Not a Wasted Word

Sheltering in place is hard. Sheltering in place while working full time and also supervising distance learning for your kids is really hard. But the hardest thing is spending every hour of every day with an emotionally reactive child.

I know all kids are struggling right now. I know this is difficult on all parents. I know everyone is doing the best they can. But spending every hour of every day with a kid who cannot manage their reactions is exhausting in a way I have never experienced before.

I”m so tired of waiting for my kid to lose their shit. I’m so tired of taking deep breaths through the screams and the throwing and the hitting and the kicking. I’m so tired of being consistent and holding firm on boundaries and being berated and insulted for my efforts. I’m so tired of feeling like the consistency isn’t paying off.

Consistency is the key to any behavior management plan, but I think it’s efficacy is bullshit. We require our kids to brush their teeth every morning and evening. We require them to eat three meals every day. We require they take showers twice a week. We require limits on screen time. We have always upheld these expectations and every day I still have to navigate tantrums when I ask for any one of the these things to be done. I respond with empathy and understanding, but firm resolve, every time, and it doesn’t seem to change anyone’s reactions. I still have to fight for even the most basic of self-care to be accomplished.

I’m so tired of managing my kid’s behavior. I’m tired of walking on egg shells. I’m tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m tired of steeling myself for a meltdown every time I request the smallest thing. I’m tired of keeping calm while I am physically and verbally assaulted. I’m tired.

I try so hard to do be proactive, to model the behavior I want to see, to practice strategies when we are calm, to remind them of strategies before the rage boils over. I’m working through the steps in The Explosive Child but it seems to be getting me no where.

Yes, I know kids do well when they can. I understand it’s a lack of skills, but I don’t understand when the skills will be learned. It feels like there has been AMPLE opportunity for these skills to be learned.

The idea of spending the next three months like this makes it hard to breath. It crushes something deep inside me. It strangles any semblance of hope I may have. Once school stops all the boundaries will be created and held by me. I can’t even point to an outside entity anymore. The wrath of my explosive child when expectations are enforced will be brutal. It will be a string of long, hard days.

I know this too will pass. But right now, man is it hard.

Our St. Louis plans were officially cancelled and our daughter’s Girl Scout sleep away camp the last week of summer was also called off, so our summer is officially a vast wasteland of nothing.

Rec and Park still hasn’t announced if they will have any kinds of camps. Even if they do, we probably won’t participate because it doesn’t seem fair to take those spots when our situation is more flexible than most people’s. I also doubt my kids will handle wearing masks all day very well. I know we need to start training them to wear masks for next school year, but I’m dreading it.

I’m not trying to complain about the summer, because I know I am very lucky that I don’t have to work. I mean, I’ll be working, but it’s not the same when people aren’t expecting deliverables from you on a daily basis. It’s just a lot of time to fill, with confusing guidance on how we can safely fill it.

I can see that we’re heading into that time when we see and hear and read about other people’s choices as reopening begins and we start to wonder what we feel is appropriate and whether or not we should take the actions of others into considerations (after following public health guidelines of course). I’ll be curious to see what California requires and recommends starting on June 1st. Besides the reopening of county parks, nothing has really reopened in my world yet so I haven’t had to make any decisions about what I feel comfortable doing or where I feel comfortable going. My parents want more time with my kids – they want to take them for an entire weekend – but that is still technically against the rules. Once that is an option again I’ll have to decide if I accept the risks of my kids possibly exposing my parents. What does one do if the people who are more at risk accept the risk and want to be with the people who are less at risk? These are hard questions to answer.

I’ve read a couple of articles suggesting that countries that are re-opening, and even data from the US that looks at when different aspects of the shelter in place started in different areas, suggest that closing schools did/does not make much of a difference in community spread. I wonder if any study could come out that would inform the return to school in the fall. My guess is no.

My district is now anticipating a $4 million dollar budget deficit, which is crippling for a district as small as ours. I don’t really understand why I’m not reading ANYTHING about the devastating budget crisis that is about to hit public schools across the nation. I guess there are more important things to consider.

I’m becoming more concerned with next school year for my own kids. SFUSD is a mediocre school district (at best) when there isn’t a pandemic destroying the foundations of public education – it will most certainly be a shit show of epic proportions next year. My daughter is in a 4/5 split this year so she’ll have the same teacher next year, which eases my anxiety a lot. My son, who is struggling with all this a lot more, will hopefully have a teacher I’ve wanted for years (we missed her with my daughter because she moved down to 1st grade when my daughter was moving up to 2nd). But still, even if they have good teachers, the situation will be so grim. And I plan to move them both out of their school the following year (we aren’t planning on staying for 6th grade even though it’s a K-8 so we’ll need to find a middle school for our daughter), which means I have to find new schools for them when touring will probably not even be allowed. I honestly hadn’t really thought that much about them in the context of the next school year and now that I am I’m feeling a little panicked.

