Not a Wasted Word

When the Bay Area’s shelter in place order was announced over two weeks ago, I was relieved to hear that they considered “recreation” an essential activity and that outside spaces would remain open. Being outside, and getting exercise, are essential to our mental and physical health.

Two weeks later and they’ve changed their tune. First the playgrounds closed. They said it wasn’t safe for kids to be touching surfaces touched by other kids, even if they did wash their hands afterward. A lot of parents, especially those with younger kids who are going crazy being stuck inside, cried that day. I know I did, and my kids aren’t even that young.

You can see on the sign that even though the playgrounds were closed, they urged us to run, bike, hike, and enjoy nature. Then they closed all the open spaces.

On Friday my daughter and I went for a run in a county park not far from us. It requires a $6 parking fee, so I bought an annual parking pass in January, that is how much I love this park.

We went again on Monday, for a walk, and found this.

I understand that people were using the open spaces to get together in non-social distancing ways, and I understand that that behavior is not okay. I also recognize that some open spaces don’t allow for social distancing. My favorite running trail on the peninsula is too narrow and too popular for people to stay the requisite six-feet apart; I understand why it was closed. But some spaces really are not conducive to gathering – they are great for walking and provide enough space that people can practice social distancing. The fact that those spaces are closing is insane to me.

When we realized our park was closed, I sat thinking about what open space would still be open. I realized Lake Merced cannot be closed because its perimeter is a sidewalk on regular roads. So we headed over there, and as I suspected on the drive, it was packed because it’s one of the few places left for people to run and walk. This is another way closing big, open spaces back fires – it crowds the spaces they can’t close like beaches and running trails with street access.

The city’s new line is that we should be going outside only in our own neighborhoods. I find this suggestion totally short-sighted. San Francisco is not as densely populated as most cities, but still crowded enough that if people only have their own neighborhoods available for getting outside, and getting outside is the only way to leave one’s house for exercise and fresh air (and a break from the monotony of being stuck in one’s house), then those neighborhoods will be so overrun with people that they can’t possibly keep six-feet from each other.

It’s one thing to ask people to stay at home, without open spaces available, for two weeks. It’s quite another to do that for two months (or more!). The levels of anxiety and depression in the general public is rapidly rising, and giving people outside spaces would do a lot to alleviate that. I’ve never felt as panicked during this time as I did yesterday, when I realized the open-space parks were closed. I don’t know how we’ll stay sane when there is no where to walk, or ride bikes.

The city used to recognize that “recreation” is an essential activity and that our open spaces are adequate for social distancing. I hope they remember that again soon.

My husband is struggling mightily with this situation. Because his job involves counseling business owners who are trying to decide if they should take out loans or shut down, he understands the gravity of the economic collapse we’re facing better than most. He was keenly aware of how bad everything was going when most of us were still parroting “but the flu kills tens of thousands of people every year too!” I’ve never seen him so visibly affected by events outside of his control.

He’s also really busy. Just like me. And after a day of juggling work and our kids, we’re both exhausted. The connection between us feels tenuous, fading every day.

We’re also not sleeping together. In an attempt to keep the possible bed bugs downstairs, we moved the bed down there, but only one of us is sleeping on it. My husband is downstairs where he can keep the bedding from hitting the floor (an important bed bug precaution) and I am upstairs, thrashing around on the couch bed. We’ve been sleeping apart for 10 days. I have to admit, I don’t miss his snoring, and we’d probably be going to bed at different times anyway (I’m letting my night-owl side play a little while I can sleep in), so I don’t think it’s necessarily contributing to the distance, but it can’t be helping.

We’re trying to connect during the moments we have together, but it’s hard. And there obviously won’t be any date nights happening any time soon.

People joke that a lot of babies will be born in December, but I wonder how many divorce papers will be served. This isn’t an easy situation for most couples. And the struggle will continue for a long, long time.

So, how do we create a space that feels like spring break when we’ve been home for two weeks, and will be home for at least four more weeks afterward? These are the questions I’ve been asking myself as we started our spring break today.

My husband initially thought we should just keep pushing through with “distance learning,” but I quickly shot down that idea. They have finished all the the work that was sent home from school (we were really good about completing those daily assignments over the past two weeks), and I didn’t really want to create more work for them. Also, they need a break from the craziness that is distance learning as much as I do. Things will really ramp up when they go back, with daily zoom meetings and more work assigned by teachers, so I think having this week “off” is important. After I explained my reasoning, my husband easily agreed.

So how do we make this week feel a little special when we’ve already been home and we’ll stay home when it’s over… Letting them play as much Switch as they want would make everyone insane, and I still think things like getting outside are important (we’ve done a REALLY good job of getting the kids outside – we’ve been out for at least an hour every day since quarantine started). I also think my kids thrive on routines, if not schedules, so we wanted something in place that kept us all sane.

