YOU ARE FAMILY

Ruth, my best friend, has always been an expert on living alone. She’s a self-contained and self-sustaining ecosystem who budgets and composts and keeps track of her to-dos on a whiteboard. Especially since I got married and had children, I’ve loved coming over to her apartment, a place where my family is not. It was a feature I thought we both enjoyed in equal measure. For the first few weeks of quarantine, I missed Ruth deeply but from the opposite side of what’s become a polarizing divide—between child-free adults quarantining in total solitude and married people with young kids, never alone. Joining forces seemed like the only thing that could keep that distance from growing, so that’s what we did: After one of Ruth’s roommates moved out, my husband and I rented a room in her apartment to use as a studio. Now Ruth and I see each other most weekdays. We are co-workers again, just like we were when we met in 2004. On a recent morning, she looked at the photo of my older son on her fridge and started to cry. She really missed my kids, she said. I was surprised, at first, that Ruth cared about them enough to feel the loss. The following weekend, we met her in the park. My son didn’t recognize her at first—a cowl covered half her head—but soon he recognized her eyes and started playing peekaboo. I’ve been avoiding using the term “quarantine family,” but seeing the way Aunt Ruth and Ilya look at each other, I had to accept that there is no other way to explain what we have become to each other. She is my kids’ aunt, which means she’s more than a friend to me. She is a sister.

“I have learned that my partner thinks he is an interior designer– decorator– painter–Ikea builder, but he’s not.” —Carly Nathan