The Sickness

“Why can’t you go to work, Daddy?”

”Well, my love… people are getting really sick and the doctors don’t know enough about The Sickness to help people get better.”

That’s what we call it in our household: The Sickness. We’ve found that if we keep it vague-ish for our daughter - it’s easy to tack on new rules about how we interact with people we might encounter at the store or on our daily walks. It’s easier to adjust having preschool at home and seeing our friends through a computer screen. Or explain why we’re not in a dance studio practicing for our spring recital - but instead tap dancing on a piece of wood mommy found in the basement so we don’t scratch up the hardwood. She understands that something serious is happening outside of the safe walls of our house, and that it’s called The Sickness.

My 4yo is thrilled to have her mommy and daddy (who both work on broadway) home for every bedtime, and every weekend, and for every second of every day! It has become the new normal in our household. It obviously was a shock at first to have time… Now, that time has been divvied up into important rituals throughout each day. One of the most important being bedtime (dinner, tv/dessert, bath, stories, sleep). It has become one of my favorite times of day because we get assigned duties (I’ve yet to actually put her to bed - I’m usually delegated bath duty.) and we end her day with cuddles on our bed hearing mommy’s funny character voices to our favorite bedtime books. She then gets shuffled off to bed while daddy stands guard by her door to make sure she actually stays in bed.

Once she’s asleep (Kate and I signal each other with a silent “SAFE!” baseball gesture), Kate and I will mill about the house doing chores or play Scrabble or share some wine. It’s time we are fine spending together or apart… it’s the calm after the 12 hour long toddler tornado. We talk about updates we’ve heard, or who of our friends have it or people we know that have passed because of it. It’s bizarre, and scary, and tiresome and everything in between. We look at each other and ask ourselves - what do we do? When will we go back? We confide our fears and hug and kiss. Then we go off to bed and try to sleep. Kate is sometimes more successful than I am… but more recently I haven’t been able to sleep.

I’m worried. It’s been 17 days since I last performed my show. A show I’ve done over 2500 times. A show that has served as my normalcy for the last 7ish years. A show that I’m confident I’ll go back to when this is all over. Not over, subsided? I’m sure there will be a new normal we will have to learn when we go back but I’m confident Broadway will raise the curtain once again. Just when?