Subtle Shifts
A personal essay by Natalie Serianni from our anthology, The Pandemic Midlife Crisis
I stumble into the kitchen and look out the window, the Seattle sun shimmering on my front lawn. I start my coffee ritual, scooping the grounds, pouring the water. It’s quiet. Six weeks into our statewide lockdown, it became full-blown spring. I’ve noticed this; we all have. Mother Nature demanded we pay attention.
In the early days of containment, our collective minds have been working overtime: How safe is the grocery store? How do I homeschool? And even: What are we going to do? There is a sense of unease and swirling paranoia about what comes next.
It’s eerily empty in our neighborhood: no cars, no airplanes decelerating overhead. I’m catapulted back to another quiet time in my life when I didn’t drive. Where I rode bikes in the street (like my kids are now). When I was at the mercy of what was in my immediate orbit.
When the carousel grinds to a halt, and our pandemic present is too much, my mind moves to the past, right to the 1980s, where I find answers to a 20-year search for the feeling of home, and how to become whole out of pieces.
***
Our 80s home was our touchstone. Our hearth became a stage for Pointer Sister dance parties. There were giant chocolate chip cookie cakes for birthday parties, Glade candles in the bathroom, and the smell of country store potpourri in the kitchen. It was a time of pillow forts and freeze tag in the backyard. My younger sister and I played “apartments” in our bedrooms, pretending we lived alone in New York City penthouses. I can still hear the white roller skates clinking their pink wheels down the sidewalk of our suburban Maryland home. The wind tickling my cheek as I sat and read under the weeping willow in our front yard.
There was calm and comfort in my childhood.
My Milli Vanilli and INXS posters kept watch over my Sassy and Seventeen magazines, my blue canopy bed hiding the lock & key rainbow diaries underneath. “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and Def Leppard blasted from my bedroom speakers, making way for the ("disturbing," as my mom would say, pursing her lips) Depeche Mode/Cure era that was to take hold of my teenage years.
Life was carefree with my parents and two younger sisters at home, the main character of my memories.
***
June 2020.
At seven years old, my oldest daughter has picked up her preschool habit of collecting insects again. Bumblebees are caught. Even pill bugs and ladybugs are hunted. My three-and-a-half-year-old daughter has also joined the mix, running from one side of the backyard to the other, yelling “GOTCHA!!” while pouncing on insects with the bug catcher.
We have amassed quite a menagerie: caterpillars hibernating in their cocoons on my daughter’s white dresser, awaiting their entrance into our world, and an ant farm gently shipped via FedEx, arriving on our doorstep from Burlington, North Carolina. We dumped the sand, unboxed the ants, and watched in awe as they burrowed and built their tunnels, going about their home making.
After clearing the breakfast dishes one morning, I marvel at their handiwork as they circle around: without compartments, all the routes eventually lead to the other ants. They find each other, land on each other, work with each other. All day, while the ground continually shifts beneath them.
Like the ants, I feel crowded. There is too much together time. There are piles of books, juice boxes, and crayons scattered on what was our dining room table, now our central hub. I’m not used to all of us here in the house. I like my space. My quiet office on campus is miles—and what feels like lightyears—away. Also: when did we become ok with everyone peeing with the door open?
There are days when nobody gets along, and I snap, the walls inching closer. I convince myself that I’m not failing at my teaching job while homeschooling my seven-year-old, and that Sesame Street is just fine for my four-year-old to watch because there is learning. I drink cold coffee. There is three-day-old laundry in the dryer, and I’m too tired to fold it. We’re Zooming in a slog of unknowing, a heaviness of uncertainty.
In my mind, I find myself going back to the certainty of the 80s, where I roamed the neighborhood on my pink Huffy Sweet Thunder and peddled to the pool. Where my mom sang “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow,” as she tucked us in, crocheted blankets up to our chins. We caught lightning bugs in coffee cans, and we ran through the farmer’s field just before it became a new housing development.
The air carried freedom.
***
March 2021, still COVID-times.
I feel a sting of nostalgia thinking back to my childhood when we seemed to have it all. I even had my mother, who would die from a brain aneurysm when I turned 25.
She stayed home with us, raising three daughters in a cul-de-sac Colonial home. Tree canopies and open space. We had a newly constructed back deck and a Spacemaker kitchen TV. She must have had a motherhood moment, where she proudly surveyed her domain, took a drag off her cigarette and thought: “This is it.”
It jolts me back to now. Is this the pinnacle of our parenting? In a pandemic? Maybe this is our peak, when things feel familiar and disorienting in the same breath.
I’ve had this feeling before.
My traumatic entrance into motherhood in 2013 came with a seven-pound baby girl, two blood transfusions, and anxiety that stuck for one full year. When I arrived home with my oldest, on a gray, frozen January day, I walked past the hallway mirror, terrified. I did not see myself from before. I was shocked into something new.
***
Somedays, I feel strangely equipped during this pandemic. Having a newborn prepared me, as did years-long loneliness before becoming a mother. Loneliness had been my roommate for years, moving in right after my mother died, occupying every empty space.
