Love in the Time of Corona
Illustration by the author
©2020
A worried father loves a worried son
“It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity.”
— Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
My son’s ten year old body is like a train car, shunting, never hooking. Right now, he is slamming into the wall opposite my headboard, shaking a piece of it loose above my head. It is the middle of the night.
This is the familiar weight and impact of my son. Every place where there is a wall or floor, he has thrown himself at it either for a laugh, a crash, or just something we call, “the crazies.”
“SOMEBODY!”
I am rolling off the bed to the carpet. It is 1am, or the clock is set wrong by my six year old daughter who spins the hands every morning for fun. I roll off the floor-bed to the carpet. I seem to be standing now. I somnambulate down the hall, sliding my shoulder along it for stability. I arrive at my son’s door jamb and pivot bodily into his room.
“What’s up?”
I am surprised I have chosen a voice free of my usual sulky veneer.
“PAPA. HOW BAD IS IT? THE CORONAVIRUS?
I think, “shit”
“A STAFF MEMBER SAID THE CORONAVIRUS KILLED A HEALTHY 30 YEAR OLD. WHAT IF IT REALLY IS THAT BAD?
There are so many ways we could die. This is just one of the zombie apocalypses we’ve imagined for years. They don’t scare me. What scares me is seeing my daughter standing on the ice, fifty feet from shore next to a dark spot on the lake. Or my son, enraged at me, darting out into traffic on a razor scooter.
There are so many ways we could die. This is just one of the zombie apocalypses we’ve imagined for years. They don’t scare me. What scares me is seeing my daughter standing on the ice, fifty feet from shore next to a dark spot on the lake.
Despite being glued to the New York Times, I am not sure how to be scared of this virus yet. Now I see, my son is planning to help me with that tonight.
“HE SAID THAT AT FIRST YOU GET SICK AND THEN YOU GET BETTER, BUT THEN IT COMES BACK AS PNEUMONIA AND YOU DIE IN, LIKE, A DAY! I THOUGHT IT WAS ONLY GOING TO KILL OLD PEOPLE!
I am rubbing his back now. “Yeah. It’s hard, buddy.”
I’m so lame. But what do you say? And I am the king of saying too much. I am the king of teaching moments. And my son is the king of denying me moments to teach.
“IS IT REALLY THAT BAD? WHAT DO WE DO? I DON’T WANT YOU AND MAMA TO DIE!”
What strikes me in this moment is not that he is worried we will all die, but that he loves me. He’s even crying. He never cries. He never says he loves me. He loves me!
“WHAT DO WE DO?”
I think of his latest video game obsession, World of Tanks. I look up above his bed at the sixteen hand drawn illustrations of tanks he’s painstakingly drawn, all based on tanks in the game. Each drawing is on its own separate sheet of paper. He’s just getting started.
Despite the war game obsession of late, He is not a violent kid. My wife and I have figured this out due to our own obsession with limiting screen time. He’s not getting it from screens. He is clearly just attracted to violent images like horror movie trailers. He says he wants to see the Joker and It. He can’t understand why I don’t go see them myself.
I asked him about this interest recently during a rare moment when he didn’t feel defensive about it. He said,
“IT’S NOT LIKE I LIKE THESE THINGS. I WANT TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO NOT BE SCARED OF THEM. I CAN’T FIGURE THAT OUT IF I CAN NEVER SEE THEM.”
Last week, we finished reading, Coraline, by the incomparable Neil Gaiman. I have read aloud to him most nights for his ten years, including most of Harry Potter, all of the Chronicles of Narnia, the Hobbit, and endless new Young Adult books. I have so much respect for the writers I’ve encountered. This book, Coraline, had a stunning first line,
“Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”
My son likes this line, but for all our love of metaphors, I don’t think he would appreciate me saying that the corona virus is the dragon.
He rams himself against everything. He chews the neck of his shirts until the ink in the fabric has been sucked out. He chewed the finish off an entire five foot span of one rail of his crib before he was eighteen months old. He only stopped because he figured out how to launch over the rail.
He is an Aries, the ram, the warrior. So, trying to throw him some courage, I say,
“Y’now…You’re kind of a warrior.”
Too cheesy. That’s not gonna help.
Mercifully, he doesn’t roll his eyes. He is silent, but I can almost hear his mind spinning.
We’ve now given him a silicone rubber pendant in the shape of a shark tooth that hangs on a necklace so he can chew it instead of his shirts. In fact, he chews it frantically when he plays World of Tanks, slouched almost in half. If he’s touched anything unsavory, say, like the king of all viruses, it will surely enter his mouth. Assuming he’s ever in public again during this quarantine, we’re screwed.
When I watch him gaming, eyes glazing over, head jutting forward, I feel I am directly denying him real adventures in woods with sticks. I’m sure it’s why he has to chew things to blow off steam. At school, chewing things like this, doesn’t embarrass him, nor does eating food with his hands, nor wearing underwear twice, nor farting great, loud farts at Thanksgiving. But he is embarrassed to say he loves me. It bugs me. I don’t understand why disgustingness and intrusiveness is so much the currency of boys. I was a kid that did some of those things, even got in trouble for it at times, but man, it even bugged me as a kid how much time I had to spend tolerating it from other boys. I never understood how being offensive could gain social status.
At school, chewing things like this, doesn’t embarrass him, nor does eating food with his hands, nor wearing underwear twice, nor farting great, loud farts at Thanksgiving. But he is embarrassed to say he loves me. It bugs me. I don’t understand why disgustingness and intrusiveness is so much the currency of boys.
