Learning to Count
Photo/Katherine Fusco.
By Katherine Fusco
It’s early September, 2020. Day 3,647 of the pandemic. Perhaps. My husband and I are driving with our daughters in the back seat. Clementine, who is 19-months old, is obsessed with toes and footwear. She’s kicked off one sandal and then the other. “Shoooos, shooooos, shoooos, shooooos, shooooos,” she begins. Then she adds another word she knows, “help.” “Hup, shooooos; hup, shooooos; hup, shoooos.”
This kind of chanting is very much the soundtrack of life with little kids, sometimes punctuated by laughing or crying. Now that Clementine talks a little, the two girls will alternate calling for parental attention in the form of a round, or perhaps a religious recitation: “Mama, Mama; Mama, Mama.” Instead of three Hail Marys for purity, in our house we say thirty Mamas for popsicles.
Her older sister Eloise, who is four, likes to care for Clementine, but also to give her a good scolding when the occasion arises. We get to hear the very worst of our parenting in such moments. In response to the shoe-chant, she turns to her little sister and says, “Clementine, I don’t want to hear it. Hold your horses.”
No response from Clem, who remains steadfast in her commitment to being well shod. Tickled by her officious tone, I turn around and ask, “Eloise, what does ‘hold your horses mean?’”
With eyes and hands going wide, Eloise switches to explanatory mode: “You know. Hold your bones. Hold your brains. Be patient.”
Hold your bones. Hold your brains. Be patient.
Eloise’s very embodied explanation of the colloquialism makes a lot of sense to me these days. Living in this time, the time of pandemic, the time of autocrat-fools, the time of police violence, feels like an exercise in not flying apart.
I have a regular and recurring fantasy about opening my front door, walking out on the lawn, and doubling over, screaming, fists clenched. In the fantasy, it’s very therapeutic, if shocking to the cul-de-sac. Keeping things together is a strain on the musculature. I can feel pain in my jaw, and I’ve added Icy Hot patches to the weekly grocery order.
Too, I learn to understand and keep suppressed the violence that seems as though it might punctuate the Sisyphean nature of COVID-19 with kids. Every “activity,” and we are using the word loosely these days, is one boulder rolled up the hill. With every whine-inducing minor disappointment—I’m sorry, we don’t have pink granola bars—down it rolls. The cycle repeats. But day after day, I do not come apart. I do not shake the children apart. These are successful days.
Hold your bones.
Time passes slowly for the young and more quickly for the old. Apparently this has to do with things like how novel the experiences of our lives are—the delight of finding a bird’s nest!—as well as proportionality. For Clementine, a year is more than half her life; for Eloise, it’s 25 percent. In these days of “the sickness,” as Eloise calls it, I rack my brain for new things to do in our little house. Is it fun to dye the water in the tub blue? No. Is it fun to decorate a cardboard box? Yes.
Once, I confessed to a more science-minded friend a grim lie I told Eloise to hustle her into her coat. “If you don’t wear a jacket in the winter, your nipples will freeze and fall off,” I said. Not my best parenting, I confessed.
“Don’t worry,” the friend said. “she’s not fully myelinated yet. She won’t remember any of this stuff.”
It’s a relief that this year won’t be significant in my children’s memory landscapes. But I do still want it to have events for them, no matter how reduced. So we mark the days with bear-shaped pancakes, glue-on googly eyes, and obstacle courses of couch cushions and yoga mats.
On the other hand, the year is a blip for my older parents who live far away. We won’t see them this year, and I worry that the time they have left with me and with their granddaughters is a series of blips I can count on my fingers.
At some point, I propose that we could drive and meet in the middle of the country. About halfway between New York and Nevada there is a place called McConaughy Lake. It’s a reservoir where we could swim. We could meet there and be together. Marshaling snobbery and a 70-year-old’s impatience with discomfort, my father rejects Nebraska. I think that I will probably never visit this state.
I feel preemptive grief. When I really want to indulge in picking the scab, I remember the last time we got together as a family, when my sister and I both drank a little too much and argued about politics. Was that last time the last time? When I call my mother on the phone, we do and don’t talk about it. We agree that we shouldn’t think too much about this topic. “How are the girls?,” she asks.
Hold your brains.
We are very sophisticated in the way we wish this year away, my husband and I. We look at the betting markets to see when those ghouls who put their money where their mouths are think there will be a vaccine. We learn about something called “superforecasting.” I become weirdly obsessed with the stock market and develop an intense though unreciprocated relationship with NPR’s Kai Ryssdal. My husband and I discuss vaccine distribution timelines, our place in the line as healthy middle-aged people, if-then contingency plans about boarding a plane, renting an RV, and so on.
“I can’t stand this,” I’ll say.
But there are little lives alongside ours that are growing and changing and doing more interesting things than watching the news. Eloise is learning to read. Clementine loves to dance and requests “you-jic” (music). Watching a one-and-a-half year old try to jump is a special delight. There’s a lot of thrust but very little air. In bed after stories, Eloise will ask me to tell her about “those stars that make lines” (the Perseids) and the “long ago times when people didn’t have many things and pooped in little holes.” And then she’ll tell me that when blood is inside her body it is blue but that when it comes outside it turns red.
In the blur of days that are much the same, unpunctuated by vacations, family gatherings, trips to the movies or the library, I fear I may miss these milestones as I urge the year to move along, to get on with it already. I have to train my attention to notice that it’s not just the evening routine again, or yet another fractious dinner of pleading for one more bite. The lives under my care are changing even as the world remains suspended.
Be patient, mama.
Katherine Fusco is Director of Core Humanities at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she also teaches American literature and film. She is the author of two books, a number of academic articles, as well as popular essays on feminism and motherhood in popular culture. She's currently completing a book about celebrity and identification in the 1920s and 1930s. You can learn more about her work at katherinefusco.com
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