Tried and Tested

Thoughts on the pandemic and the husbands in She Said

This is the photo record of my beating a child in Tic-Tac-Toe. Twice. Attention must be paid.

Sitting in bed feeling unwell. And praying it’s not Covid again because my last bout in February of this year knocked me for a loop. It took me six weeks to get myself together after Kraken.

I splashed out on the expensive tests because they are said to be more accurate and they include testing for flu, which comes in handy because you and your kid get a lot of stuff during the school year and it isn’t always Covid.

Last year, I purchased Strep tests to add to my arsenal and they proved indispensable when my son developed a nasty Strep infection a few days after testing positive for Covid.

You could say I’m running a small pharmacy in my bathroom. But I’ve taken the ‘your-on-your-own’ message to heart.

Most people hate talking about Covid and I get it because it’s been twisted and turned into something awful: an opportunity to destroy public healthcare and any existing labour protections while making people crazy and worried with reams of lies. That state of affairs has obscured understanding of what it is in our lives: a flashing red beacon that public healthcare, labour protections and even marginally decent politicians are necessary to our thriving and survival. I wish we could time travel and rewrite how this story has been told.

But here we are.

I know how the pandemic has created serious pain points for people in their lives. It has caused fights, fissures and fractures in family dynamics, and once they figured they could get away with it, most employers have turned the screws on people in cruel and inhuman ways.

That’s discounting the agony felt by millions of people who have lost loved ones and those who are vulnerable to the virus’s most serious complications. I have a friend fighting cancer who has been saddled with the burden of protecting herself in an oncology ward.

This is a smart, hilarious, strong, compassionate special person that deserves to be protected.

I’ve written about vaccines and health protections during the pandemic and I’ve been disappointed by how the frame is pre-cut to suit an assumed POV of invulnerability and disconnection. As if vulnerability isn’t a human concern or responsibility. As if I don’t care about people who are most vulnerable (including my own parents and child) and am motivated only t to look out only for myself.

Fortunately, I don’t know too many people like that. But they’ve managed to infect the discourse.

This is not a new insight by any means and people have written extensively on this, but it has been instructive for me as a writer living through this time because I don’t care to duplicate that orientation. For one, it’s not accurate or based in reality and secondly, it’s not human.

My test reads negative. I’m taking that for a minor win.

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Stuck in bed I decided to finally watch the movie She Said (2022), which tells the story of how NYT reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey reported out the Harvey Weinstein story in 2016. I recommend it highly. It’s a solid journalism explainer — I learned some things! — and as someone who has reported on sexual assault and domestic violence in the past, many moments hit me hard. It’s a massive responsibility to tell these stories and you never forget the people that trust you to do that. 

But can I be a tangential human being for a moment? It was the depiction of the minor characters — i.e. the husbands of Twohey and Kantor— that played on my mind after viewing, too. To watch them taking their kids to school and offering up active support of their wives’ careers — my head was exploding with the possibilities. 

I’ve read a bunch of Conservative pro-marriage-and-kids-drek in the past few weeks. And they would almost be able to capture my imagination if a) I didn’t know better and speak to real live women and b) if this was the marriage myth they were selling.

But it’s not. 

I encourage everyone to marry a great person. There are many. But women can have babies without marriage and given that violence against women is literally the global status quo a decent society might want to acknowledge reality over myth every once in a while and make motherhood outside of marriage and safe childhoods for kids possible too. 

Which reminds me of this awesome Rebecca Traister response to the Get Married push.

Other things I read and loved this week:

• This New Yorker review of a new book by the author of a viral Mom Rage essay. It’s a definite food for thought item. Reading between the lines, it reads like a generous review of a book that doesn’t sound like it hit its mark. As a personal aside, I don’t go in for adult rage no matter how it’s framed. 

• Lara Pingue’s chronic pain piece for the Globe and Mail. Lara’s back injury provides the backdrop for a deep dive into how we don’t know how to treat or cope with chronic pain in the country. As someone who ruptured a disc in March 2020, this one felt personal.