This is the origin of man-hiding — pretending to a be the kind of boy and then eventually the man that maybe none of us really is. It’s an illusion.
My wife thinks I focus too much on telling people what he fails at. Even though she shares so many of the same feelings I express when I list these failures. Or even though she has listed so many of them herself to me. I know she’s right. She always chooses to highlight his gifts to others. She amazes me in this way.
If I do brag, I say, that he dropped into a quarter-pipe at a skatepark before he turned three. That he makes his friends laugh so hard, it’s like he’s written a standup set ahead of time. He is deep and ironic and clever. Among his most thoughtful quotes is, “It’s weird that pet animals cost less than TVs.”
One of his most hilarious quotes: “I am a man of many cheeses.”
But I know he sees me fail to smile as much as his mother. I don’t brag, because I want people’s pity. I’m breaking my own heart and his at the same time. I don’t want to be that dad.
I have lost my love of being home at times. To be honest, I don’t actually feel safe. I spent so much time around hostile boys as a kid, that I still flinch at his moods and incredibly wild tempers. He’s pulled a knife more than once, scaring even himself. He’s thrown toys off the balcony of our house so they could smash to pieces in the street. His moods are like the weather, we never know when the whole house will get spun out of control. These are the worst extremes, but they leave a mark. I’m always wondering if the next one will be that bad. I’m always on guard. Ready to leap. My chest is always tight. My stomach always clenched.
Once, to get him to stop, I threw a box of tomato soup at the wall so it exploded everywhere. To get him to stop threatening his sister for more Halloween candy I threw his own bag at him, missing him by a foot. It’s awful to get this mad. I got bullied as a kid, and practiced non-violence to the point of submission. Now my son’s resurgent anger makes me feel like I need revenge on all the men that judged me for being sensitive, for being an artist, for being soft.
I have always been scared to talk about this stuff. I risk losing my kids, my wife (my deepest love!), my purpose.
But I just have to talk about it, because I know fathers are more involved than ever, and we are suffering from a profound lack of role models.
My father loved me, and spent many hours showing it in his workshop and garage, and sharing yard work. But I find I’ve had to learn how to become a spiritual warrior on my own. I have had to learn to fall apart, fail in public, bend gender, manage anger, face existential depression, societal angst, and social anxiety mostly on my own. I wrote about this in a graphic novel with my cousin, the amazing Chef, Phillip Foss, called Life in EL. Our dad’s were brothers. One of our favorite lines in the book is when the main antagonist in the book says
“Dad’s have been blaming dad’s forever.”
In that book, we asked ourselves, what the other options were. At some point, we have to save the energy we might have spent blaming our fathers, and figure out how to make up the rest.
To echo my son,
“It’s not fair.”
Fatherhood is not fair. Childhood is not fair.
So, as I sit on the side of the bed, I say to my son,
“We’re kind of the same, aren’t we? It’s not fair. You’re worried I could die. I worry I can’t keep you safe. We suffer a lot, don’t we?”
It’s cringe-y saying this stuff to my son. But he wants me to tell him the far edges of tolerable truth. He’d rather know I was scared too, then try to believe I had it all figured out. He keeps convincing me I can’t dumb it down. This is papa bear in the wild.
I rub my son’s powerful arms beneath the blanket. One day he could destroy me with them. This is not lost on me. I need him to trust me. I need to trust him.
Now he starts to sneeze. This is never good. His allergies have kept him up for hours, and my fatherly pride is waning.
I try to hang in there. I ask him if he would be okay with me rubbing his feet. He likes to be warned like this. He understands. We understand each other.
“Nothing bad is happening right now. Thoughts are stories. You can work on them again tomorrow.”
It’s cringe-y saying this stuff to my son. But he wants me to tell him the far edges of tolerable truth. He’d rather know I was scared too, then try to believe I had it all figured out. He keeps convincing me I can’t dumb it down. This is papa bear in the wild.
I reach for his feet below the blanket. They are tough and soft as I rub them. I remember all the ingrown nails, the athlete’s foot, the tar stains on his bare feet in the summer, the undead smell of his wet socks in the winter.
Now, I am in the bathroom, running warm water over a cloth to lay over his forehead and eyes to help his allergies.
As a kid, I used to plug my ears, put a washcloth over my head, and stand under the shower just to feel something hot on my head, reducing my senses to just two, the sound of the water from inside my skull, and the heat on my head.
I am ringing out the cloth.
Back in my son’s room, I fold the warm cloth, and am laying it over his forehead, covering his eyes, avoiding his nose.
I am returning to bed. He will call again soon, I am sure of it.
Two days later, the state announces all school is cancelled. I welcome this, somehow. I’m so used to things slamming against me, now it’s like work, home, marriage, fatherhood are all slamming together into one small house. I have the privilege of being able to rise to it. I don’t want to take that for granted, and the first thing I wanted to do was write. I want a story out there that is for fathers and men like me who are actively trying to make this world a better place for our sons, even though we often fail at our attempts. This story is for our sons and partners. It is for the little sisters, transgender siblings, and little brothers of some of these sons (you know who you are). We are all here trying to raise each other up against the old cultural stories.
While I’m home, I’m suddenly faced with more social connection with my family compared to the typical isolation I face when I work alone at home all day. I want to embrace this chance to homeschool the kids. I want to study nature along the Mississippi River just blocks away. I want to build more trust in the face of our family in conflict. I want to make books, podcasts, plant a garden, cook together a little more. Only a fraction of this will probably happen. Today, we learned a song on the ukulele. We asked the grandparents if they would video conference a lesson from their own life stories.
The virus might wear the crown, but this is our kingdom.
