensive and important. In the other case, we chose to abandon the stuff: the college is in a big city / higher-risk area, and the kid had come home later on in this process so had brought home everything of real value/importance. If you have a college kid coming home for spring break or for some situation the college says will be temporary, it would not be overdoing it to have them take as much of their stuff home as they can, ideally all of it; if they can’t take home all their stuff (if, for example, they are flying home), they should prioritize bringing home the stuff they can least abandon/replace.

(I hope I don’t sound critical of the way the colleges made these decisions; things changed so fast and it was so hard to know what would be best, and these were decisions with enormous impact and very little precedence. You can’t just impulsively send away tens of thousands of students, many of whom CAN’T “just go home” as easily as Rob and William could. Not to mention the tremendous financial implications for the school, and the impact on the professors, and the even more serious impact on, for example, the food service staff.)

My three younger kids all go to public school. First the school system said they would close for one day, for a thorough cleaning—but then they sent home several online surveys asking about each family’s computer/internet access and dependence on school food. Now they have closed for three weeks, but I think the “three weeks” is about as likely as the “one day.”

The library where I work has not (yet) closed. But Paul had some items holding for him at a library near where he works, and when he went to pick them up, there was a sign on the door saying “Closed until further notice.”

Paul’s office has not closed, but they are making rapid plans for people to work from home if possible. Paul can’t do all of his work from home, but he can do some of it.

We have a decent supply of food, but we also now have seven people at home eating it. Paul and I talked a little yesterday about what the plan is. Normally I would make two packs of ground meat for tacos, but should we make one pack and bulk it up with rice? It’s hard to know what’s going to happen with grocery stores. My assumption is that that the shelves will be replenished and that it will still be possible to go out to acquire food if we’re not sick ourselves, but I don’t want to lean too hard into that assumption—and of course, even if the assumption about replenishment is correct, we may be sick. We’re going to talk with the kids today about the potentially limited nature of things such as milk.

Speaking of maybe being sick ourselves: I have a sore throat and a light cough. In ordinary times, I would take a couple of ibuprofen, put some cough drops in my pocket, and go to work. I don’t need to tell you these are not ordinary times, and there is no way I am bringing whatever this is into a public library. My hope is that my boss will be 100% in agreement with this decision—but my job involves doing the grunt work, and if I don’t do the work other people have to do it and nobody likes to, and already everyone’s workload is much higher with the cleaning of all incoming materials—so it will not be GOOD news to her. I was hoping they’d decide to close before I had to tell her I wasn’t coming in. Now I am hoping they decide to close before I have to tell her I’m not coming in tomorrow either.

We are worried about Edward, who is on immunosuppressant medication for Crohn’s disease, and who gets medication by IV every seven weeks in (1) a hospital in (2) a big city. He is supposed to go in a week and a half. I am going to have to call his doctor’s office and find out what to do, but I am giving them a little time to figure it out, since this is happening fast to everyone, and Edward is not the only one in this situation.

I don’t want to overstate the personal panicky feelings here: looking at almost every aspect, my particular family is particularly well-placed to handle this situation. (Just at the very bare minimum, all our kids are old enough not to need childcare.) But every time Paul and I are discussing how we’re going to handle one thing or another, even a small thing like whether to stretch the taco meat with rice or just assume food supplies will be fine, we keep ending back at societal panicky feelings: wondering what is going to happen to everyone who works in all the businesses currently being closed or about to be closed, and how those people will manage, and there is no way to comprehend it. And of course all the healthcare workers. And soon we will start to hear news of celebrity deaths, which will make it feel both more real and more like a movie/book. And everything continues to change/develop so fast.

We are attempting right now to think about things in smaller, more immediate pieces. We are together. Right now we are okay. We can’t opt out of what is happening or what is about to happen; we are all going to be exposed eventually and the only goal is to slow it down so the health care system can cope; this school semester is going to be a write-off for all the kids but that’s going to have to be something we deal with later; everyone is going to face disappointments and inconveniences and that’s if we’re the lucky ones; so in the meantime let’s put together a puzzle and/or finally sort the bookshelves.

