Sarah Viren

Rooting

March was ending, and our kids were still by our side. One day, just like all the other days only harder for reasons I no longer remember, I searched “kids” and “yoga” on YouTube, imagining I might find a new way to entertain them, and inner peace for myself.

When a Frozen-themed episode popped up on the scroll list, I at first said “no way.” It didn’t look serious enough for the general gloom. And I was tired of princesses.

F. and N., who are seven and three, disagreed. “Pleeeeeeease!” they screamed. 

I relented. 

I pressed play and a smiling woman in a blue jumpsuit appeared before us like a friendly space alien. She was doing an odd mash-up of yoga and storytelling that somehow felt ancient and bard-like. Her voice was cheerful without being annoying, playful without seeming fake, but what struck me most was the way she stared at us so intently when she talked. She felt like more than just another image on a screen. Like she could be important to us, as a family.

Within days, I realized I didn’t have time for yoga, not really, and I started letting the girls contort their bodies with that woman—her name was Jaime Amor—on their own. That gave Marta and me half an hour to try to complete some of the many tasks causing us stress in those early weeks of lockdown: prepping for classes, teaching classes on Zoom, attending meetings on Zoom, researching, writing, and staring at our own screens, ones increasingly filled with stories from a world we no longer recognized. 

In Spain, where Marta’s family lives, they were bringing in the refrigerated trucks, they were deciding which patients would get care, they were saying things like “we are at war.” In Arizona, where we live now, infection rates were still low, and it sometimes felt like we were watching the world burn from a bubble.  

But on the screen in front of our girls, Jaime was there, and she was calm. She held bridge pose as she recounted the story of a girl who falls down a rabbit hole, she moved into tree pose while pretending to go on a bear hunt, she looked my kids straight in the eyes, and told them how to harness their inner ninjas. And at the end of each retelling of Star Wars, of the Hungry Caterpillar, of Harry Potter she reflected on the story, offering a moral of sorts.  

“There really is no place like home,” she said at the end of her Wizard of Oz episode. “Often, we’ve got all we need, right here.”

I was passing through the living room one afternoon when I heard her say that, and I wished it were true. There was so much we were missing then, and still today: friends, teachers, cafes, bookstores, time alone in which to appreciate what we did have. But I was glad Jaime Amor had lied to our kids. I didn’t have the energy to do it myself. 

**

“When the virus is over . . . ” N. said a lot at the beginning, and it always made me sad because the end of the sentence would be such an ordinary request. “ . . . we’ll go to the park.” Or “I’ll go to school.” Or “I’ll see my friends.”

I came back from running one day in April and F. was already up. She said she was playing chess with her imaginary friend, even though she had no idea how to play chess. I stretched afterwards on the floor beside her, doing the same series of yoga poses I always do after running: downward dog, warrior pose, triangle pose. 

F. joined me on the floor and moved her body into awkward poses that looked like nothing I’d seen before. She got down on her belly and raised her head toward the ceiling. 

“Do you like snake pose?” she asked. 

I said I did. “I like snake pose,” she said. 

And in that moment it felt like everything would to be all right. 

But the next day, N. had two breakdowns in a row. I was in charge of the girls that morning, and I thought I was clever when I found a dead bug and proposed looking at it with the microscope we’d bought at the beginning of the pandemic. The creature was like a ladybug only uglier and larger, and we took notes about its appearance and guessed at what it might be. 

F. poked it with a stick and N. decided to draw it. All was well until F. bumped N.’s elbow. N. threw the paper to the ground.

“It’s ruined,” she said. 

I told her it wasn’t, even as I remembered that parents are supposed to validate their kids’ feelings. I suggested she draw something else, something not real, from a dream, maybe—and for a minute that worked. She stopped crying. She was there, inventing a world with her pencil. Until F. found her fake Peppa Pig iPad and started playing with it—loudly. N. threw down her pad again. 

“I can’t concentrate with her here!” she screamed, and ran from the room. 

I watched her run, but I didn’t follow. Later, I found her drawing on the floor. It was of a little girl flying.

**

We had been in lockdown for a month and a half when I decided to join the girls for their yoga session with Jaime one morning. The episode they’d picked was about a polar bear, so we moved stiffly from being polar bears to being an igloo to helping penguin babies find their way home to their parents.

