My daughter is a frontline worker. She’s not a doctor or a nurse or a personal support worker. She works frontend (which means she helps the cashiers) at Costco. Five days a week, seven hours a day she’s there with her face mask and her gloves helping to get the job done so the rest of us can eat.
She lives with me and in these pandemic days, I’m old enough to be considered a vulnerable person so Tanya and I have had to make a few adjustments to our living arrangements. Some are difficult but by and large we’re getting along just fine.
Her bedroom is in the basement but she’s always had the run of the house. She’d come and go through the front door, watch TV in my bedroom if I was reading in the living room and wanted quiet, pee in the bathroom closest to where she happened to be, and open and close the fridge door as often she wanted. I did all the shopping and all the cooking and she did all the dishes and 90 percent of the housework.
Since March 16 or thereabouts, things have changed. She comes and goes through the back door directly into the basement. When she arrives home from work she immediately throws all her clothes in the washing machine and takes a shower. She has a coffee maker in her room and keeps a supply of snacks and her own plates and cutlery downstairs. She brings her plate to the top of the stairs when I call out that dinner is ready. Sometimes she’ll sit on the top stair leading up from the basement and I’ll sit as far away as possible on the main floor so we can share a glass of wine and talk about the day.
We did break the rules a bit this weekend. It was her birthday (and Mother’s Day) so my other daughter and my grandson came by for dinner. We usually go out but this year we ordered for pickup at the restaurant. We ate in our own corners and had a happy birthday Zoom chat with cousins in New Zealand and Australia.
Like I say, it mostly works out just fine. The thing I find most difficult, and fortunately also the most amusing, is Tanya doing the shopping. As someone who has no interest in cooking, she really doesn’t know much about shopping for food either. When she lived in her own apartment she mostly ate out of a box or a can or whatever she managed to take home from here.
I shop with a list but mostly with my eye. Chickpeas are on sale, I’ll pick up a couple of cans. Despite having Brussel sprouts on the list, if they look gnarly when I get to the store I’ll buy cabbage instead.
Not Tanya, if it says Brussel sprouts on my list then Brussel sprouts it is. If it says grapes – well she doesn’t take a small bunch out of the large plastic bag – nope she buys the entire bag. I had so many grapes after one shopping expedition I thought about making my own wine. Sometimes I get a call from the store, for instance.
“Mum, where do I find this stuff? And she spells out ‘quinoa’.
She had no idea something that started with ‘qu’ could possibly be what we call ‘Keenwa’ and which, on a plate, looks much like rice.
I’ve never been a bulk buyer. I don’t have the room to store stuff for one reason. But Tanya working at Costco knows all about bulk buying especially in these days of panic bulk buying. She has lugged home on the transit HUGE packages of paper towel and toilet paper. I have enough hand sanitizer in industrial-size bottles to supply the whole street through several waves of Covid-19.
We’re getting better though. We go through the shopping list before she heads to the local Foodland and she checks with me before she buys from Costco.
We have lots of laughs and she tells me she will definitely learn to cook once this over. Frankly, I can’t wait for things to get back to the way they were – me shopping (and cooking) and her in charge of house cleaning and dishes. I also can’t wait to not worry about outbreaks at Tanya’s branch of Costco or whether or not I’ve sanitized the handle on the washing machine or the dryer.
Meanwhile, I’m mighty proud of my frontline worker and her ability to stick to it even when, as she tells me sometimes, she feels a bit scared.
