Under Water

*This is an article I'm working on for a collection at MUSC about people's experiences of the COVID epidemic.  I'm sharing it here so that you can always have it, Jules.

My daughter has always loved the water- when other kids were terrified to put their faces in, she would dive down, deep down, and stay down so long that we would become worried.

While I am not a very good swimmer and don't even particularly like to swim, I must admit that there is some beauty to being under water: everything becomes fuzzier, brighter (if it's a sunny day), and sound is muted.  It's just you and whatever, or whoever, is there in the water with you.

Strangely, when we first saw pictures of the COVID-19 virus, water came into my mind.  The bright red spikes reminded me of the coral I saw when I dove in the Great Barrier Reef, alone but surrounded by a feeling of protection and love.  This is how quarantine feels: isolated in our homes, focusing on the quotidian facets of life, it's easy to turn inward and block out the sounds and sights of the world.

Until, of course, in T.S. Eliot's words, "human voices wake us/ and we drown."  We have to come back up to the surface, back up to clear vision, back to the sounds of news reports and speculative conversations, back to the reality that COVID-19, despite its almost beautiful coral-like appearance, has forced us into being at home.  I've had to teach my college classes online and homeschool my daughter, who has Down Syndrome.  While typically developing students can follow some type of online schedule, we have had to improvise, be creative, and just hope for the best; federal laws for kids with disabilities aren't really being observed at this time.

And yet, there is something about this enforced isolation that feels, sometimes, like being underwater.  I've been forced to focus on the essentials (to use an overused word today): my daughter, my husband, who works at the Medical University, my students.  In this environment, I perhaps have about fifteen minutes to catch up on news, but that means that all of the politics, all of the nastiness around the virus and the way people, especially minorities, are being treated, is muted.  What I hear is our "Good Morning" song, Julia's continual pleas to call her grandparents, who we are now talking to more than we ever have, her need to have safety and continuity in her life.  She doesn't really understand what's going on right now, which is very scary: she doesn't understand why she can't see her friends, why she can't go to school, why we have to be "safe" all the time.  I told her that people are sick, so now she thinks that everyone is sick.

So we retreat into comforting television shows, field trips (to the few places that are open), or even walks to the local pond to feed the turtles and watch the birds. I've been teaching her how to read and we have a nightly workout routine. My classes are now over (it's mid- May and the College, where I teach, would have had graduation today), so I can focus on her, on protecting her from all of the ugliness that is COVID-19 and the politics that unfortunately surround it.

At the beginning of the epidemic, Julia had been in school and had been exposed to Flu Type A. However, because the symptoms were so close to those of COVID-19, and because her father works at the Medical University, we had to go get her tested.

We had seen the pictures of the testing site: dozens of white tents covering the parking lot of a mall.  We had seen the doctors doing the testing, dressed in heavy white hazmat suits, all of their body parts covered.  I thought about Julia's (rational) fear of mascots.  If you couldn't see someone's eyes, how could you possibly trust them?  I thought of her fear of masks.  How, I wondered, would I get her past the tents, the people, the palpable anxiety?  And even if she did not, by some miracle, freak out about the tents and what would look to her like space people, how would she ever endure having one of those space aliens put a long q-tip up her nose?  It felt like something out of a science fiction movie.

So I knew we would have to innovate.  Together, we came up with a plan: we would wear (or, in my case, pretend to wear) costumes.  And guess what costume Julia chose?

She was a mermaid.

Mermaids have been known to be fierce, spunky, and sassy, and Julia is all of these things. With her sparkly tail, she channeled her underwater self and told me, in no uncertain terms, that her costume was better than the doctors'.  She also never even flinched when they put that q-tip up her nose.

But sometimes mermaids need help.  Even though being under the water can be a serene experience, it can often--again like COVID--be murky.  You can't see where you are going or, in my case, when you will hit the wall of the pool (one of the reasons I don't like swimming).  You don't know when it will end, so you keep paddling, hoping against hope that you will touch a wall soon. That fear, the anxiety of having no end, is real, so when she went to get tested for COVID-19, Julia asked me to pretend as well.  She asked me to be a lion.  A protective, ferocious lion.  I played my part; even though we were asked to stay in the car, I knew she might need a little extra help blowing her nose, having someone hold her hand.  I played the "special needs" card and demanded to get out of the car so that I could help my little girl.

And this, to me, exemplifies the COVID epidemic.  We live our mermaid lives and, during the times we are out in the "real world" (which, for my husband, is every day), we are lions, working hard to protect our tribes and allow for us to have our strange, surreal, at-home existence. We anxiously await for--and sometimes, dread--the day that we will emerge from the water.  Will be be able to regain our footing? We will lose the uncertainty, but will we also lose the strange, almost beautiful underwater silence that pervades our lives now? For now, I take a breath, dive down, and try to live in the moment.