I Love You All, Please Leave

By Victoria Carlisle

Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist in the nonfiction humor category.

 

Candid, hilarious, and relatable, I Love You All, Please Leave is a whip-smart essay collection on motherhood and mayhem during the COVID-19 lockdown.

 

Victoria Carlisle, a British expat living in Oakland, California, is a zaftig housewife and unapologetically relaxed parent. More than a decade ago, Carlisle was psychiatrically committed six times after the birth of her third child. (They had to let her out eventually.) And in 2020, she and her family—one husband, two guinea pigs, and three kids—endured one of the longest COVID school shutdowns in America. (They had to allow the children back at some point.)

 

With Carlisle's irreverent humor, I Love You All, Please Leave is a provocative essay collection that revels in the hilarity of small moments during the coronavirus pandemic. Carlisle recounts her spectacular failures in mothering during lockdown—from an inability to "Zoom School" (What the fuck was that all about?) to including a Sexy Lady Santa outfit among Amazon purchases of hand sanitizer and cereal ("Mummy, you'll look like a stripper!").

 

Both COVID and psychiatric lockdowns shut Carlisle up in little rooms and left her with a mind like a trapped bird fluttering behind a window. Her long journey from insanity to health traversed the well-trodden Berkeley landscape of alternative medicine—with a pit stop at electromagnetic headbands and keto diets—eventually landing at lithium and self-acceptance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria Carlisle Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987459317

Book preview

What Just Happened Here?

Greetings from my second experience of voluntary incarceration! (I’ll get to the first one a little later on.)

It is now 2020. The world has shuttered its eyes indefinitely, in widespread lockdown. Coronavirus. COVID-19. These are the only words on everyone’s lips now. And here in Oakland, California, my merry band of five has battened down the hatches together. Our family’s plague battle leader is Todd, an HR wizard for the high-tech sector, and I am Victoria, both British and a legendary creator of the best chicken matzoh ball soup in the world. (A bold statement, but true.) We have been married⁠—to each other⁠—for longer than all of Kim Kardashian’s marriages combined. There’s fame for you!

The smaller inhabitants are Jack, twelve, keeper of all things sharp; Margot, nine, lithe and beautiful as a woodland sprite; and Lucinda, seven, future Silicon Valley CEO in the making. (The less criminal version of Elizabeth Holmes, if you will. All CEOs are admittedly slightly criminal, however.)

There are also pets: various. (Mostly guinea pigs who will last to death and beyond.)

Join us as we go nowhere and do nothing for what feels like an eternity during the coronavirus pandemic. I will also travel back in time, comparing the charms of this lockdown with the delights of the six psychiatric incarcerations I endured postpartum with Lucinda. That was a wild ride too!

This ain’t Kansas anymore, Toto. This is COVID lockdown: buckle up, people.

I’ll never forget when we discovered the Four Horsemen of COVID were coming. It was a Sabbath evening with friends⁠—Friday, March 13, to be exact⁠—when the plague’s bony finger first tapped us on the shoulder, back when we believed the lockdown would be measured in weeks and normal was right around the corner.

Toward the end of that Friday night’s meal⁠—amid sputtering candles and the rosy glow of several empty bottles⁠—people collected the children who belonged to them. (No one took ours by accident, unfortunately.) And as we said our goodbyes on the doorstep, one of the dads, Eammon, remarked nonchalantly, Did you know they’re doing a school lockdown on Monday? Three weeks to flatten the coronavirus curve. (If we’re using the language of the Torah, week can be as elastic as God wants it to be!)

It was hard to concentrate properly on what he was saying, however, because Eammon was wearing a hat that looked exactly like a dead, moist beaver, and I just had so many questions about that. This happens to me often: words come out of people’s mouths, and I mime interest and seriousness, but when they’ve finished, I ask if they killed the beaver themselves. There was an awkward pause.

And that uncomfortable moment of silence marked the end of our last social engagement for months and months to come, with a balloon’s droop of disappointment rather than a festive bang. Later on, parents would lie that our first thoughts were of the children’s diminished education, but the secret recesses of my mind only gave way to what I myself would be losing: chances to have loud afternoon delight (including costume changes) with my Rob Lowe–look-alike husband.

This plague better be worth it! I thought huffily. I hope we have rats running in the streets and some damn good boils. And if we have to wear face masks, I insist on curved beaks like an outsized pelican: just like the good ole plague doctors of the bubonic plague used to wear!

