What They’ll Remember

I have a wonderful shelter, which is my family.

~José Carreras

A few days before COVID-19 took center stage in the United States, we self-quarantined our family of seven. At the time, I was having confusing dreams and waking up in the middle of the night covered in sweat. An avid dreamer, I often find confirmations of my waking intuition in my dreams. Still, confusing dreams are unusual for me.

That whole week, my dreams had a recurring theme. I was staring in the bathroom mirror. The “other” me smiled and spoke calmly, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying.

Later that week, in the wee hours of shared concern, my husband and I agreed it was time for our family to react to (what was clearly becoming) a national pandemic.

We are no strangers to action plans for respiratory illnesses. Many members of our family, including my husband and me, have compromised health. Congenital heart issues, autoimmune disease and asthma are all part of our family’s everyday lives.

Last year’s case of strep throat had exasperated our most medically compromised child’s health and landed her in the hospital. We were worried. For our family, a pandemic could literally mean life or death.

“There’s no longer a way of shielding them from how serious this is,” I said.

In the middle of the night, ahead of the rest of our nation, we made a drastic adjustment to our lives. We wouldn’t wait for the anticipated school closures. We would pull our five kids from school immediately and self-quarantine our entire family.

We sat in the silence of the monumental decision. We knew we were experiencing a significant moment in history and in the story of our family.

“You okay?” my husband asked.

“Yeah,” I sighed. “It’s just a lot of pressure. They’ll remember this their entire lives.”

My mom brain was going a mile a minute. I was barely managing a full-time at-home job, five kids, our medical needs and our everyday lives. How would I add the stress of a pandemic and virtual schooling without totally losing it?

That night I had trouble falling asleep. My mind was preoccupied with our forthcoming conversation with the kids about the situation. Anxieties over health and mortality were already a stress on our children. Sharing the severity of the situation — without frightening them — was going to be like walking a parenting tightrope. This conversation (and the weeks to follow) would be a defining moment in their childhoods and my motherhood. They’d remember how we loved, fought, prayed, cried and laughed.

Once I fell asleep, I dreamed again of looking in the bathroom mirror. The “other” me was smiling again, and this time, when she spoke I understood her.

“Remember,” she said.

I woke myself up screaming, “Remember what?”

I quickly jotted “Remember” in my nightstand journal. The following day, I worried that I’d missed an important item on the to-do list from my subconscious.

That afternoon, our youngest daughter interrupted me while I was working in the bedroom.

“Let’s bake something,” she said. “I want to learn to make frosting!”

“This isn’t a vacation,” I snapped at her. “I still have to work, and now you’re all here all day! I can’t bake on a workday.”

Her face fell. Her bottom lip quivered like it does when she’s trying not to cry. She stomped out and left me with my computer, feeling like a failure. It was day one of the quarantine, and I had already snapped at a child about how stressful this was for me.

Usually, I like to jump right in and help, with either a solution or a reminder that most problems aren’t that bad. I needed to analyze my own behavior. I recalled my dream and pulled out my journal to examine the question I had written. Below “Remember what?” I added: “Remember that this virus is contagious, and so is my reaction.”

I felt relieved and ready to “reset” our quarantine. I had figured out what the “me” in the mirror was trying to say, and I had a plan for my attitude about the pandemic.

I called my daughter back into the bedroom, and we researched cream cheese frosting recipes. When she found the perfect one, she grabbed my nightstand journal.

“Can I write it in your important notebook, Mama?” she asked. “You write all the things you promise you’ll do in there.”

She took my journal and diligently copied the recipe.

That night, I went to bed feeling confident. Then, I had the dream again.

I woke up feeling defeated and frustrated. I thought I’d figured out my dream and my approach to the quarantine.

Again, I wrote “Remember WHAT?” in my journal. This time, it was next to a recipe for cream cheese frosting.

Throughout the first weeks of the quarantine, I had some version of that dream a few more times. About a month in, on a particularly difficult day, my husband was especially frustrated. The homeschooling, working, uncertainty and fear had overwhelmed him. He was grumbling at the kids about some minor issue.

“When you get like this and I know you need a break, what do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Just tell me to remember,” he said. “In these moments, I need to remember how trivial the things that upset me really are.”

I was taken aback. I hadn’t told him about my dreams, so I was surprised at his wording.

As he left the room to take a break, I noticed our youngest daughter sitting on the couch, paying close attention.

“I’ll remember, Mama,” she said.

Oh, no! Another parenting fail, I thought.

“We make cream cheese frosting and bake in the kitchen a lot now,” she said.

“Really, honey?” I responded. “That’s what you’ll remember about this whole thing?”

“Yeah, Mama,” she said. “I’ll remember dessert every night!”

That night, I opened my journal. Right next to that frosting recipe (in my daughter’s handwriting), I crossed out the question mark and completed the sentence: “Remember dessert.”

I haven’t had the dream since, but we’ve eaten a lot of dessert with homemade cream cheese frosting.

— Holly Rutchik —