Moms Don't Have Time To Page 2

  We pivoted quickly. Instead of launching our online magazine months out as we’d planned guided by the strategic counsel of my friend and consigliere, Maxi Kozler, we rushed it to “press.” My old friend, designer Somsara Rielly, gave in to my begging and, working with wunderkind McCain Merren, produced the entire design and launched it in weeks. I took all the pictures for the issues. Nina Vargas, formerly my kids’ babysitter and then head of events—which had completely ceased—took care of social media promotion. Jamie Mortimer, my kids’ babysitter, my right-hand lady, and a former English major, copy edited. We Found Time?! Yes, we sure did.

  My tiny team produced compassionate, timely literary essays. Carolyn Murnick, an author from my podcast, used her years of experience at New York magazine and stepped in to help edit and refine the concept. Alice Berman, another author and dear friend, negotiated partnerships. I hosted an online Zoom launch event at which thirty plus authors came to celebrate the release of this new form of entertainment, an antidote to the stress of the changing world.

  All the essays we produced during lockdown are in this book. We released them over the course of two months in the most uncertain times we’ve ever lived through. Everyone juggled their own issues, health concerns, kids, spouses, other work, and more to produce it. I couldn’t be more grateful.

  It shouldn’t have been me at the center of all of this literary action when bestselling authors, career editors, agents, publishers, and journalists would surely have been more qualified. But it was. And I knew I was doing the right thing, even if there wasn’t anything quantifiable to show for it. After all, that’s not why I was doing any of it.

  Sometimes I felt like a medium or a psychic, like I’d been given this precious gift of being a trusted intermediary. I could ignore it and shove it in a closet, or I could place that gift carefully in my hands and showcase it to the world. I trotted it out.

  When I saw pictures of overworked doctors in protective bubbles, eerie, empty streets all over the globe, and patients struggling to breathe in overcrowded hospitals, I felt helpless. When readers emailed me to say my We Found Time essays were helping, I knew it was all worth it.

  I don’t have a medical degree. I couldn’t stop the pandemic. I couldn’t make my life—or anyone else’s—go back to normal. I couldn’t even explain to my five-year-old son why he couldn’t add anything to the Countdown app on my phone because we didn’t have any plans to count down to, possibly ever. I couldn’t help patients breathe. But I’m glad I could help people at home breathe a little easier, think, connect, smile, and learn. Feel less alone. Feel human.

  So that’s how We Found Time happened, even though my seventy-something-year-old mother told me even she didn’t have the time to consume all the content I was creating. I wanted the right person to find the right story, quote, or sentence for them.

  I may have been stuck inside indefinitely, homeschooling four kids. I may have been overcome with anxiety and fear and sadness and hopelessness at what was befalling our beloved world. I may have been separated from loved ones, family, friends, and community. I may have been unable to hug, to see, to touch, to smile at others. But I decided to respect that gift—that pull—so others could connect through storytelling. I decided to keep listening to the voice in my head each night that whispered: how else can I help?

  And I’m so glad I did.

  It shouldn’t have been me. But it was.

  We released the final issue of We Found Time on July 27, 2020, when things seemed to be going back to normal and time would be lost again.

  That very week COVID-19 struck my family.

  My husband Kyle’s grandmother, Marie (“Nene”) Felice, passed away from COVID-19, which she inadvertently “caught” while hospitalized for a life-threatening heart condition several weeks before. The hospital released her without testing her for COVID-19.

  She promptly went home and gave it to her daughter and roommate, my mother-in-law, Susan Owens. At sixty-three, Susan was healthy and newly divorced, a hardworking baker and small business owner who had started a new relationship with a guy with a motorcycle (that she actually dared to ride!). She stopped everything to care for her mother, but quickly caught COVID-19—with a raging fever—herself. When Nene went back into the hospital, now dying from COVID-19, Susan donned a full-body hazmat suit to say goodbye. She stuffed it with ice packs.

  The day after her mother passed away, Susan was admitted to the hospital. For the next three weeks she endured horrific health care challenges while fighting COVID-19. A nurse spilled a container of urine on her. No one washed her thick, shining, chest-length, chocolate-brown mane, or even took the time to brush her teeth. COVID-19 tests were jammed up her nostrils daily until her nose grew infected. She lay “prone,” upside down, to help open up her lungs, and the nurses forgot about her. This was the one moment, during a phone call, when tears broke through her typical Jersey-girl, “I got this!” fist-pump emoji self.

  After three weeks on a cocktail of meds like remdesivir and steroids, her lungs still ended up ravaged. She went on a ventilator and then, when that failed and the doctors in Charlotte ran out of options, she was airlifted to Duke University. She spent another three weeks in the ICU on a ventilator, an ECMO breathing machine, then dialysis for her kidneys, until she had a stroke that ended her valiant fight to live. Kyle, his sister, Stefanie, and I heard the news in our hotel room and began howling as Susan’s two well-behaved dogs suddenly attacked each other.

