This week, we bring you two stories about negotiating life under the same roof during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Part 1: When Gail Thomas moves in with her family during the pandemic, tensions brew between sisters.
Gail is a writer/actor/storytelling coach and lawyer living in NYC. Her voiceover credits include John Cameron Mitchell’s Anthem: Homunculus, Angelo Rules, David Letterman, and Beavis and Butthead. Her short comedy, My BFF won audience favorite at New Filmmakers. As a speechwriter for over 30-world class events including the Tribeca Film Festival, her words have been uttered by Oscar winners and fancy people with great clothes. But none of that matters now, we’re in a pandemic. Gail is out walking her dog.
Part 2: The pandemic brings Wendy Bredhold and her ex-husband back together under the same roof for Thanksgiving.
Wendy Bredhold works for climate and environmental justice representing the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign in Indiana and Kentucky. She lives in Evansville, Indiana with her daughter Beatrice Rose and cats, Pearl and Pinky. She loves dancing to live music, reading, writing and rabble-rousing.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Gail Thomas
…phone calls, checking in with my younger brother in Dallas and my older sister in Denver. COVID is still abstract to them, but not to me. It's March 2020. I live in New York City with eight million other people. I'm staying as far away from them as possible. Luckily, I'm single. I live alone. I already work remotely so it's not that hard as long as I don't leave the house.
Our 90-year-old mother recently moved from Oklahoma City to Denver to assisted living near Kaye, Kaye my older sister. We're both really nice people but we're very different. She's a CEO. A big picture, action taker. An optimist, she likes to say. That's stupid. It's a pandemic.
I Googled ‘best face mask’ in January and Amazon delivered my N95s on February 2nd. I'm a former lawyer, a cancer survivor, a freelance overthinker. I prepare for worst-case scenarios.
Thankfully, Kaye and her husband move mom into their house to be safe. I'm relieved.
Mom sounds great. She says, “I'm happy to live with family again.” And I'm jealous because Kaye gets mom. I can make her laugh and I want to see mom before it's too late.
In July, I adopt Desi, my little rescue dog, and the COVID numbers go down. So after two weeks together, Desi and I fly to Colorado for a couple of months so I can see mom and give Kaye a break. It's the first time I left my neighborhood since everything shut down.
I'm looking forward to the break too but I'm nervous about sister time. The red flags start before I even leave New York. I'm searching for an Airbnb and Kaye takes over and starts sending me posts of these sterile, fancy, high-rise apartments that are across the street from her. I don't want a fancy high rise. I live in New York. And I don't want to be across the street from her. I want nature. Plus her places all turn out to be scams.
Finally, I remember that I'm a grown-up and I book a place near a park, the biggest park in Denver.
They pick me up at the airport and we drive straight to Kaye's house. I keep my mask on in the car. I'd actually secretly hoped to quarantine first. I'd imagine two weeks in the Rocky Mountains by a stream before being squished into family time, but Kaye doesn't think I need to quarantine and I really want to see mom so we go to Kaye's house.
Gail walks the open streets of Colorado with her family.
I walk in the front door and there's my sweet, gray-haired mom sitting maskless at the family dining room table that Kaye inherited. I walk over to her and I give her a big hug. It feels wonderful and horrifying.
I release her. I look at her and I take off my mask. It's the first time that I've been face to face with another human being since this whole thing started. Fortunately, the meals are outside in the backyard. This is taking a lot of getting used to, but it's Colorado and it's open skies and lots of space.
The first week is rough. Kaye's golden doodle labradoodle whatever kind of doodle seems to want to eat my little dog Desi. Every time Desi comes to me her dog moves in front and grabs Desi's little neck with her big sloppy jaw and Desi yelps and runs away. I can't even get to know my own dog who I've only had for two weeks.
The next day, Desi pees on Kaye's oriental rug while she's on a conference call. I Google how to get it off and start scrubbing it down and it's coming up just fine and then Kaye runs out of her conference call and grabs a towel and starts scrubbing it really hard back and forth making it way worse than it already was.
