Mar 20, 2020 3 min read

Today they will learn to sew on a button. Tomorrow, ironing a shirt. After that, checking the oil in the engine.

As the world grinds to a halt, we’re finding ways to use our hours inside. The coronavirus pandemic has doubled the population of our house this week, the result of a college shutdown and pre-crisis spring break travel that disrupted plans for my daughter and her friend and brought them home.

It’s cozy in here.

These emancipated 20-year-old kids are probably feeling the tightness even more than the farmer and I are feeling it. It doesn’t help that we’re missing one bathroom while he renovates the basement.

My mood is loopy as a bungee cord, from despondent to a fluttery, bouncing hope. I keep things light for the kids, but I’ve been rolling out gentle warnings that life is going to be much different for a while.

When I was about five and suffering at home with chicken pox, my grandmother came to visit me in my bedroom.

“I wish I could take the sickness out of you and into me,” she said. She would repeat the same wish years later when I was recovering from surgery to remove my wisdom teeth.

“Better me than you,” was her message.

Better me than you, I think as I sanitize the kitchen island for the eighth time today.

Better that I get the virus than the two 20-year-olds sleeping in rooms down the hall or my 24-year-old son still asleep three time zones away.

Isn’t that the wish of every empty nester this week?

If only this virus were a speeding train barreling toward us, or a poison dart – something that we could see and absorb with our bodies. Every mother and father has thought if not said, “I would take a bullet for my child.”

The pandemic version of that is, “I would inhale the virus if it meant saving my child from inhaling it.”

If only this virus were finite, a collection of floating dots like we’re seeing on all the graphic models on Facebook. If only there were a finite number of germs instead of myriads of them endlessly duplicating themselves. We parents of young adults could line up like grocery hoarders to take our dose, deplete the supply and then take our chances.

If it meant there was no virus left to hurt my children – or my aging mom and dad – I would get in that line. Yes, my almost-grown children still need some parenting, but I’ve done my work with them. They are kind and strong and know the things that matter.

Exhibit one is my sweet, guileless Grace who wakes in the middle of the night to sit with the puppy when he cries and barks, so the rest of us don’t have to get up. That such a person would reach age 20 and not know how to sew on a button is shameful – and all my fault.

And so today I will pull down my sewing box, thread a needle and teach both of these college kids how it’s done. It’s a skill they will need soon, when they’re dressing up for a big college dance and they pop a button on a jacket. They may need to sew on a button when the world starts spinning again, and that’s my fluttery, bouncing hope talking.