Paul has a mild cold (just a cold: no dry cough, no fever, just a little congestion and sneezing) and NOW he is panicking about the Covid-19 situation. He’s been observing my calm and reasonable efforts with fond indulgent condescension, but he gets the tiniest little bit sick himself and suddenly it’s “DO WE HAVE ENOUGH DAYQUIL BECAUSE I NEED TO TAKE IT EVERY FOUR HOURS TO TREAT MY NOTHING SYMPTOMS WHILE I PLAY VIDEO GAMES” and “SHOULD WE (BY WHICH I MEAN YOU) HOMESCHOOL THE CHILDREN??” This evening, before going to bed TWO HOURS EARLY, he said to me, “Don’t read Twitter and get all panicky, because you might need to talk ME down from panicking.” In the immortal word of my sarcastic 9th-grade daughter: “Okay.”

Meanwhile, Rob’s college and William’s college both notified us that they are making all classes remote/online. Neither college is technically closing campus, which I am taking to mean a stance somewhere in between “We really don’t want to screw over kids who can’t go home mid-semester like this” and “We really don’t want to give refunds for room/board.” Okay by me. I am heading out to collect my young and tuck them back into the nest for the time being.

Also meanwhile, people on my in-person Facebook feed are mocking people who are trying to get enough supplies together to sustain themselves in a situation where they’re sick and it would be irresponsible of them to go out for supplies. This is not a good look; I suggest not rocking it.

I went on my usual weekly shopping trip with my mom, and one of our stops is always Target, and it was very odd to see the large empty shelves where hand sanitizer and rubbing alcohol used to be. And the hand soap aisle was 90% empty. And there was not much choice left in the cold-medicines section.

I could feel a little reactive tendril of panic twirling up, telling me to buy up everything that was left whether I needed it or not. I soothed that impulse down by buying restrained back-ups of things we use all the time and will use even if there is no pandemic/quarantine/disaster: cat litter, cat food, one extra bottle of ibuprofen, one extra bottle of Mrs. Meyer’s lilac hand soap, one extra pack of toilet paper, two extra packs of the omeprazole I take for reflux, one extra bottle of salsa I eat despite having reflux, etc.

We are trying to be sensibly prepared without getting silly about it, but it is so hard to know where that prepared/silly line is when part of the anxiety comes from not knowing how this thing is going to go: people can compare it to the usual flu, and that IS stabilizing, as long as this ends up being similar to the usual flu, which we don’t really know yet. It’s too easy to picture people in the early stages of any historical catastrophic illness, feeling the first little tendrils of anxiety but trying not to get all SILLY about it.

But it does help to imagine what it would be like if the media were covering the regular flu in the same way they’re covering Covid-19: many reports a day giving lists of HOW many additional people in WHICH states had been diagnosed with flu that day, how many had died, etc. My goodness, how very stressful and upsetting that would be! But they DON’T do that, so we’re not in a constant flutter all flu-season long.

At the library where I work, we are wiping down incoming materials, and tripling our usual daily sanitizing (tables, doorknobs, counters, keyboards, etc.). We are all a little crabby from the extra hassle/work and from the Lysol/Clorox fumes. The fumes are also making my throat feel a little funny. OR AM I GETTING SICK. No, I think it is just the fumes. Every time anyone coughs or sniffs, which we all do all the time because books are basically a giant pile of temporarily incorporated dust (girl, same), we all squint in that person’s direction.

The schools keep sending us emails about how they’re monitoring the situation. The middle school and high school are basically doing the same as the library: more sanitizing, more cleaning. Rob’s college and William’s college have both suggested not traveling over spring break, and have asked anyone traveling to certain places to please self-quarantine for 14 days after returning. Both schools have mentioned the possibility of not having ANY of the students return to campus after spring break, depending on how things go in the intervening days. A co-worker’s daughter is at another college, and THAT college says if there is one single Covid-19 case diagnosed at their school, they will close the school and send everyone home.

Well! Well. And here we all are, waiting to see what happens next. Definitely all of us very chill about the whole thing.