Laura Jean Baker
Every pandemic requires a convincing argument, so this is what I tell myself as my husband Ryan and I dovetail at the kitchen sink. I am forearms deep in Palmolive suds. He is pantomiming flourishes of optimism, twirling the dry towel. Time has dilated and sucked us into a theoretical existence. Before COVID-19, we lived separately on the spacetime continuum of our everyday lives. Now we are metrics in Einstein’s field equations for gravity, cocooned in a worm-tunnel of love.
Since 1996, Ryan and I have navigated distances far longer than the stretch of a collapsible tape measure, used once by a seamstress to pattern my wedding dress, five times by a midwife to chart the bubble of my fundus. For four years and six months, we studied in separate cities, Ryan rock-steady in La Crosse while I sojourned from Boulder to Madison, Buenos Aires, Madrid, and back again. I’d often fall ill, homesick for my partner-in-crime. Longing for Ryan felt like it was a virus.
Marriage in 2001 delivered us to a shared domicile in Ann Arbor, but graduate school was ruthless as a melon baller, scooping out my insides. Ryan was living; I was just a hollow pumpkin earning a creative-writing degree.
By 2003, I’d recovered from my M.F.A., but then Ryan started law school. Everybody refers to law students’ partners as “widows” for a reason. Our lawyers-in-training curled cadaverous over books in far-flung libraries, earning their Juris Doctorates while we stayed home. In 2004, our first daughter was born, followed by a brood of siblings in ’06, ’08, ’10, ’13. As I breastfed “on demand,” Ryan and I didn’t often sleep in the same bed. We dreamed and woke six billion light years apart.
Before March 2020, on any given day, Ryan drove the boys to hockey; I drove the girls to music lessons. Or I chauffeured the boys to movies; he taxied the girls to Starbucks. Only a wormhole, a hypothetical shortcut in space and time, could unite us.
“See you in fifteen years,” we’d say.
Then on March 12, the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh announced I’d begin teaching my courses in English online, and ten days later, on March 22, the Wisconsin Supreme Court suspended in-person proceedings state-wide. Slowly but predictably, everything closed, even the YMCA, our central hub for kids’ activities. We stopped forcing our cars to guzzle gasoline, and we all decelerated.
“Hey, you,” I said as if to a stranger in a cafe. I winked, and he smiled. This was our Corona-inspired meet-cute.
Against the backdrop of our own fear and vigilance, amid our children’s frustration and noise, Ryan and I had suddenly been thrust together again. We synced our lives, re-calibrated our designs on togetherness, began walking “five laps” a day – one for each child – around the mile-long neighborhood circle.
Governor Evers’s stay-at-home order has allowed us to merge with propulsive force. Despite all the dangers a wormhole presents – exotic matter, radiation, the threat of collapse – it’s unexpectedly radiant in here.
Laura Jean Baker is the author of The Motherhood Affidavits and Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. She is working hard to be optimistic, #safeathome with her husband and five children.