But as I brooded far into the night⁠—awake in a house full of peacefully sleeping bodies⁠—I realized that we would have to continue with some semblance of normality, regardless. For instance, we still needed wine and food and the medication that keeps me just this side of sanity, plague be damned. And so I continued with my weekly shopping trips to Whole Foods. For those unfamiliar, this is commonly known as WholePaycheck, a simply elegant way of depositing most of your family’s salary into the waiting arms of a giant retailer. I can’t remember why I shop here (Todd is always urging me to go to the cheaper Safeway in the ’hood). I do believe I’ve fallen for the allure of the plump, ripe fruit artistically composed into piles of seductive urgency. Also, everything is organic. I have forgotten why we suddenly need to buy everything organic, but I am sure that it is now a crime in California to give your offspring anything less. (In marketing-speak, organic must be code for ball-breakingly expensive: seven dollars for a basket of strawberries!) In any event, my unschooled children particularly enjoy WholePaycheck, despite the myriad rules that have us lining up on our blue line, dutifully six feet apart, just to get in the door. And yes, we are now wearing those surgical masks that⁠—with the best will in the world⁠—make us look like right idiots. Or unused storm trooper extras from Star Wars. (Sadly, no plague doctor masks quite yet.) But, I mused, standing there in idle speculation, What an excellent opportunity for crime! You can see it now:

Detective Johnson: What did the suspect look like?

Generic Steve: He was wearing a face mask!

DJ: What? Not one of those blue ones . . .

GS: Yes!

DJ: Damn! He’s too cunning for us. We’ll never catch him now; I’m going in for my tea-and-biscuit.

Anyway, there we were, waiting in line, annoying no one when we arrived at the entry portal after half an hour. Standing between us and successful admission into the store was a security guard, drunk on the tiny amount of power COVID had conferred on him.

Security guard: You can’t come in, I’m afraid. Only groups of two.

Jack (swift off the mark): But we’re a family!

SG: Well, those are the new rules.

Me (thinking, You’ve seen us approaching for half an hour. You couldn’t have told us then?)

Woman behind us: I’ll take one of your kids.

Woman behind her: And I’ll take another of them. (I have several kids to dispose of.)

And wasn’t that the most wondrous thing you’ve heard in a long time? There’s the real blitzkrieg spirit! It made me feel proud to be a Californian! But then the person continued:

SG: No, you’d only reunite in the store.

Me (sound of my mind exploding, quietly)

Also me: OK then, two of them will go sit in the car.

SG: It’s illegal for children to sit alone in the car.

Fixing him with a death stare from my laser eyes, I ignored the tiny-brained man while putting Jack (thirteen in six weeks) in charge of Lucinda (seven) in the car. If they die of heat exposure in a stationary car while I shop for forty-five minutes, well, then I will have removed two extremely stupid children from circulation in the universe.

It appears that no rule is too petty that it can’t be applied in the interests of Health and Safety. And those are the only two gods to be worshiped right now. It also appears that this is your time to shine if you combine the Scylla of rank stupidity with the Charybdis of a whiff of power. This was the same man, by the way, who denied entry to a ninety-five-year-old woman, existing on the very last rung above death, who was shopping with her companion. Her companion was told that they had come outside of senior shopping hours. Watching this poor lady shuffle forward, her back bent into a C, scraping the ground with her stick⁠—well, it was horrifying.

When we left WholePaycheck, I strangled the security guard with the straps of his own face covering. Obviously, no one will be able to pin the crime on me: the perpetrator was Another Woman in a Blue Surgical Face Mask.

Here ends the first lesson of the eleventh plague, COVID. I wonder what the jealous God of the Torah has in store for us over the coming months?

Stay Home,

Stay Well?

Self-care is important! How do we know this? Why, our leaders tell us so: Stay home! Stay well! Stay healthy! It’s so easy. It’s especially easy when you follow the advice of one of the many celebrities who refuse to leave us alone. To stay relevant, they post pictures of themselves in dressing gowns, wearing a face mask, and clutching one small, well-behaved child. Of course, the nanny, house cleaner, chef, gardener, and chauffeur are just off camera. It must be so hard to be famous and be a parent right now! How do they do it?

Stay home! Stay well! Stay healthy! Employ staff!