Those first few weeks after my mother died in September 2001, much like during this pandemic, there was little sleep.
Nighttime is when the shifting takes place, when the cells transform. Matter searching for meaning.
After she died, my constitution couldn’t go back to before. It was unthinkable. In desperation, I quit my first visiting professorship, my first job after graduate school, and moved back to my childhood home in Maryland.
I couldn’t face going back to the classroom, what once was. I drove down to North Carolina, to my brand new, not even furnished apartment to pack up. With my books and a crying cat, I headed north: five dazed hours, listening to Travis and David Gray, not even in my body, the four white lanes on I-95 blinking, blurry with my tears.
I lived at home with my father for six months, watching pieces of my mother leave the house in boxes: clothes, mostly. Perfume. Her address book, bulging with notes on scraps of paper. I substitute taught at high school, answering robocalls at 5:30 a.m., saying yes to work. Saying yes to leaving the house, yes to interacting with others in their still-moving life while mine was at a standstill. I’d leave the sleepy house with my coffee, hoping to glimpse her in the kitchen. Each morning, a gut punch that she was gone. Much of me evacuated when she left; home lost its hold.
Since then, life has been a movie reel. I moved back to North Carolina and met my husband in 2005. When our eyes first locked, in the kitchen of a house party while I was standing next to my ex-boyfriend, atoms crashed. I felt the familiar spark of comfort.
We fused quickly. We yearned for bigger spaces, newness. Wildness. We searched the U.S. map and placed our fingers in the Pacific Northwest. We got as far away from North Carolina as we could go, driving cross-country, through the midline of America, past the Dakotas, and straight into marriage and a townhouse in Seattle.
My cells began to settle after we bought our first house. After getting the keys, my husband at work, I stood with my second trimester belly, looking at a Linden tree from the upstairs bedroom, feeling a century of families under my bare feet. The 1928 hardwood floors were coated with a still alive love. I allowed this house to hold me. But loneliness resided, too.
***
Needing to be alone became part of my DNA. During the hardest experiences in my life—mourning my mother, running a marathon, birthing two babies—I was, essentially, alone. Although I had the support of others, in the wings or right next to me, I still managed to push people away. I refused to be seen in my suffering or sadness—hot, heavy Mother’s Day tears or throat lumps when talking with my dad. Hiding my “prickly parts” during these difficult moments, I mutated, separating from others.
For the last eight years, as a working mother of two in midlife, I’ve been running from work, to daycare, to preschool, to after-school soccer, to volunteering, to Girl Scouts, in a tunnel of go. I was a sleep-deprived, coffee-fueled shell of myself. Careening off the rails, I’ve been filled with fear for most of my children’s life. But I pushed through because I was productive. I could handle it by myself. I didn’t need help; I could hustle. I morphed into a lesser creature.
Driving past scenic Lake Washington on my way to work each pre-pandemic morning, there were countless times I looked over to the passenger side, longing to dive into the freezing water— to submerge, to swim free and sure again. To startle myself awake and coalesce in the healing water.
That feeling unraveled, slowly, after several unhurried months at home with my family during this pandemic. I woke up my youngest daughter by crawling into her bed, the warm sheets, curls on her pillow, the faint smell of pee in a pull-up. We all shared breakfast and lingered over lunch. I watched my oldest daughter learn to cross the street, her long ponytail swinging as she looked both ways, me waving from the dining room window. These moments have assembled me into someone who can get close to what she loves.
My children saw their mother grinning on a stand-up paddleboard one summer moment, and rage-filled about dirty dishes the next. They saw my range; they saw me. Being home has helped me understand my own basic needs: I need my family, and they need to know who I am. I’m a mother learning to mother myself while I mother my children.
***
The pandemic won’t allow me to pretend that my hair’s not gray, or that working from home with others on top of you isn’t hard. From the anguish of losing my mother to the blur of the baby years, I’ve finally had a moment to step back and clearly see my last 20 years in full view. And just like this pandemic, they’ve been a marvel, and a doozy.
Often during this time of at-homeness, I’ve thought of the magical, beloved book I had on my own dark brown childhood bookshelf, The Little Prince. I remember the otherworldly, cartoonish illustrations, a boy poised on a planet. A fox. Many times during this stay-at-home mandate, and I believe now more than ever, its premise is true: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
It’s become our sole survival question this past year: Do we have what we need?
After a year of this pandemic, I can say: I do now. It’s what I knew as an eight-year-old in the 80s: home is love in close proximity.
This pandemic has brought crisis and fear for many of us, but hope flitters on the horizon. Like my daughter’s caterpillars who became butterflies and took off into the air, they teach us what to do: in different shapes and forms, we continue.
Natalie Serianni is a Seattle-based writer, award-winning college instructor, and mother of two. Her personal essays have appeared in HuffPost, Insider, SheKnows, Motherwell, The Manifest-Station, ParentMap, Today's Parent, The Keepthings, Literary Mama, and Ruminate Magazine, among others.
 | A guest post by
|