Covid: What is a Household?
Like flies in amber, the members of my nuclear family were caught in our house on March 24, 2020, the day the Harris Country judge, Lina Hidalgo, issued her “Stay Home Work Safe” orders. We had gathered there for our respective spring breaks which, for once, turned out to coincide: my older son, who teaches high school in Austin, my younger son who is a student at Syracuse University, and my husband and myself. Each of my sons brought his dog, so starting that week in March and until last week our house contained 4 adult humans, 4 dogs, and 2 cats. We were suddenly, and for an indeterminate time, a household.
That household—that configuration of people (although not pets)—became official, froze again in a new way, when I filled out the 2020 census, which asks you to list all the people living at your address on April 1, 2020. My two sons will, as it were, live with us until the next census, even when they resume their separate lives, even after COVID “disappears” with a new vaccine, new treatments, herd immunity. Our household, formed by COVID and preserved by the census, will live on for the ten years between census even if we die of the disease.
The confluence of COVID and the census has made me think about the idea of the household, that odd conflation of people and place that we sometimes take for granted. Since the first modern (centralized) census—the British Census of 1841-- populations have been counted and described in terms of this statistical unit (although the “head of household” has recently disappeared as a category.) Early censuses, unlike ours today, ask for “occupation,” and here we see a world rich with unfamiliar terms, phrases, and identities: “gymnast to housepainter,” “colourist of artificial fish,” “sampler of drugs,” “proprietor of midgets,” to name just a few. Our own census forms are relatively bare: sex, age, telephone number, race, and the relation of each person to the “Person 1” who fills it out. Although the 2020 census includes the category of “roommate or housemate” and “other nonrelatives,” these come at the end of a long list of possible relatives by blood, marriage, or adoption. The census form and the household take on the familiar shape of the family. With no occupations listed, the questionnaire focuses on the “house” in household, isolating the group it asks to define from the rest of the world. As with the Victorians, contemporary households do not map neatly onto the nuclear family. Then, as now, households could include apprentices, lodgers, extended families, long-term or short-term guests. Poorer households were even more porous than more affluent ones, with families and friends moving in and out of homes and even beds, rearranging themselves to fit the needs of the moment.
Stay-at-home orders have both relied on ideas of the family as a unit and redefined our sense of household: if the cultural ideal of the American household involved two parents and multiple (but not too many) children, the disease has made visible even to the most siloed the prevalence of intergenerational households. Mostly, these are presented in the news in the context of “bad outcomes,” as young people are imagined “bringing the disease home” to grandparents. Often, these are pictured as black and brown households, which are more likely to include extended family. This is only one of the ways that COVID has made racial inequity visible, but it is an important one. When Trump cuts the census short or wants to exclude “illegal aliens” certain kind of households disappear from our mental map, with profound economic consequences.
COVID has also made way for affiliative households, queer households, or households of choice: “double bubbles” where two households come together to share labor and provide support, or “quaranteams” of usually single people who agree to associate only with each other. There are also, of course, virtual households who eschew physical proximity altogether, meeting regularly over Zoom or some other platform. Families can be reconstituted this way over long distances creating a household without the house.
There are also of course, households that belie the connection between choice and a shared domestic space. Domestic violence has increased as victims are trapped with their abusers, reminding us that homes are not always places of safety. I know couples arrested in the process of separation or divorce, negotiating life under one uneasy roof. I have learned from already-divorced or separated couples how complicated the pandemic has made the already fraught logistics of co-parenting. Some people do not feel they have the choice to go home: we have all read about medical workers renting hotel rooms or other impersonal spaces to protect their families from infection.
In the meantime, my household has reformed around its nucleus. Of course, it is with a difference. We are not simply negotiating, as all parents of boomerang children must do, the changing contract with adult offspring, many of which involve the definition of boundaries: when do we expect adult children to come home at night? What are the rules about guests? What are expectations around labor, money, space and privacy? We are also dealing with adults who, however much they love us, feel trapped in a world they thought they had left—or at the very least a world that they had imagined being able to leave and return to at will. Now their exits and returns are burdened with meaning and often with guilt, bounded by the dire consequences that, at least in theory, will affect their parents more than themselves. My older son has a household of his own, no less significant because it consists of him and his dog. Over the last year he has crafted it into a home—as one of my friends who saw a picture of it noted, a “grown-up home.” He has a color scheme, a wood and resin table he built himself, an array of kitchen tools and appliances. He is here now, surrounded by the blues and greens of his childhood, and not by the oranges and reds with which he decorated his apartment.
Sometimes it is I who feel guilty for taking so much pleasure in my sons’ easily accessible company. We swim together in the pool, pass the time with complex cooking projects, watch tv side by side, fawn over the dogs and play favorites with them. I lean on my sons--too much perhaps--for the happy incidentals of living together: a vocabulary born of shared daily moments of no real moment at all; the ability to be silent together or to decide to be alone in the full knowledge that the house is full. I love not worrying about them and yet not having to bug them, not having to take my phone to bed in case I miss an emergency text.
After 5 months of togetherness, our household is breaking up. One son has returned to college and to an off-campus apartment where, since he comes from the COVID hot-spot that is Texas, he must quarantine for two weeks. A census taken now, or on September 8 when my older son is scheduled to return to in-person teaching, would capture a different household at our address. By an accident of geography—the place of our family household—my younger son will stay within the walls of his apartment and my older son will move freely if cautiously between households.
The census and COVID together remind us that households are provisional and porous, simultaneously a unit of the administrative state a cultural fantasy yoked uneasily together. While we’ll be talking in more detail about the physical spaces of home in future posts, I wanted to linger for a moment in the abstraction with its promises and insufficiencies.