That night at dinner, Kaye and her husband stare me down and tell me that when you stay here with mom, Desi will sleep in the crate. I feel like I'm being put in a crate.
Dinner is every night at Kaye's house. I haven't had dinner every night with someone in over 30 years since I lived at home with my parents. And now my sister is in charge of everything. She said I could borrow her car but now it's like if I schedule in advance. I could borrow her bike but now she might want it. Everything's on her terms and it's like I have to ask for this ahead of time.
“Well, we can just come pick you up. Are you ready now?” It's like, no, I'm doing some work too.
And one night she tells me that I'm her most difficult relationship. I'm thinking, well, why? Because I don't do everything you say? Because I push back? And then she gives me this story about how she defends herself by saying that I'm a good manager at work.
I'm like, “This isn't work. This is family.” It is work, actually, and I don't know if I want to do it and I don't know if she wants to do it.
Gail Thomas with Dezi in the Rocky Mountain air.
A couple of weeks later, we're sitting outside in her front yard on the pretty little bench in front of her pretty little house sipping wine and I ask her if I can give her a little constructive feedback. She doesn't say no.
And I tell her, “You know, I feel like you're commenting on pretty much everything I say and do and it just feels like I'm being reprimanded.”
And she says that she feels defensive because she thinks she's not doing enough for mom. That's a new angle I had not really considered.
I tell her, “You're doing great. You're doing so much. I can see that.”
Finally, it comes time for me to move out of my place and move in with mom so that Kaye and her husband can go on their trip. I'm really excited that mom and I can have our single lady time. And Kaye and John are being safe. They're driving and they're going to North Carolina. It's just going to be with Kaye's son and his wife.
So the first day's it's mom's a handful. The dogs are a handful. At some point everybody, somebody's got to go outside and the dogs want to come inside. And even when the dogs don't want to go outside or inside, mom thinks that they do. And I have to remind her, “Mom, we're not working for the dogs.”
Then we have to make sure we keep the same TV show on, Blue Bloods or Law and Order and I got to go get to— mom wants me to go to Triple A to find her a map. God bless her. She has early stage dementia but she wants to keep her bearings.
Gail’s mom shares a moment with Dezi the rescue dog.
She lived in Denver over 60 years ago when she was in her 20s with her parents. One day we take a little field trip to find the house that they lived in. We don't even use the map. Mom is just like, “Turn here. Turn there,” and I'm so proud of her because we find the street and we think we find the house. I mean they've all been renovated. It has been a while. But it's just such a special time.
We get back to the house and mom opens up the big map on this couch and it’s so big that I don't even see her. I'm like, “Mom, where'd you go? I don't see Mom.” And she's laughing so hard she almost falls on the floor. I can make mom laugh.
I find all these zucchini recipes. There's so much zucchini in the garden.
And one day Kaye texts me and it's not the usual things about the house and mom. It says, “Thank you.” She says that that morning she'd found herself being overly critical of her son and his wife and she remembered our conversation. She wanted to thank me for making her look at it. And she types, “I love you.”
I recover and respond. It's not what I was expecting. “I love you too.”
When Kaye and her husband return, we all live in the house together for a few days, which I had been nervous about but we're like a family. Kaye pulls me aside and asks my opinions on her decision-making about mom. We talk about when is the best time to move mom back into assisted living and we agree after talking about the cases and the facility and what they're doing that maybe later in September. By the time I fly back to Brooklyn, it almost feels like we're in this together.
I settle back into Brooklyn and September becomes October becomes November and then December, and I've got a flight for Christmas to go back to Colorado. But Fauci starts talking about the holiday surge and warning people about small groups and little family gatherings. I know I'm not going to go because I don't want to worry about myself and mom and the crowded airport and all this stuff.
By now, mom has moved back to assisted living and so Kaye's got more freedom. One day on the phone Kaye mentions that they are going to take a little road trip to Oklahoma, which is a hotspot for a little dinner party and anniversary gathering. It sounds like the dreaded Fauci scenario to me.
