Science Baby 6, Covid

Jennie woke up this morning mad at everything.

It’s hard to hear my own voice inside when I know she’s angry.  What I want to do is figure out what is making her mad and fix it so she can be okay again.

Over breakfast I was finally able to get her to tell me what, specifically, she’s upset about, and it boils down to this amazing sequence of false logic and assumptions

1. In Vitro Fertilization cycle #6 is being delayed a month because she contracted covid
2. It is definitely her fault that she got covid
3. Therefore she screwed up cycle #6

I tried to assure her that it isn’t her fault she got covid.  Life happens, Covid happens.  Precious little of it is under our control.

Not true, she said.  It’s my fault, I had a cold/flu in late December and I was letting my parents run me ragged and work run me ragged and my immune system was shot so that’s why I couldn’t fight off covid.

It seems like you’re looking for ways to blame yourself, I said.

Well, I mean, it’s just my fault, I screwed this up, I am the reason this cycle is getting delayed a month, our lives are always in limbo thanks to something, thanks to my parents, thanks to IVF, thanks to covid, I hate this, I can’t believe I screwed this up.

You didn’t screw it up

Yes I did

Agree to disagree.  I’m going to leave you alone and go work or something, shout if you need me.

We got four inches of snow on Monday, our first real accumulation of the year here in the greater Boston area.

Yesterday, Tuesday, I drove out to go to the gym and get a few things at the store for my Covid Wife.  My attention is held by the trees, vertically striped, white on one side, dark brown on the other, like zebras, the snow sticking somehow to the trunks.  Everything looks so different that the pattern-matching systems in my brain are broken as a result — incoming images don’t match what’s on file for geolocation mapping, as if I’m driving around a different place entirely.  I almost miss the turn off to the gym as a result.

The incredible thing about this experience is that, just for a moment, I had a strange tickle in my head.  It reminded me of being six years old again, so utterly unfamiliar that I had to poke around for a minute inside of myself searching for the root of the feeling.  Wonder, that’s it, I finally decided.  It’s wonder and awe, just base level appreciation for something that looks new and startlingly beautiful.  

I wouldn’t mind feeling more of that.