Hey. It’s the Tuesday after what has probably been a quiet Memorial Day weekend for many of us (if you, though, are reading this not from your living room couch but from a crowded beach, please know a] I’m mad at you because SOCIAL DISTANCING, and b] I’m jealous of you because BEACH). I noticed this weekend that I managed to mess up Cian’s buzz cut last week (shocked, are you?): there’s a strip of hair above the nape of his neck that’s noticeably longer than any of the hair above it. Which means that as it grows he’s going to get a mullet. Which means that I am never, ever, ever touching the hair on that boy’s head with clippers ever again. He’ll just have to learn how to braid. I made Mom’s deviled eggs again yesterday. They tasted more like how she used to make them, and that made me happy. (My sister-in-law made key lime pie. That, too = happy.) I’m reading Emma Straub’s All Adults Here. I love her books, and…
There are things I’ve done that I regret in this life. That 8 a.m. math class my freshman year in college is a big one (or, rather, the fact that I rarely showed up to it). That pixie cut (“But Cameron Diaz looks so cute in hers!”) circa 2001. Tequila. But here, in this time of pandemic, I’ve done the most clichéd regrettable thing of all: I cut Cian’s hair. When I say “cut,” I mean I took scissors to Cian’s hair the other day, trying to maintain the style he’d had before. I cut it once, then twice to fix the once, then the final, cringe-worthy time to fix the mess I’d made the first two times. My child. My beautiful sweet kid with the longish hair we both liked so much… …now has a buzz cut. He spent all of the day afterward glaring at me while pointing at his head: “I have ELF EARS!” But then the girls, thankfully, spent the rest of the evening telling him how great it was, and that he…
Okay, at this point of quarantine, you’re in one of two camps: #1: You are a person who’s settled into this “new normal,” and are content and calm. You’ve weeded the flower beds, laid down fresh mulch, and are considering a fresh coat of paint inside your house. You’ve set yourself and your family on a flexible-but-calming schedule, and have a routine for sharing the laptops for work and school. You’re the parent who organizes the Zoom playdates for your kids. Or: #2: You’re the person who’s finally realized that this could go on forever and the kids eat all the food and the carpets are so dirty and who can freshen up their landscapes when they’re too worried about catching coronavirus if they leave the house for the garden center and you miss restaurant margaritas and your friends and you really should be decluttering the closets/finishing the book/organizing the family finances/making sourdough starter but you can’t, you just can’t, because you are tired of it all. You are a desperate for a…