“Did you know that baby penguins have a specific song that can only be heard by their mums and dads?” Jaime asked us. 

My girls didn’t answer, but I was moved. I shifted into downward dog and felt F. looking at me. She looked over again when we made bridges out of our bodies and again when we became a tree. It was as if she was checking to make sure that I was real. I wondered how absent I had been, even as I was in the same house with her, right beside her, everyday.

At the end of the polar bear episode, we moved into Shavasana, and all I wanted was to close my eyes, to feel my body release after movements I hadn’t made in so long, to hear what Jaime had to say about the story she’d just told. But then N. started laughing and she couldn’t stop.

“Shhh,” I told her. “I want to relax.” 

“I just keep picturing the polar bear,” N. said, F. now cracking up as well. “And the penguins. They’re so silly.” 

I started to shush her again, but then I stopped myself. I started laughing too. 

I watched Jaime with her eyes closed, in her adorable jump suit, and I wondered who she was helping: my kids or me. It helped me to think that I was being helped, to see her so calm and full of life there on our screen. But it helped them, I realized, to laugh at something like the silly penguin waddle we’d done together on our mats. 

My girls kept laughing, but I closed my eyes and listened to Jaime talk about the artic animals and the importance of love. 

**

We started going for walks that month, every evening after dinner, and on one of those walks I noticed the cactuses had filled with nesting birds. I’d seen the holes before, the burrows where we knew birds were or had been, but now we saw birds flying in and out of the spiky arms at dusk, their babies crying for food inside, and those parents returning again and again with grubs or worms or something in their beaks, and for a moment the tiny cries would subside. 

One evening on our walk, we found a visible nest, with a bird atop it, perched somehow both in the hole of a cactus but also peeking out enough for us to see it. 

“A mama bird,” F. said, and we talked about the eggs under her in that nest, and how eventually the babies inside would peck their way out, their bodies wet with yoke, their mouths wide open for food. We talked about how different F.’s birth had been. 

“Instead of an egg,” I said, “you came out of a body. My body.”

Both girls love to hear their birth stories, and that desire only increased during lockdown, when we had more time and a dearth of events to talk about in the present tense. When I told F. her story, I talked about how tiny her screams had been when she lay on my chest, and how they only stopped when she rooted. 

“What does rooted mean?” N. asked when I was done. 

I said something about trees and roots and how babies know to search out the nutrients they need to live as soon as they are born. But then I realized that metaphor made me—made mothers—into the earth, and it felt like dissembling. I was more sky than ground in those months, always looking to other places or people for my kids to root: on screens, in books, in the nests of cactus trees.  

On our walks that week, the mama bird was still there, always in exact same position. And at first, she felt propitious, like finding Jaime Amor had been: a sign that we’d eventually discover a route through the woods that would lead us back home. But after a few days, as that bird held her pose so still, I started to wonder if she was real. Then I started to worry she was dead. 

I told Marta, and she laughed. We worried about so much then—we still worry about so much today—and my fears probably sounded like an extension of a more general anxiety about nature, about disease, and the world around us. 

“She’s just focusing on her eggs,” she said. 

But the next day the bird was in the exact same position. And a week later, when I was walking the dog by myself, I found her on the ground, frozen in her nesting pose, now with nothing below for her to warm. 

**

That same month, I talked to Jaime Amor, over Zoom, for a magazine profile that I never ended up writing, and in my sleep-deprived and stressed state, I managed to record only my part of the conversation. 

When I listened to the recording afterwards, I heard the sound of me typing quickly, trying to keep up with Jaime Amor’s stories: how she gave up on a career as a classically trained actor after a grueling experience playing all the female characters in a travelling production of The Picture of Dorian Gray; how she once got a scholarship to go to Burning Man; how she felt she was stuck “like Willy Wonka” in the perspective of a six-year-old.

Every once and a while, I could hear myself laugh, and the laughter surprised me. I didn’t remember feeling happy that morning, or any morning, in those early months of lockdown. I remembered feeling frozen.

