Reaching For My Family...
Reaching For My Family – And My French Not-Husband
“My mom called me three times at lunch. I was sitting outside on a gray French November day. The meal was chilly, but it was the fall of 2020. We were lucky restaurants were even open. It was the final day before Paris’s second confinement, and the city had a cold, paranoid energy. My friend arrived with a backpack full of just-purchased puzzles, replacements of the ones he’d finished last lockdown. But when I saw my missed calls, I couldn’t have cared less about puzzles, old or new.
Despite my best efforts, WhatsApp rarely rings on my phone. After four years of living abroad, being reachable is never as easy as I need it to be. But sometimes a missed call tells it all. And as I dialed my mom in California, I already knew what she would say: Grandma was on her deathbed. When could I get there?
Back at my apartment, I looked at plane tickets to San Francisco, clicking faster as options appeared and disappeared. My body was shaky with indecision, and I wanted my French partner there to assess the risks. I’d moved in with him for the first confinement, and he was the human hand-sanitizer dispenser who kept me updated on transmission rates, who trained me to wash my hands then lock our door. It’s some combination of freak luck and his loving diligence that have kept us both virus-free.
But he was at his parents’ house in a tiny village outside of Bordeaux where he’d decided to stay when the French government announced the confinement. It forbade both interregional travel and daily errands, except for government-approved reasons. Getting to Paris wasn’t the only administrative hurdle: We have a French civil union, which isn’t recognized internationally; ever since the travel bans of March 2020, he had no legal means of entering the United States with me…”
An essay about loss, confinement, and how the government tries to define family.