It’s the middle of the week and I’m tired and things feel harder right now than they will after the coming long weekend. As always, I’m trying to take it one day at a time.

Being in my classroom today was a totally surreal experience. It was like walking through a time machine back into my normal life. Everything was where I left it nine weeks ago when I walked out on Friday, March 13th assuming I would be back in three weeks (and believing that teaching from home for two weeks because of the coronavirus was the strangest thing that could ever happen). If you had told the me that walked out of that classroom that Friday that I wouldn’t see a student in that classroom again during the 2019-20 school year, I wouldn’t have been able to process the words.

There were still papers in the turn baskets and pencils on the floor. It was like a time capsule, a physical reminder so potent that I could stand in the middle of that room and feel the normal settling like dust all around me.

I cried as I packed it up. The weight of the reality of it was so heavy. I haven’t spent more than 10 minutes in my classroom in over two months. We missed an entire trimester of the school year. So many moments between my students that I didn’t realize I cherished until they were ripped away.

I’ve written here before that I’m surprised to learn how much I genuinely enjoy teaching. I had no idea how important that aspect of my life, of my identity, was until it was gone. I’ve been teaching for 16 years, and it took a pandemic, and two months of sheltering in place, for me to really know how much I appreciate what I do.

There are definitely aspects I don’t miss. To be sure. I sometimes think about the challenges and realize it’s been nice to have an extended respite from some aspects of my job. But there is more to it that I love than I realized. I appreciate learning that.

I doubt I’ll be back in that classroom on the first day of 2020-21 school year. At some point, later in the fall, I think I’ll be welcoming students back into my classroom, but it will look so different than it ever has before. I’ve been teaching the same thing, at the same school, for a decade and a half, and I can’t fathom what next year will look like. It’s a strange feeling. It’s surreal.

Today I will do two normal things. Except they won’t feel normal anymore. They will be skewed by the new normal. In fact, these normal things will feel incredibly abnormal when I do them today. That’s life in the upside down.

First I will get my allergy shot. I haven’t gotten one in over two months, but tomorrow I have an appointment to get one at 9:45am. We used to not need appointments, but now we do. We used to not need masks, or specifically assigned seating arrangements, but now we do. It used to be just a thing I did on my way home. I would just drop in and get it done. Now it’s a big deal, with an appointment and protocols. I miss just popping in to do things. I miss it a lot.

After the allergy shot I will go to work. There won’t be any students there of course. I’m just going to start the process of closing my room for the summer. I’ll be clearing off counter tops and defrosting my mini fridge. I have hours and hours of work to do there, but I have to be home by 3pm so it will just be a start. I’m bringing a lot of materials back to school, things that I don’t need anymore. There are only three real weeks of distance learning left, and I don’t need much to finish off the year.

Finally I’ll run on my way home. I always love running on my way home from work because there are so many good spots. I’m going to try something new tomorrow, a 3 mile loop that is supposed to be less trafficked than my normal path.

I’m looking forward to the day away from home. It was a long week with my husband’s bad back and I’m proud of myself for asking for the time on Friday when I really started to lose my mind. My husband is taking most of the day off so I can actually leave. Just being away from my kids for five hours will be a welcome respite.

And of course that old normal, will now be weird too. I haven’t been away from my kids for this long in nine weeks. I certainly haven’t been this far from them for that long. I haven’t been away from my house for this many hours either. It’s going to be a surreal day, made all the more surreal by the fact that it all used to be totally normal.

This was a hard week. I cried a lot. It’s been a few weeks since I cried as much as I did this week. I’m so exhausted. I’m so tired of managing my kids’ big feelings. I’m tired of managing their school work. I’m tired of managing their disagreements. I’m tired of managing all of it.

My house is a disaster area. My husband can’t go shopping and we’re down to the last of our reserves. I’ll have to head out this weekend and I hate grocery shopping on the weekends.

We finally got something from our superintendent about schools opening again in the fall. Here were some points:

• We may start the year in Distance Learning mode or on sites August 19. We will be prepared for either scenario.
• We must plan for students and staff to practice social distancing by staying 6 ft. apart, washing hands often, sanitizing rooms during the day, and possibly everyone wearing masks.
• With social distancing, will students go to school campuses every day? Every other day? Half day? We do not know the answer yet.
• During the school year, we may need to return to Distance Learning at home for some weeks if there are high levels of COVID-19 infection and hospitalizations.  

