When COVID-19 Infects Your Marriage - Megan Esserine

A personal essay by Megan Esserine

“The Lord is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him.” – Nahum 1:7

Being a married, pregnant woman isn’t the typical college experience, but for me, that has become my life. I met my husband back in high school, and it wasn’t until after we both graduated and he returned home from serving a Church mission that we began dating and fell in love quickly—with an engagement three months after we made it official, followed by a wedding the following month. Sound odd? In Utah, it isn’t. The dating and marriage culture at Brigham Young University makes for an outsider looking in to quickly label us as “a peculiar people”. A whopping 25% of undergraduate students are married while studying at BYU, a number not seen virtually on any other college campus in the nation.

After getting married at the end of November, my husband and I were on cloud nine. We relished in the simplicities and intimacies of married life. Weekly dates, monthly visits to our religious temples, and consistent attendance to our college’s weekly on-campus devotionals made for a great balance of our new personal and couple goals.

Married life is the best life. Living with my best friend and enjoying the years of college with a companion by my side was the dream life I knew I wanted. Little did I know, however, that such a life would change dramatically.

The Symptoms

The COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the “two weeks to slow the spread” turned into months, and now, has turned into a year. Like everyone else, the two weeks off from work and cancelled classes on campus made for a well-deserved rest in the middle of the semester in March of 2020. However, as the days passed by, trials began to hit me and my husband rapidly.

Within a month, we were notified by our manager for our student custodial job on campus that our jobs were possibly in jeopardy, as the school was making cuts to its budget and staff. We soon discovered that we couldn’t make it financially within the next month if we decided to stay in our on-campus apartment, and without our jobs, and such little savings from being newlyweds, it became an unwanted intervention that took away the time and the rest I had desperately wished for.

Quarantining

Times became tough, and we decided to move into a small, broken, one-bedroom basement apartment. So small, in fact, that my husband’s hair brushed the ceiling as he rummaged around the obstacle course of moving boxes that stayed packed that summer, piled in the humble 5’ by 5’ space they called a living room. Our only comfort in the Utah summer heat was the small, rickety window air conditioning unit, shoved into the crevice of a window that let in the only manageable light for our room, plugged into one of the three total outlets in the whole apartment. The space felt as tiny and empty as our wallets, plaguing us with renter’s worst nightmares: Wi-Fi errors during online schooling, leaking ceilings from the upstairs-neighbor’s bathrooms, and broken handles on the shower’s faucet—the half-shower, might I add, that my husband couldn’t use without sticking his legs out and leaning in, one side at a time, to bathe himself.

We also applied for new jobs. I received a call back from the local Café Rio restaurant, to work as a cashier, while my husband found a job working as a groundskeeper for the Provo Parks and Recreation department. After starting our new jobs, our old manager called us up to let us know that our student jobs were safe, and that we could continue working the late-night custodial shift if we preferred. And that we did—racking in on average 110 hours of work a week combined between us. Our spring term of school ended quickly, leaving us available to work such extreme hours for the next three months.

My blissful married life dreams came halting to an abrupt stop. The honeymoon phase was completely over, after only the first four months of marriage. Reality sunk in, and though we lived there the entire sunny summer, I can’t recall darker times than those.

Isolation and Healing

The darkness didn’t just come from the despair that plagued our nation from the fear and spread of the coronavirus—it came from spiritual longings that had failed to bloom in the midst of our new, busy lives. It came from the refusal of my managers to let me leave on time from my day job to go work my night job. It came from the long, busy days working with difficult customers and feeling so helplessly alone at work, unable to call my husband on my lunch break because our breaks didn’t line up that day. It came from the long nights of anxiety attacks that would keep me awake until the next morning, when I had to drag myself out of bed, to throw on the same food-stained outfit to drive to work, hours after my husband had risen in the dark of the morning to bike himself to his job. It came from the gaping hole in my life that had once been filled with date nights, temple visits, and devotional sessions. I was drained beyond what I thought I was able to do, and so was my husband. In our exhaustion, we were left with nothing to give to each other and came to a stalemate in the growth of our relationship.

But just as the storming sea gave way to the calm that the Savior called upon it, our lives too were met with the little tender mercies that stilled the raging storms in our hearts, and brightened that lonely, forsaken summer. The only person I can give gratitude for these things is God because it was only by His presence that I was able to have miracles bless me and my husband. It was the policeman who had pulled me over on my drive back from the laundromat that left me off with a simple warning, no ticket. It was my husband surprising me with flowers and homemade dinner for Mother’s Day. It was the miracle of our schedules clearing up for one weekend, for us to travel to Silver Lake Reservoir, and enjoy our first backpacking trip as a couple. It was the new, on-campus apartment offered to us after months of waiting on the waitlist for any other affordable housing to open up before our contract at our basement apartment was up for renewal. It was the airline tickets my parents gifted us to fly down and visit them and my siblings for the fourth of July, after not seeing them for nine months. It was these mercies that re-filled the gaping hole in my life and gave me hope again. Hope for better circumstances. Hope for our marriage. Hope for our future.

Life Beyond the Virus

Today, our lives are blossoming. We received new jobs, with better wages, and better working environments. My husband began his own business, and has been able to run it while going to school and working his new job. We’ve been blessed with a beautiful baby boy, due in a few short months. And we’ve since moved from the dark basement apartment into our new on-campus apartment. The miracles I longed for, and prayed for, came to pass, and the long darkness that I thought would never cease has been lifted. My husband and I are closer than ever, and the spark of the newlywed honeymoon phase was reignited. Although times are still tough, and the pandemic has not completely healed, my heart has been healed completely. Those life changes I owe all to God. I count myself lucky that my hardships were able to be healed, as not all who have suffered during this pandemic have received the same comfort. But I know, that if they turn towards their loving Savior, Jesus Christ, that they can find the same refuge from the storm that I was able to. In that darkness, we can find flickers of light, that guide us to the end of the tunnel of our trials.