Out, out damned spot
Marcy O’Brien
Lady Macbeth was a hand washer. But anguished pacing and rubbing didn’t rid her of the imaginary stains that guilt had smeared on her hands.
I do wish the corona virus was imaginary, but since I’m convinced it is the real deal, I’m gonna just keep on scrubbing. I’ve never washed my hands this much – ever.
I thought I lathered them up a lot when I was a new mother. The world’s most perfect infant remained at home for more than her first month to protect her from – everything. We weren’t going to expose her to the less-than-perfect world around her until her immune system was sturdy.
But months passed and we gradually slipped backwards to the normal slugs we were pre-baby. By the time she was crawling, I was washing the pureed peas off her face with the sink sponge.
By 18 months she seemed impervious to dirt. When I entered her room after an afternoon nap to find her coating the crib spindles with the contents of her diaper, I ran a bath, not a trip to the E.R. She was laughing gleefully enjoying her new-found artistry. It was tricky scrubbing it out of her hair, but she wasn’t happy with my attempts at brushing the brown residue off her teeth. (I washed the walls and curtains later.) After that debut finger-painting exhibition, I thought she was tough enough for the real world.
Eventually she ate sand in the sandbox and dirt in the garden. I did realize, probably just in time, that my mother’s old “Eat a barrel of dirt before you die” was meant for a lifetime not a mere toddlerhood. Nevertheless, my first-born grew up super healthy. Today she is a practical hand-washing mother, and, like me, she’s paying lots more attention to the all germs we’ve taken for granted all our lives – because of the new “Big Daddy”
Big Daddy Corona has me scrub-a-dub-dubbing more than I thought possible. I take a prescription diuretic which automatically increases my trips to the bathroom sink. Depending on whether I’m raking in the yard or digging out the closets, I wash my hands before and after potty visits. I just realized that I don’t do either on my 3:00 AM bathroom trips.
So if I add to tinkle-time my pre-cooking, pre-eating, post-mail reading, and supermarket-unpacking washing, I’m hitting the soap and water combo about 19 times a day.
I also find myself creaming my hands more. I knew I’d finally crossed over to Corona paranoia when I looked at the hand cream tube and wondered if I’d handled it before I washed up.
I think we’re all going to come out of this more conscious of the germs around us. Personally, I’m still working on Mom’s barrel of dirt, but I’ve put a temporary lid on it for now.
Thankfully Lady Macbeth didn’t have a virus to add to her worries. She’d have had a 5-gallon keg of Purell strapped to her back.