I’m starting to realize that there is a much bigger chance of us “returning” in distance learning mode than I had originally thought. This is… a disheartening realization. It was hard enough ending the year in distance learning mode, but starting it that way? When we need to meet and build relationships with our students? It’s going to be really hard.

And if we do go back on some kind of hybrid model (this is what I’m still hoping for), what happens if my kids go to school on different days than I go to school? What will we do? My parents have said they would help, but I worry about exposing them to the virus. They aren’t 70 yet but they are close.

It feels like everything is teetering. It’s clear that nothing will emerge unscathed.

This is what our district is focusing on as it tries to plan possible scenarios for next year:

• Schedules and facility use/cleaning
• Teaching and learning in and out of school
• Technology support for every student and teacher
• Social, emotional and mental health of students
• Parent education and support
• Mitigating learning loss and meeting students where they are

There is so much to consider, and many of these considerations are at odds with each. Throw in a budget crisis, which will probably mean larger class sizes and furlough days (less time teaching) and it’s clear that something will have to give. And that something is almost assuredly the education of our students.

These changes to our educational model will have negative consequences for all students, but they will be profoundly damaging for students from lower socioeconomic households where parents can’t help with distance learning or provide the enrichment activities that students in wealthier households will be getting. The achievement gap, which is already a gaping canyon, will stretch the yawning distance between continents.

This pandemic is set to dramatically change our institutions, some maybe even for the better, but I don’t know how public education is going to survive with these continued restrictions. Public schools are already underfunded to the point of dysfunction, and with the economic crisis looming, it will only get worse. Public school funding is always the first thing to go.

This summer is going to be fraught with uncertainty. As a teacher, I will be spending a lot of unpaid hours preparing for next year so that the fall is not as exhausting as this spring has been. I guess the good news is I have plenty of time to do it.

What are public education officials in your school districts saying about reopening in the fall? What messages are your communities receiving.

I wrote that post on Monday night. On Tuesday morning my husband threw out his back getting out of bed. The last 48 hours have felt like a marathon at sprint speed. I didn’t once wax philosophical about how I might cultivate some enduring inner calm during this crisis.

To be clear, I have no interest in learning anything new or developing some new skill. I guess I just wondered if I could grow in the face of adversity, instead of shrinking away from it. But maybe just standing in it, and making it through each day, is resilient enough.

This is really hard. I’m working long days. Very long days. I’m never done and I rarely rest. I’m lucky that the end of the school year is in sight. I can’t imagine what that parents who need to keep working through the summer, without childcare, are thinking and feeling.

Right now I’m at a park. My kids have traveled a “secret passage way to an ancient fairy shrine” (straight from the mouth of babes) and I’m enjoying a moment of calm. But instead of just sitting here and taking a moment, I planned next week in my Notes app and now I’m writing this post. Maybe what I’m looking for is ways to recognize, and take advantage of, the calms in the storm better, so I can carry that skill bravely (or just more patiently) into this new world.

I’m looking forward to the school year being over. I’m burnt out as a teacher and as a parent helping her own kids navigate distance learning. But I have to admit that the summer, with its long stretch of nothingness, the vast sameness of dozens of days, terrifies me. What will we do? Who will we be when it’s over? How will we keep doing this in the fall?

Stamina has always been my thing. I’m not fast, but I can go far. I’ve ridden centuries on my bike. I’ve run a marathon. I can do long distances. But this? This feels like it will never end. I think I need to change my mindset, so that I’m not wondering how long we can keep this up, but accepting that this is our life now. Forever. Maybe then it won’t feel so terrifying to look 2 or 5 or 10 weeks ahead. Maybe the gray nothingness will become a comfort instead of something that sets my teeth on edge.

I’ve read enough articles with subtle, and less subtle, and straight up overt, messaging that I should take advantage of this upending of my life as an opportunity for personal growth. I am in a stable enough position that these suggestions don’t feel as offensive as they might, but they still irk me. But maybe they irk me for the wrong reasons. Because, like all good, upper middle class white ladies, I’m always itching for an opportunity to shed my old issues, to grow stronger in the face of adversity.

But, as always seems to be the case, I’m not quite sure how to do it.

I even just finished Untamed, which one would hope would lay some solid ground work in the area of “finding oneself,” and yet…

I find myself falling back on my same old coping mechanisms. I find myself spending my money in ways that don’t align with my values (::cough:: Amazon ::cough::) for the sake of convenience. I find myself making all of the same choices I wasn’t thrilled to be making before. The “perspective” that the world can change at any moment, and the “great pause” that shelter in place has “provided,” is doing nothing to nudge me in the directions I want to go.