“Well, that gets to my bigger question,” I said at one point, “which is kind of about the art of what you do. It does seem that you are adapting stories into a form of movement, and I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the process of adapting.”

What Jaime said in response, I’m not entirely sure. I have my notes, and it looks from them like she talked about how she uses subjects in traditional stories—from trees to snakes to dragons—and shapes them into yoga poses that she then organizes to tell a story that is also a yoga routine for kids. But I’m sure she said other important things I missed or have since forgotten. 

What I remembered days later was not what she said about art or storytelling or yoga, but the image of her talking and me staring at the neat, clean living room behind her. I imagined that when we hung up, she would step into that quiet space and do some stretches before going on a long, peaceful walk with her husband, two dogs, and no kids. 

Meanwhile, outside my office door, on the recording, I could hear F. singing. It was the siren song from Frozen 2. 

**

When I was ten, we moved for the first time: away from Missouri, where I had grown up, to Wisconsin, where we would live for a year before settling in Florida. It was a shift that felt apocalyptic in the moment: I got my period, it snowed for weeks at a time, my mom was working more than she ever had before—or at least that’s how I remember it. 

When I asked her about that year the other day, over FaceTime while she talked to F. in the morning, my mom said that actually she’d worked less in Wisconsin than she ever had before, or would afterwards. We’d move there because a job at a university she’d been offered in Boston—the place where we’d planned to move—had been revoked at the last moment. The provost there had decided her CV wasn’t impressive enough, and suddenly my mom, who’d earned her PhD in her 40s, was jobless. We’d moved to Wisconsin for a job my dad got. 

“My guess about why you felt I was less around is because you were becoming a pre-teen and beginning to feel less close to me,” she emailed me after we talked. “Also, there was the paragon of motherhood, Mrs. Fonzen.”

The Fonzens were our new neighbors in Madison. The daughter was my age and her mom, Mrs. Fonzen, stayed at home, had a huge garden in the backyard and, most impressive to me, made her own hamburger buns. In comparison to my mom, Mrs. Fonzen seemed a little like Mary Poppins or—as I’d think years later—like Jaime Amor: always there, always in control, always working magic.  

“Wow,” my mom said one day when I came home with yet another story about how amazing Mrs. Fonzen was. “She’s the perfect mom.”

I was eleven then, so I doubt I had much awareness of the pain I could cause others, but I remember that moment, and recognizing that my mom—though she would never say it—was fragile too. 

“You don’t have to be Betty Crocker to be a good mom,” I said in response. She laughed. And that became a line we repeat to this day. We say it as a joke, but it’s become something of a maxim for me as a parent, too, a reminder of the value of imperfection when raising kids. 

On my best days, I think about that story and tell myself that I’m doing all right, that we’re all doing all right, that we don’t have to be Betty Crocker to parent during this pandemic. But on my worst days, I think about that mama bird on the ground and how long it took us to realize she was dead. 

**

It’s almost fall now. More than a year has passed. My kids have stopped watching Jaime Amor. They replaced her for a while with Maria from The Sound of Music, then Mary Poppins, but they soon gave up on those proxy moms as well.  

I have more time to write now, but still can’t seem to finish this essay. It feels like everything is abandoned unfinished these days. A sentence half spoken and left hanging in the air. A family that no longer recognizes itself. 

N. no longer talks about what might happen after the pandemic ends. She asks instead if anyone will come for Christmas. When anyone dies on the news, she asks if it was from Covid or something else. F. just asks about death itself. 

“When I die,” she asks one day, “will I miss myself?”

By August, more than four million people had died from coronavirus. Hundreds of thousands of women with kids lost their jobs. We talk about them in portmanteaus: the mom-session, a recession of moms. Like we are a joke when we aren’t.  

I remember some days that, in Frozen, like in all Disney movies, the mom is absent. That’s the only way little girls can have adventures. 

The cactuses are empty when I take the dog for a walk now, but I know their babies are out there somewhere, flying around. I hope they’re all right. I hope we all are. 

Sarah Viren is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and author of the essay collection, Mine, which won the River Teeth Book Prize. She's assistant professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, where she lives with her wife, daughters, and dog Oki. Her next book, Autobiography of Shadows, that is forthcoming from Scribner.