Breathe in the deepest breath I’ve taken all day… exhale through the mouth…
I wake at 4:17am again and take myself silently into the loo. As I sit, still not quite awake, but mentally calculating the cost of staying awake from now until tonight or trying to return to sleep, a movement catches my eye. I peer through the glass wall of the shower and notice an earwig crawling in the mortar between the tiles that line the shower cubicle. Hello little earwig, I send, I haven’t seen one of you in almost a year.
It makes me feel sentimental – the paucity of bug life in our home in Red Deer disturbed me, because it felt like an indication the place had been poisoned. It was probably the cold.
I wonder how the earwig got into our hermetically sealed (not quite) hotel room, fourteen floors above the ground? I wonder what it means when our online yoga instructor tells us to plant our feet, our hands, our bottoms firmly into the ground, when the actual ground, the earth is so far beneath us? It probably hitchhiked in aboard one of the delicious fresh apricots my mum dropped off from her dog-walking friend.
My sim still isn’t working. I suspect it’s because the old one had been disconnected and therefore won’t transfer. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get the gumption to do something about this, but I don’t want to have to remember more numbers….
This morning, I use some of the fancy textas we were given (thanks Aunty Nut!) to make myself a paper bag mask. I show myself to Wizard and ask whether I look glamorous now. His response? “You look like you have a bag on your head” did nothing for my self-esteem.
Brown Owl and I do more mask-making today. We post a selfie on the hotel quarantine guest page. Another guest, several fortnights ago, also used the paper bags to good effect. We see a page of the masks she made each day that she was here.
Joe, of PE with Joe is distracted today. It’s a video from March (2020), in his first week of presenting to a locked down UK. He keeps stopping what he’s doing, to listen to Nicky give him updates on how many people are participating live, and where in the world they are coming from. I wish he would just get on with the workout.
In yoga this morning I start to be able to feel some connections between movements I make and the associated body parts.
After lunch, we are advised that the littlest hotel guests will get a chance to be chefs this afternoon. We are awaiting the yoyo biscuit decorating kits to be delivered, when the knock comes on the door. Wiz whizzes into his mask and answers the door, but it’s a pair of nurses in yellow plastic covers over their scrubs, masked and gloved and ready to stick things into our throats and noses.
Wizard is appalled when the nurse uses the same end of the swab-stick she’d stuck in his throat, for his nostril. I don’t think any of us really took much notice the first time. Jack’s result (negative for COVID) is already in. We’re waiting on the rest.
One of the nurses is a man, and this sends Jack into the need to show off his footy skills. I’m not sure the nurse can take much notice, and he doesn’t say anything to the cavorting ten-year-old in the room behind the doorway, where the rest of the family is lined up, passports in hand, masks over face, awaiting our turn.
I’m not sure how I feel about toxic masculinity at this moment. Is this a benign case of joyous self-expression? Is it a reaching out for connection of like with assumed like because of some shared social gender traits? Are we not doing well enough in our quest to teach our children that football, like gymnastics, like ice skating, like ice hockey (?) is open for humans of every gender to enjoy and participate in? Am I totally overthinking this?
When I hear a particularly vile swear word used by the youtuber Jack is currently watching, I call it out. Jack sheepishly selects a different clip. “They don’t usually talk to each other with those sorts of words, do they?” I am dismayed, because from what I’ve been observing, this fellow seems to be generally positive, having some points in his favour. Despite his obnoxiously loud voice, and his tendency to talk over whoever he’s playing a game with online, he has friends whose accents hint that they come from a variety of places around the world, and he is so silly that even as a distant observer I am sometimes overcome by sympathetic giggles and belly-laughs.
Brown Owl and I find ourselves playing piggy in the middle in the boys’ room, with the two jellyfish balls brought to us by the Dads earlier in the week. I distinctly recall how I hated the game as a child, but today it is fun. I giggle and struggle and succeed in grabbing the ball as it goes past me. The tentacles help.
I cannot believe how much physical activity we are able to pack into these quarantine rooms. In the back of my mind is the constant necessity of being prepared to interrupt myself when engaging in other more solitary activities, in order to give to the boys. While part of me resents this, (not as much as when we aren’t in quarantine, when I tend to resist), I also know that anticipating and accepting these needs, and actively addressing them will absolutely and definitely forestall the painful conflicts that arise when they are too much ignored.
It’s my turn to read with Wizard tonight, after our evening viewing. We are reading our way through the Greek Gods. Wizard announces that he will go to sleep without his melatonin tonight. It would be great if returning to the Southern Hemisphere has reset his body-clock. He knows himself well and puts himself to sleep quickly and without fuss.
I manage to stay awake until after 10pm tonight, to finish the book I started, which was given to us by one of Brown Owl’s colleagues in Red Deer. A House in the Sky (2013) by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett, details Lindhout’s experiences of being held hostage in Somalia for 15 months. She survived terrible abuse during these 15 months. In her memoir are thoughts about Muslim fundamentalism, corrupt governments, capitalism, gender relations and poverty. It’s a challenging read.
I drift into sleep, actively working to dispel the unease and sadness that lingers after I close the book. As my conscious mind gives way, I link the vile word used by the youtuber with Jack’s reaction to the nurse, and the endless questions Jack taxes me with, about power and violence and conflict.
We chatted during the day about which local junior football club he might be able to join this season. When it came to explaining our idea about Kilburn Football Club being very “rough” and not suitable for him. When it comes to toxic masculinity, white working-class culture, xenophobia, Australia’s social underclass and intergenerational unemployed people, and our wish as parents to shield Jack from the worst aspects of this, it’s not easy to put this into words a ten-year-old will comprehend.
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