Maybe this just isn’t enough of a crisis for me personally, to force hard change. I haven’t lost my income, I haven’t lost my health, I haven’t lost anyone I love. I haven’t lost anything really, except the superficial trappings of my old life. Everything is still here, it’s just been rearranged enough that it looks entirely different.

I’m struggling with this, when I have the time to think about it. Maybe, as we slowly return to the pieces of our life that are allowed, I’ll start thinking about what I want to add back in. I’ve been surprised by what I’ve missed and what I haven’t missed, but I don’t know if the magnetic pull of “how things used to be,” of my well programmed subconscious, can be bypassed by any conscious revelations that have occurred along the way.

Honestly, I think the only reasons I have been handling this so well, especially all our cancelled plans this summer, is that we have the downstairs to figure out, and it’s new and it’s fun and it needs things to go in it. If I didn’t have that to fixate on, to write lists for and to plan out what to get and when, I’d probably be struggling a lot more with the reality of this situation.

So yeah, I guess I just wrote the most obnoxious post in the history of coronavirus posts. But I swear it was inspired by other articles! I didn’t just wake up one day thinking… hmmm… it’s the end of the world, maybe I should focus on personal growth! While hundreds of thousands of people are dying! And the world’s economies are collapsing!

The past few weeks have been relatively good. There was that deep dip last week, before my period, but otherwise I’ve been fairly even keeled. I guess my brain finally stopped thrashing against this reality and settled in. And I have enough space and support to make it work relatively well (I also think I lowered my expectations, especially around work). So I guess I’m not in survival mode. Things have shifted, it feels like there is a modicum of white space in the margins. Just a little. And that is why I’m now thinking about how I might harness this insanity as a force for change in my own life. I just wish I knew how.

I guess I can say that I’m dealing with uncertainty way better than I have in the past. I suppose I’ve learned that along the way. I keep pulling up a blank email to ask my principal for the number of kids that want to take Spanish next year, and then I am reminded that knowing that will tell me nothing because we aren’t sure if we’re offering zero period (we might slash it for budget cuts, which would VASTLY reduce the number of kids in my classes because most of them care more about band than about Spanish and they only take Spanish if they can take both), oh and we’re not even sure how we’re going to go back next year AT ALL. So I close the email and I don’t ask the question, and it doesn’t feel that excruciating to let it go. I wonder about what being at the other middle school will look like, but again, I know there is so much uncertainty that no one can answer my questions so I let it go. My cousins keep talking about maybe still going to St. Louis, and while I assume that we will not join them if they go, the possibility of them going, and us staying at home isn’t driving me crazy. (I know the summer is not a source of stress for me, like it is for most people, because I don’t have to work while my kids are off, which definitely helps take the agony out of the question about summer camps.)

There has never been a singular event of this magnitude affecting so many people at the same time. Will we ever really be the same? Are we changing without even realizing it? And if we are, can we do anything to nudge that change in certain ways?

So there you go. The most obnoxious post of the coronavirus. You’re welcome. ::Flourishing hand gesture. Deep bow::

Yesterday afternoon my husband and daughter were in the backyard getting some fresh air. My husband was cutting big branches from the trees that are pushing over our fence from the neighbor’s side when he suddenly shrieked. Suddenly my daughter was by my side, breathless.

Mommy! We found a chameleon in the backyard.

Um, no. You did not. There are not chameleons, in backyards, in San Francisco.

But they had. A chameleon was just sitting in one of the branches that my husband had cut down.

Chameleons do not live in San Francisco – at least not outside, on their own. It’s too cold here for a chameleon – it must have escaped, or been cast out, from its home.

After knocking on some neighbors’ doors (with a face mask on off course) and some researching, I found a vivarium that would take the chameleon – and it was still open! We gently put its branch in a tub and I drove it across the bay to the vivarium, where it would have a spot under a sun lamp to stay warm.

When I called them, they also couldn’t believe we had found a chameleon in our backyard. His response mirrored the response I had given my daughter just an hour earlier. You found… a chameleon… in San Francisco.

We will likely be talking about our chameleon for a long time to come. I’m so happy my husband happened to be cutting down branches today, otherwise the little guy probably would have died.

Mothers Day ended up being quite nice. I didn’t get up until 9:30, at which point my kids came down with cards and breakfast for me in bed. They also had two air plants for me that my mom had gotten but left for them to gift me. I took my kids down to hike with my parents in the park near them that recently reopened. And then they watched the kids in the hot tub while I ran in that same park. All in all it was a nice day.