But she says, “Oh, well, everybody's friends and everybody's testing first and everybody's being really careful,” so I don't say anything and they go.
I text her while she's away. I'm like, “How's it going?” And she sends me a video of people walking into an entryway maskless screaming, “Surprise!” it's horrifying.
They returned from their trip and I talked to mom that morning as she waits for them to come pick her up for a visit and I want to say, “Mom, why don't you just wait a couple of days,” but I don't say anything.
Then the following day Kaye calls and tells me that someone tested positive for COVID at the party, and I'm furious inside. I don't want to be right and I don't want to be glad that I'm right. I don't say anything and she starts to get defensive anyway, but then I think she remembers that we're on the same side.
And I say, “Kaye, you're managing a lot. I love you and I support you, even if you give Mom COVID.”
They all quarantined. Her doctor's orders. And mom's annoyed because she didn't do anything wrong. We wait for test results.
Kaye texts and calls and she says that she's paying the price. She says that she's truly sorry, and I know she is. She's my sister. We're family. And I don't need to be right.
Part 2: Wendy Bredhold
It’s Thanksgiving 2020 and I'm sitting at my ex-husband's kitchen table. I wondered all year if this is how we would spend the holidays in our necessary pod. We celebrated our daughter's ninth birthday together in July and, now, here we are, celebrating Thanksgiving together for the first time in seven years, the first in our daughter's memory.
We are excellent co-parents. I'm sitting here at his table on Thanksgiving and the virus has demanded of us even greater trust and more communication because of the small person sitting next to me who travels back and forth between our households throughout the week. As far as the virus is concerned, her parents might as well still be married.
By rights and Indiana's guidelines for divorced parents, it's his year to celebrate Thanksgiving with our daughter, but he invited me almost shyly one day as he was walking back to his truck to take her to my former home.
“I'm making a turkey for Thanksgiving. Would you want to come over?”
Since mid-March 2020, I have only been under a roof with these two. The virus has revealed us as this basic social unit. And every holiday has felt like a hurdle to jump or a puzzle to solve how to make it special or fun for my daughter or even just how to have some sense of normalcy.
Thanksgiving loomed. It's always been my favorite. The least commercial. Just about family and food, if you ignore all the problematic history.
I had nowhere else to go since I'm distancing from my mother and her husband and my grandmother in their 70s 80s and 90s, and I didn't want to spend Thanksgiving alone, so I said, “What can I bring?”
And now I'm sitting here at his table that he made with his own hands in an outbuilding of a country house that we rented from a couple of artists not long after we were married. For days after he applied layers of varnish, I was banned from entering lest I disturb some dust and mar its surface. It's lovely, this golden pine. And when he finished it, I didn't love it. I would have preferred something more rustic and less shiny.
And I remember him telling me, as our marriage was failing 15 years later, that nothing he did was good enough for me. I wonder if he remembers that. I hope he doesn't.
My ex-husband has characteristically prepared a feast. A whole turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, two kinds of stuffing, roasted carrots and cranberry salad are all arranged on his kitchen island where we fill our plates.
I have brought that Midwestern staple, green bean casserole, sweet potato casserole, wine, dinner rolls and dessert, and I'm proud of my modest offerings. He was the cook in our marriage and look at me now. I can contribute.
He tells me that our daughter helped him make the cranberry salad and I suddenly remember our last Thanksgiving together. Now, ordinarily, we would spend Thanksgiving at his parents and my grandmother’s, but that year we celebrated Thanksgiving with my mother at her house.
I love my mother's Thanksgiving and her meal was as good as I remembered, but she served this canned cranberry sauce. You know, it's shaped like the can and it has the ridges from the molded aluminum. She put it on the table on this nice dish and nobody touched it. And when the meal was over, she noticed it sitting there untouched and she remembered that only my father, who even then was long gone, he'd passed away many years before, had ever touched the stuff. She herself was long ago remarried but had just bought it out of habit.