  When I first asked Susan if she and Nene wanted to quarantine with us, she had politely demurred. She didn’t want to be an imposition, especially with the two dogs, Nya, a black Lab, and Luna, a Husky/Bull Terrier mix who Kyle had rescued as a puppy; he’d found her wandering around a parking lot late at night.

  Those dogs live with us now. They sleep beside my two youngest kids at night. Nya snores underneath my chair as I conduct podcast interviews and write.

  This virus is far from gone. The vast implications are still unknown and, tragically, many more families will be affected. That’s why I’m donating my advance and all proceeds of this book to the Susan Felice Owens Program for COVID-19 Vaccine Research at Mount Sinai Health System. In the meantime, I hope everyone will remember to wear masks, stay six feet apart, and follow the ever-changing health recommendations.

  I hope the following essays by truly sensational, insightful, and talented writers, all of whom have been guests on my podcast, serve as an antidote to the uncertainty and chaos that terrorize our world. That is, if you find time to read them. I hope you will.

  Sheltering with Ghosts

  ESTHER AMINI

  What would my parents have made of our locked-down world?

  I’m quarantined with cans of lentil soup, rolls of Bounty, and an assortment of disinfectants just as my memoir Concealed is launched into our locked-down world.

  As I’m held hostage by the coronavirus, I often think of my Jewish parents who came from the Iranian city of Mashhad and grew up hiding, both physically and emotionally. They concealed their true identity and led duplicitous lives. As underground crypto-Jews, they pretended to be other than who they were in order to survive in a community intolerant of those who were different. Mom stepped out into open-air markets, masked, veiled from head to toe behind a black chador as my father prayed from the Koran in public squares, each posing as Muslim. Within the secrecy of their home they were devout Jews. The outside world felt lethal, not because of a widespread virus but due to life-threatening anti-Semitism, a deadly pandemic of its own. After World War II, my parents immigrated to the United States, where I was born, but also hauled with them medieval Mashhad into our New York City home.

  Since Iran’s societal values were diametrically opposite to America’s, so much was misunderstood, and often lost in translation. When my Persian mother spotted bare-armed teens flaunting tattooed biceps she’d belt out “Jinko-lo-vinski,”—her best attempt at “Juvenile Delinquents!” Mom was convinced public reproach would
bring about social reform. Thanks to her indecipherable English, our lives were spared. She didn’t understand them, nor they her.

  Growing up, I found myself caught between two worlds, the Iranian chador and freewheeling America.

  But I, too, didn’t feel understood. Growing up, I found myself caught between two worlds, the Iranian chador and freewheeling America. I was trapped amid the Persian expectation that I be submissive and married by age sixteen, and my wish to break out into the world, unrestricted, and speak.

  Today, in the midst of a twenty-first-century plague, we’re each cooped up, burrowed in our homes, afraid of proximity: especially the breath, sweat, and touch of strangers. And whenever we dare step out, our faces are fully masked. What would Mom say if she were here today, weathering our times? Knowing her, she’d probably jut out her chest, grip her wide Persian hips, and in Farsi bellow, “they will definitely discover a coronavirus vaccine. But it’s about time they come out with a vaccine that stops the spread of anti-Semitism!”

  And what would be Pop’s response, given how terrified he was of people, mail, and all that entered his antiseptic, anti-American abode? He had already perfected “sheltering in place” by avoiding crowds, company, and all forms of human contact. Would he now dig deeper into silence and distrust the outside world even more than he already did?

  If my parents were alive with me now wearing face masks and practicing social distancing, memories of their sequestered, underground lives in Mashhad would certainly surface. Unlike Pop, who craved silence and solitude—his aphrodisiac—my boisterous and disobedient mother’s insatiable hunger for company would send her breaking out onto city streets. Patience was not her strong suit. I can imagine her scrambling down Fifth Avenue in search of people to stop, see, and gab with. Mom’s inner rebel always ruled.

  I can’t say I identify strongly with either one of my parents. Born in the States, I’ve been shielded from the kind of dehumanizing terror my parents endured. I’m not hermetic like my father, nor outrageously titanic like my mother. In addition, since I was raised in New York City, my associations with hiding behind locked doors to protect myself from this pandemic are also quite different.

  If my parents were alive with me now wearing face masks and practicing social distancing, memories of their sequestered, underground lives in Mashhad would certainly surface.

  For me, isolation is a gift that favors art. For many, it provides the much-needed climate to invent: compose music, write books, paint, sculpt, think. The creative process flourishes under these circumstances. It demands looking inward and detachment from the outside world, entering one’s interior life and getting lost there. And eventually, with determination, pulling out what’s buried inside.

  This is prime time to be undistracted by the comings and goings, the clutter of our modern lives. This is time for reflection. Time to think and not to run. Time to consolidate and evaluate.

  For me, it’s time to write. Whether I have two hours to pen a thought or two minutes, what’s most gratifying is reaching into my silent, overlooked side and letting it speak freely in ways it was not encouraged to do growing up.

  It’s time, too, to think about the past and be grateful that I am only held hostage temporarily, unlike my parents, who were held hostage by the world they left behind their entire lives.

  Esther Amini is an artist, psychotherapist, and author of the debut memoir Concealed.