My kids only have two full weeks of “school” left. They officially end on June 2nd, but I wonder if they’ll expect anyone to “show up” on those last two days. It was already dumb enough to end on a Tuesday and now it feels especially useless. I am looking forward to a break in the daily power struggles associated with distance learning, but I’m worried about the loss of a schedule, especially when there is nothing to fill the void.

I have school until June 11th, so almost a full two weeks longer than they do. Our students are going to learn soon that we aren’t posting traditional grades this trimester, but instead will be doing some form of Pass/Fail (probably Pass/Insufficient Evidence) and once that happens, I worry the few students who have been showing up and putting in some effort will officially be done. Maybe at that point the kids who have disappeared might come back to try to salvage a “pass” out of their failing grade?

After mid-June we’re looking at… more of the same, except without the external expectations of school. I’m looking forward to being done with this daily grind, but the vast nothingness that stretches after it sends me into a panic. We’re going to need to find a schedule that works for all of us, and I doubt that will be easy as each of us wants different things (and some things, like unlimited Switch time, are absolutely not on the table.)

I got a new computer from work but I’m paralyzed by the prospect of moving everything to it so I can actually use it. This frustrates me, as my old computer is struggling. I asked my husband for help, saying it could be his Mothers Day present to me. I know he could get it done much faster than I could and I’m hoping with a little guidance the whole thing won’t feel so daunting. I’ve had this computer A LONG time and there is a lot on it. My personal computer died years ago so this has basically everything from the last two or three years on it. It’s going to be a lot of work to move it all over (and probably I should go through it all first so I’m not moving over stuff that I won’t need again).

I tweaked my shoulder and neck last week but they are feeling better now. I also tweaked my elbow that seems to have calmed down. I’m struggling to stick with virtual martial arts – it’s just very hard for a visual learner like me to engage with this platform. But I want to have martial arts to go back to if that is ever possible. Right now though, it’s hard to show up.

I’m rereading The Explosive Child. Actually, I bought the abridged audiobook on Audible (it’s an Audible exclusive) because listening for three hours is something I can actually manage. The simple reminder that “kids do well when they can” is helping. The acknowledgement that what I’m dealing with is intense and difficult validates my struggle and feelings, making things easier to manage. Still, it’s exhausting, and I am reminded on a daily basis that I am a better parent when I have time away from my kids.

Not much else to report. I can’t believe it’s mid-May, and that it’s been almost two full months since our world was turned upside down. It no longer feels like we’re in crisis mode, but we’re certainly not thriving. I guess manageable is a step up from where we have been, so I’ll take it.

This week was national Teacher Appreciation Week and Sunday is Mother’s Day. And while I made sure my kids made their teachers digital cards, and I sent them gift cards, I did not receive anything from my students. And while I will give my own mother something on Sunday (I am very grateful she is still in my life), I will likely not get anything from my own family. I’ve gotten so close to accepting this perceived discrepancy every year, and honestly it only stings a little at this point, but I’m still not a big fan of early May.

{I know I am appreciated, and I know my kids love me, and I hate when superficial “weeks” or “days” make me feel like someone needs to do something to prove that. I think it’s especially frustrating because the efforts I make myself never seem to be made toward me (and I am not the kind of person that enjoys making the efforts – it absolutely feels like a chore). But again, I know that sending an email during a specific week is not the only way a student can show they appreciate what I do, and a card from my kids is not even my preferred way of them showing me they love me. But when you see it everywhere, except in your own life, it’s hard not to feel… overlooked? Like I said, I’m not a fan of early May.}

And yes, I have made clear to my family that I would like I little acknowledgement (just a card or drawing!) but it doesn’t seem to be something they can manage at this point.}

So in the absence of being openly appreciated by my students and family, I appreciated myself this week by taking advantage of a sale on Mixtiles. In about three weeks, 32 photos will be arriving here to grace the wall in our new living room. We just got the giant wardrobe out today (which has been stressing me out for weeks) so I can finally see the entire wall. It’s going to be amazing when all the photos go up!

These are all photos I’ve taken over the past year or so, that I ran through different filters on an app called Prisma. I really like to have photos like this on my walls, and most of the “art” in our house was created by me (some of it created by a much younger, very interested in black-and-white photography me). I do have some photos of my kids, but mostly I put up stuff like this. It was incredibly satisfying to “create” something (it’s been A LONG TIME) and I can’t wait to put it all up on our walls.

Do you like days or weeks that force others to feel they have to show their love or appreciation in certain ways? Do you participate in them?