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Survivor
The Quarantine Bonus Episode in Which You Hunker Down with Your Ex Amidst A Global Pandemic
I loathe reality tv, largely because I have little interest in watching groups of people in intentionally stressful situations duke it out for survival. I am usually stuck at the premise itself, wondering what fool would sign up for this self-inflicted torture and then profess surprise when things go south.
And yet there I was, in April 2020, stuck in my own form of a wretched living experiment, uncertain if all participants will come out alive or, at the very least, sane.
Let me set the scene.
My family is one month into our quarantine together in our weekend house in rural upstate New York: me, my three kids (aged 20, 17, and 9), and my ex-husband Michael.
“Come and stay,” I had said to Michael on the phone when he had asked mid-March if he could come to visit us. “Or don’t come at all. We can’t have you bringing city germs into our hermetically sealed enclave.”
Challenge accepted, he arrived the next day, setting up a makeshift office and living quarters in the family room in the basement, since I had already claimed the master bedroom. We had come a long way in the two years since we had separated after 27 years together. The consumptive rage I had felt toward him after discovering his affair had been softened by time and forgiveness. Friends joked that maybe this cohabiting situation would reunite us, but what had brought us here was simply our unwillingness to be separated from our kids for a prolonged period. We were here in spite of each other, not because of each other.
The first few days had been filled with a sort of merriment at the novelty, as if we were stranded on a godforsaken desert island that didn’t have the decency to be warm and from which we would likely be rescued before long. During the day, Michael paced the yard, still barren and brown in the waning weeks of winter, trying to figure out how to keep his business afloat, while the kids attended school remotely and fought over usage of the internet hotspot since we didn’t have Wifi (not by choice, as we do fully embrace living on the grid).
