Mindlessly scrolling through Instagram in the dark last night as I silently willed my children to sleep, I came across my old Instagram Stories from 2020’s lockdown. They brought back a wave of memories and a rush of feelings. Of course, at the time we were terrified that just being in the elevator would give us Covid. There I was, furiously wiping down groceries so that the bags of frozen vegetables wouldn’t infect us, and there was my 6’ 4” husband - comically stripping off every single item of his clothing outside our apartment door after walking the dog. The laundry, as you can imagine, was insurmountable. The rest of the residents on our floor had fled to the Hamptons or Palm Beach by then, but it was all perfectly normal behavior for the time.
We cooked and cleaned all day long (do the children really need 3 full meals AND two snacks a day?), drank our body weight in wine earlier and earlier every evening, tore our hair out over trying to home-school young children and work in the same place at the same time, and gratefully gathered at our open windows at 7pm every night, pots and pans in hand, and ready to clang in support of the health care heroes that braved the unknown, in order to do battle with an invisible virus that was claiming lives everywhere we turned.
We stood in the apartment we had lived in for a decade, waving at neighbors who we had never met in the buildings across the street, smiling encouragingly at each other over the tinny refrain of Sinatra’s “New York, New York” blaring from an apartment window. In a city marked by a million unimportant, thoughtless interactions with others, for a brief minute every day we were all really connected, grateful, emotional, and couldn’t believe what life in this once thriving city had become. Cuomo’s daily press briefings had our attention and our hearts. Netflix and Tiger King had us riveted to the screen, much like our children, who had, by now, discovered Roblox.
There was hope, as restaurants and stores remained open at first, the feeling of being anchored by the familiar ritual of picking up a socially distanced daily coffee, and then despair as those same businesses shuttered, a lot of them never to return. Protesting in the streets led to the ubiquitous white-gloved doormen who dotted the buildings of the Upper East Side being replaced by heavily armed guards, the vaulted windows of Park Avenue co-ops sealed up with plywood to protect from vandalism.
We lost many of our friends’ parents to the virus, the cruelty made worse by an improvement in health before a sudden and steep decline, which turned into a heart-wrenching forever goodbye over FaceTime. The inability to physically comfort the grieving weighed heavily on our hearts, deepened by the loss of our beloved dog Hudson. He had inexplicably fallen ill at the start of lockdown, and died in my arms by the time it was through. But it was when the coroner started coming into the buildings on our block, wheeling out bodies of former residents and neighbors in anonymous black bodybags, that reality truly set in.
Our public school announced it would not be reopening in-person for the new school year, and a different reality dawned. One where life was going to continue in this dystopian manner, but one where we had a pivotal decision to make. We debated endlessly. Do we sit tight, wait it out, continue as we were in the hopes of maybe moving to a larger apartment, where life wouldn’t feel quite so stifling, and one day (when?), things would return to normal? Or was normal not really a thing anymore? Do we head to the safety of the suburbs and open schools, where for many of our friends, ensconced in sprawling homes and private gardens, covid lockdown had been an entirely different experience?
After lockdown we spent many a glorious day with our suburban friends, who gave us a glimpse into what life could be for the foreseeable future. Bolstered by a vision where I could drop my kids off to school for six glorious hours every single day, I finally agreed to a brief respite of one year, with the caveat being that we had to move back. My husband concurred but pushed for two years, because I have many wonderful traits, but practicality is not chief among them.
And thus our search began. We rented a Zipcar every few days, dutifully wiping down the interiors with anti-bacterial wipes each time, and drove out of bounds, bribing our children with Dunkin’ and yet more screen time. Long Island, New Jersey, Westchester…our masked faces marveling at the lines of people waiting to view homes, walking into showings for houses that already had both offers, and backup offers.
After a few anxiety attacks caused by the sheer number of trees I had to drive past to get back to Manhattan, we settled on a lovely house in a bucolic town. It was a blessing, affording us peace, fresh air, wonderful schools, and space. Space to think, to work, to plan for our future. We enjoyed driving around the picturesque streets with our windows down, and taking walks in the forest (I suppose some trees are okay?), all punctuated by multiple trips back to support the restaurants that had re-opened, to reconnect with friends we hadn’t seen in what felt like forever, and to keep an eye on the pulse of the city.
As the months wore on, people trickled back to their offices, my kids settled into school, and all the while I waited and waited for New York to call us home. The optimistic dual-ended life we thought we could create didn’t really materialize. How naive of me. It was impossible to run into the city and then back again before school pick-up, without sitting in the traffic for hours or meticulously planning every minute of the day. There was no longer such a thing as a quick morning walk through Central Park, or a speedy coffee with a friend, before resuming with the day’s productive haze.
Those million, thoughtless daily interactions suddenly became an important missing piece of my puzzle. Work became busy again, my husband and I driven apart by long hours and distance, almost living two separate lives. It was isolating for me to see the world I knew start to move on, and feel like we were just living in a holding cell of our own beautiful design. I was now in an uncomfortable limbo of a seemingly-perfect white picket-fence life that I was beyond grateful to have, but the thing is, it was the type of life which I had never once actually coveted.
I feel guilty for being unhappy. The life we have is a dream for most people, my husband points out to me. I know this; I know all of it. And yet, this life is totally foreign to me. Shall we move to Miami? Timbuktu? If I can move out of Manhattan, I might as well move anywhere, I half-joke to him.
And then, the book of life delivers a major plot twist. Just as our two-years in the ‘burbs drew to a close, with NYC school interviews almost complete and real estate listings open on my browser…I found out I was pregnant.