There’s a strange discomfort that comes with living in a permanent state of almost-but-not-quite belonging. It’s quieter than rejection, but heavier than indifference. And it’s something I experience almost every day that I leave my house, here in a country I was not born to.
A couple of weeks ago, I felt it sharply. In my ex-partner’s home, in a room filled with sunlight and family, our child, whom we raised here in Norway, marked a milestone in a tradition that I can never truly claim.
Did you ever hear that story about a guy getting mauled by a giant panda and having to hold his own intestines in until help arrived? That’s kinda how I feel today. Just holding myself together until help arrives. Except there is no help. This is just how it is now.
At some point, my arms are going to get tired and I’m going to have to let go. Then all my guts will come spilling out like spaghetti from a can and I’ll sink to the floor.
And when I’m on the floor, I’ll know there are people on their own floors who got mauled worse than I did. Whose floors are colder and harder. And that’ll make calling for help harder.
And no one can put the intestines back in anyway. That’s my job. I’ll reel them in, wind them into a ball and stuff them back inside. I’ll peel myself up off the floor and sew myself back together. And no one will see the stitches.
I’ll do all this before 2pm today. That’s when I’ll be needed again. I won’t have achieved much else. Because it’s hard to do things when you’re holding your intestines together with both arms. But the floor, the reeling, the sewing…that will feel like a big achievement anyway.
Day 6 of corona quarantine was my birthday. We celebrated by getting all dressed up and having a roast lamb dinner, a Bunny Hop dance break, followed by dessert and a movie.
In this episode we answered questions from Ella’s cousins in Australia, Josh and Skye, and from some lovely people on Twitter, Daniel, Sadie B, Jess Capelle, and Jessica Fonseca.
Tonight, we fielded our first question from Twitter. If you’d like to ask a question for us to answer, you can tweet me @zoeselina or send an email to zoe [at] zoewrites.com.
Today, we each came up with five quick questions to ask each other. Ella learned about Buddhist monks and gritted her teeth through a cursive writing lesson for school work while I stressed my way through a busy work day.
This was our first full day of home school and home office together. We’re trying to get a routine established, but we’ve still got some work to do. We’re also onto the second can of Ocean Bomb Pokémon soda: Charmander orange!
Today is the first day of The Quarantine Diary. My almost-ten-year-old daughter and I are self-isolating just outside of Oslo, Norway and we decided to create a daily audio diary of our lives in quarantine.
Every Christmas, the internet is inundated with advice, complaints, pleas and general grumbling about Santa and the “lie” so many of us tell our children about him.
It’s no secret that I hate November in Norway. It gets cold, but hovers above zero with moisture that hangs in the air until it finds hair to frizz, at which point it turns me into Cyndi Lauper circa Vibes, but without the invisible best friend.