  The Short Stories I Found in the Sweater Box

  CHRIS BOHJALIAN

  When I was cleaning out my father’s home after he died, I came across a sweater box under his bed. In it were some of the short stories I had written in the third and fourth grade. For a few minutes I sat on the floor and read them, recalling the bedroom in Connecticut in which I had penned them decades earlier, my teachers, and the inspirations for the tales. A couple of times I had to blink back tears, because here was one more indication of how very much my parents had loved me: My mother had saved these stories for years, and then, after she died in 1995, my father had preserved them.

  Now, it’s also possible that I was on the verge of crying because the stories were absolute train wrecks. Nowhere in them could I find what a creative writing professor might generously have called promise. (I must admit, I did take a little pride in my penmanship. My lettering would have made a medieval monk proud.)

  But I was struck by how I could see, even in that “apprentice work,” two themes that would resonate in my novels as an adult: heartbreak and dread. When my books work—and heaven knows they do not always work—those are the points on the narrative compass that matter most. The stories ranged from a tale of a disembodied hand emerging from a wishing well to one about sibling rivalry on the school bus safety patrol. Another ended with this sentence: “The dripping stopped and the vultures had their meal.”

  There’s often a deep connection for writers between what we read for pleasure and what we write. It’s not always direct: it’s not as if novelists known for writing horror only read horror. (On the other hand, one piece of advice I often give fledging writers is this: write the sort of thing you love to read most. If you love science fiction, write that. If you savor what we call literary fiction, let those books be your inspiration.)

  There’s often a deep connection for writers between what we read for pleasure and what we write.

  But I know that Esther Forbes’s Revolutionary War saga, Johnny Tremain, a novel about a fourteen-year-old apprentice silversmith with a crippling hand injury, influenced what I was writing in third grade. I still recall the last line with all of its metaphoric gravitas: “A man can stand up.”

  Likewise, one week in fourth grade when I was home sick from school, I devoured Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, a ghost story that to this day scares the hell out of me. I’m sure at nine years old I missed Eleanor Vance’s emotional instability and the sadness of her adulthood prior to joining the ghost hunters at Hill House, but I have never forgotten the riveting scene when she jumps from her bed in the night and cries out to her roommate, Theodora, “God! God!—Whose hand was I holding?”

  Those two books for me were all about my dual lodestars of heartbreak and dread. To this day, that is what I seem to crave in my reading, whether all is right with the world or we are living in one of those moments in history that we will look back on and think to ourselves, “I know exactly where I was when . . .” I recall finishing Howard Frank Mosher’s A Stranger in the Kingdom on the front steps of my home in Vermont on a carefree Saturday afternoon in June, the sky cloudless and cerulean, savoring the wistfulness that washed over me and made no sense given the kind of day it was. When I read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird aloud to my daughter when she was in third grade, we were both a little unmoored by the quiver in my voice as I read the last page—and especially when it broke on that last paragraph:

  “He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”

  We still have a totemic connection to books made of paper. I love audiobooks on my phone and on occasion I have even read novels on a device. But most books I read are hardcovers or paperbacks. My fiction is alphabetized by author, but I actually have a special section in my library for those books that left me feeling a little broken and a little fragile when I turned the last page—because those are my favorites. Those are the ones I have, on occasion, read two and three and even four times.

  Sometimes I wonder what my parents thought when they perused those stories their son had written as a boy. Did they worry about the darkness in them? The sadness? I wasn’t a melancholic child. I’m not a morose adult. But then I remind myself that my mother was an avid—almost ferocious—reader; I still have her editions of some of her favorite novels. She probably saw in my short stories the books and movies that had triggered them. She very likely understood that, whether it’s Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Tales from the Crypt, children are often drawn to fict
ion that touches the darkest recesses of the soul.

  To this day, that is what I seem to crave in my reading, where all is right with the world or we are living in one of those moments in history that we will look back on and think to ourselves, I know exactly where I was when . . .

  And so mostly when I look at those handwritten stories, the blue ink on the white lined paper, I recall that among the great gifts my loving parents gave me was a love of reading in the first place.

  Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Midwives and The Flight Attendant, among many other books. His most recent bestselling novel, The Red Lotus, was published in March 2020.

  How David Sedaris Is Helping Me Get By

  ALLI FRANK

  Searching for humor in a most sobering time.

  I’m currently serving as our house’s coronavirus distance learning warden, and my sixth grader and third grader have been asking me for math help in surround sound. With each ticking week, their suspicions that I am in fact clueless, as well as embarrassing, are confirmed. The three of us sit within yelling distance of one another so I’m at the ready for support, but typically my mind is elsewhere.

  Back when we thought this whole homeschooling thing would last two weeks max, I ordered pens and pencils in bulk. Some were for now, but most were to be saved for the next school year (I’m a planner). Where the hell have they all gone? Somehow we start every school day with the same declaration: “I need a pen.” And my oldest daughter wants intricately braided hairstyles every day for her Google Meet classes, but I cannot, for the life of me, create a straight part. The back of her head looks like tire tracks fishtailing on a road of fresh snow.