I am particularly glued to the advice given by our elders and betters⁠—our politicians. I haven’t yet mentioned how dashingly sexy our governor, Gavin Newsom, is. (I always find it easier to listen to people when picturing them naked.) And the frequent missives from our state assemblyman⁠—whatever that is⁠—Rob Bonta are even easier to digest. I do believe he has the fluffiest pouf of hair seen outside a 1980s Richard Simmons fitness video, with teeth so blindingly white, I am sure they guide spaceships. So yes, self-care: It’s essential. Definitely! Both Gavin Newsom and Rob Bonta say so, and I would not want to let down my fluffy-haired, shiny-teethed leaders.

In nonplague times, I pay little attention to politicians, newspapers, or anything on the news. Let me rephrase: I ignore the news. The world, according to my Google search history, is comprised of celebrity sex scandals and makeup tips from teenagers. Making my Oxford professors proud, I’d say.

But during the plague, I scour the news hourly in hopeful anticipation of just one word: Open! In reality, like petals falling from a rose, announcing their little deaths, everything is shut, closed, out of business⁠—permanently, it seems. And as we continue with this eternity of a lockdown, I ask myself, How are we all coping? Despite our carefully pruned, united front, sorrow and anger prevail behind our brightly painted front doors.

We, the adults, are all doing too much right now⁠—especially those of us with children at home. We are running around, flapping our wings in circles, attempting to do all the things and be all the things. It’s too much. Since the schools closed, we have been powering through checklists even God could not complete, hunkering down with a tight-lipped anxiety that will spill out into our marriages, our children, and ourselves. And our children are watching and will remember these times.

And if I fail at homeschooling (actually, I’ve failed already) and housekeeping (ditto) and perfectly crafted Facebook pictures of us, clean limbed and shiny cheeked, eating three carefully balanced meals a day (something I’ve never even attempted), well, so what? If my children look back and think of us laughing together, that is success. And if they remember the terrible television we all watched, piled up on my bed while I drank my bottle of wine⁠—antioxidants for the win⁠—that is also success. I can fail at all of it. But I will win this for my family.

Luckily, when things are going badly⁠—worldwide plague, mass death, and destruction⁠—God smiles down on you and blesses you with additional crosses to bear.

Yesterday evening, I accidentally poisoned myself by eating a boxed salad with invisible peanuts in the dressing; the salad was supposed to be an earnest move on my part to stop eating calorie-laden cheese in the evenings. However, I am horrifically allergic to peanuts⁠—and not in a casual, gluten-bloats-me kind of way but as a serious means of interacting with hunky emergency personnel. So, I had to give myself an adrenaline injection and spent much of the night vomiting. Even more luckily⁠—and because it is so marriage enhancing⁠—Todd got to hold my hair back while I puked up my intestines. Of course, he has seen babies emerge from me, so this might not be the summit of grossness, but still, it is probably only one level down.

To add insult to semiserious injury, Jack has broken his toe (of course he has), but it is entirely his fault. He has constructed a fort on the side of the house, which looks indistinguishable from a homeless encampment, and which our neighbors probably fear devalues their own properties. It is made of loose boards, sharp-edged wood, and nails, and he scampers up there daily with the grace of a mountain goat to weld and sand things⁠—at least, I think that’s what he’s doing.

Like our biblical forefather Job, I must be present and endure. At least, physically. But my extreme absent-mindedness, whether through amnesia or dementia, conspires against me. My family is incensed daily by my failing memory, but to be fair to myself, there are a lot of moving pieces to forget, from the medieval machinations of Todd’s job to the sassy dealings of Mean Girls (in both cases, bosom buddies are just one playground tiff away from mortal enemies). Jack, as a boy, is much easier and more simpleminded: he has one best friend, two swords, five throwing stars, and seventeen congealing Domino’s pizza boxes in his room.

The smallest inhabitants of the household, the guinea pigs I reluctantly accommodate, are also suffering. Now, pets are a big deal in the Bay Area; they are particularly important for people who have forgotten to have children. Stores now sell all the accoutrements de baby⁠—strollers, carriers, little outfits, and so forth⁠—so that fur parents can pretend they are bringing up a child. (I wish I had known this option existed before I committed to raising humans!) I was unfortunately born with a total deficit of the animal-appreciation gene (apart from when they are dead and on my plate, of course: baby lamb is delicious!). But luckily, I get to experience animal love through the whims and wishes of the children who live here. And the children’s steadfast dreams and hopefulness constantly aim to shape me into a fur hugger⁠—a dream that I fear dies with every visit to the vet.

The vet nearest to us recently closed in a veil of secrecy (was someone diddling the animals?). So now I have to drive pretty much to the middle of nowhere to find someone who will accept my exotic animal, one