I ask my ex-husband if he remembers this story and I have this familiar uncertainty, like is it okay to talk about when we were married and the past or should I stay with the present and our daughter and why we're here together now? Are we as friendly as we seem or is it just for her benefit?
And he remembers the story but I can't really tell from his reaction. So I turn to my daughter and I praise her cranberry salad, but she's more interested in describing her favorite comic strips from her collection of Sunday newspaper funny papers, a hobby of which I was unaware. And I wonder what it's like for her living this bifurcated life. At my house for two days, at his house for two, alternating weekends. You know, maybe in a COVID context it's a benefit to have a different set of walls to look at from time to time.
And as she chatters on describing a Garfield strip frame by frame, my ex-husband tells me that the green bean casserole is good. I smile somewhat ruefully, but I am genuinely glad that I have dumped the right proportions of mushroom soup and milk and canned green beans and dried onions in a casserole dish.
It's very different from when we were married and we would argue about the cooking. I would offer to learn and to take my turn and then he would back down and say he liked doing it. Now, I sometimes give him gifts of food, mostly baked goods. Once, his favorite gumbo, ostensibly prepared with help from our daughter, although maybe she just took a turn at the whisk. And these gifts feel like an urge to please in an area where I failed in our marriage.
They say, “See. I've grown.”
“See,” they say, “I've grown.”
I notice we're eating from the dishes that we picked out together and registered for as wedding gifts. They are cream-colored with a brown rim. Simple, rustic even. The salt and pepper shakers are some gorgeous exotic wood. They were also a wedding gift, something else I left behind.
I recall the day that we found the ladder back dining chairs with the rush seats while we were out of town visiting family in Indianapolis at a yard sale. We crammed them into the back of the car and we were so excited by our luck. They were exactly what we were looking for and just ten bucks a piece.
Our daughter's art table is still in the same corner. I watched her take some of her first steps from that table to the play kitchen set across the room. My ex-husband says she's outgrown the kitchen set and he's going to give it away.
And all these things and, in fact, this whole house feel heavy with the past and with memory but their meaning is less clear. They're only objects after all and the virus has taught us what we should have already known. That what matters most is people.
Returning to the island with my plate, I notice that the refrigerator is papered with pictures of their life together without me. There's the gaggle of cousins, all girls, provided by his sister and brother. The camping trips and the beach vacations and the long-awaited trip to Disney World in February 2020 just before the world stopped.
While they were there my ex-husband sent me a video of our daughter describing all the animals she could see from their hotel room. Giraffes and zebras, water buffaloes, cranes. He conscientiously texted me pictures from throughout their trip, as we do.
He's the kind of dad who takes his daughter to Disney World and beach vacations and camping trips. They do science projects together and they go fishing and they geek out over Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. It is a father-daughter relationship I can only imagine because I am witnessing it between the two of them.
The Thanksgiving dinner.
I'm fairly in awe of who our daughter may become because of it. Because of having two loving, involved parents, having the security and solidity and the knowledge of that love for all of her life, it seems to me an extraordinary gift, but maybe it's more ordinary than I know.
When I told my mother about my Thanksgiving plans, she was grateful and relieved that my ex-husband invited me over. And she reminded me that he doesn't like sweet potato casserole.
At my ex-husband's table, we each offered our gratitude. And our daughter said, “At least we can have Thanksgiving.”
I'm fairly in awe of who our daughter may become because of it. Because of having two loving, involved parents, having the security and solidity and the knowledge of that love for all of her life, it seems to me an extraordinary gift, but maybe it's more ordinary than I know.
When I told my mother about my Thanksgiving plans, she was grateful and relieved that my ex-husband invited me over. And she reminded me that he doesn't like sweet potato casserole.
At my ex-husband's table, we each offered our gratitude. And our daughter said, “At least we can have Thanksgiving.”
It was indisputably a Thanksgiving the likes of which I never could have achieved on my own.