{Also, while I happen to have the same spring break as my kids (for the first time ever!) my husband has no spring break at all, so I’ll be with them for the bulk of each day while my husband is working downstairs. This also makes a routine important to me.}

We sat down with the kids today and talked to them about how we wanted them to have a fun spring break, but that we also wanted to make sure everyone was happy and healthy (we talk a lot about how video games make us happy in the moment, but sometimes make us angry or frustrated later in the day). Then we asked them what they wanted out of our spring break.

After some negotiation, we came up with a routine that we think will work for everyone. It involves copious (in my opinion) amounts of screen time, but it also involves taking care of ourselves, each other, and our surroundings. My sticking point, besides basic self-care (you’ll notice I had to write down the three meals of the day, because my kids hate eating), was going outside every day. We’re also trying to get them to do more for themselves around the house, and we’re giving them some new chores.

{I’m embarrassed to report that they’ve basically never had chores before, besides the bare minimum of picking up their own room. But now that we have the time to teach them how to do things, and we are home enough that they have many times to practice doing them, we’re going to start. I’m hoping that, if we really stick to the chores this week, they will be easier to keep up in April when we’re also doing distance learning.}

So that is what we’re doing for our spring break. My husband laughed at me for writing out yet another schedule on the big white board, but I think it helps to see the routine. It keeps my grounded and it helps manage the kids’ expectations; they won’t be getting three hours of Switch/Kindle/iPad time if they aren’t taking care of themselves, each other, or their surroundings! I hope my white board helps them remember that.

Today is our last day of the first two weeks of distance learning. This coming week is our break. In my mind we’ve finished Phase One and are entering Phase Two. Our district has officially announced that we are returning to distance learning after the break, until May 1st. May 1st is a Friday, so I suppose it’s really May 4th. That will be Phase 3. And they might just extended it again after that. Phase Four?! 🙁

Honestly, I was relieved they didn’t just call it through the end of the school year. At least now we have some hope that we might go back.

At our staff meetings, teachers have made clear that the work load of the last two weeks is not sustainable. We are working together as a staff to create a schedule that is more manageable for everyone – both students and teachers. At this point we think a form of block days makes the most sense, so teachers have days when they are meeting with students via zoom and available to answer emails during specific time periods. Then, on other days, they can focus on creating content and reviewing student work. Doing all of those things simultaneously, every day, is just not possible.

I’m thankful that I work at a school where our staff can come together to solve problems without things getting contentious, or devolving into power plays. I just hope the district listens to our voices, and gives us the authority to implement a schedule that works for us.

At home, things continue to be a mess. I plan to purge a bunch of stuff from the house over the next week, because the clutter is driving me crazy. I also plan to put together some stuff for the next month of teaching remotely. If I learn how to use Explain Everything I will declare the break a success. Mostly, I need to find a better schedule for all of us. I’m hoping, that with the revamp of the school week schedule, the revamp of our home schedule will be easier to determine and implement.

We’re still not sure if the four-week extension of distance learning means a four-week extension of shelter in place. Will my husband be home in April? Will the playgrounds still be closed? I’m assuming so, because this is the “distance learning” I know, but there is still a lot of uncertainty.

Today was a hard day. I felt out of sorts all morning. Just down in the dumps. My kids were pretty well-behaved (given the circumstances), but I kept getting frustrated at them. Everyone at the staff meeting looked so tired and stressed. My friends were struggling at home alone with their kids. My husband kept reading me shitty headlines.

At 7pm I took my regular martial arts class, except I was in our living room instead of the dojo. I miss the dojo so much, and as I tried to lose myself in my class, while my kids called each other names in the neighboring room, I lost it. I just started sobbing. I miss my old life so much. I miss my parents and my friends. I miss my work, and my students. I miss time away from my kids. I miss the dojo and all the people I cherish there. I miss having something that is only for me.

It was the first time I’ve cried for what I miss, for what I’ve lost. I don’t think I let myself realize that I’m mourning my old life – this is just a hiatus after all – it’s not gone for good. But it’s gone now, and I’ll never get these months back. I’ll never get that innocence back, the innocence of a woman who didn’t know she could effectively lose almost everything.

I’ve cried for my future, out of uncertainty and fear. But I haven’t cried yet out of sadness for what we’re going through. Now that I’ve started, I don’t think I’ll stop for a little while.

Not surprisingly, splitting the childcare with my husband while all four of us are home and both adults need to work, has been… difficult. I’ve always covered more of the child care in our family, as I can leave work much earlier and I take our only car for my commute. Both my husband’s later end time, and the fact that he takes public transportation (and our kids’ school is not on a good bus line), means that for years he never picked them up. (Just this year I negotiated for my husband to pick them up one day a week so I could go to an earlier martial arts class, and that had been so nice.) I also take them to more of their activities, and do more with them on the weekends, because I prefer leaving the house and my husband is fine to stay home.

All this to say, I wasn’t surprised when, after the first five days of shelter-in-place, I had to initiate a discussion of how we could more equally divide the child care during these weeks of quarantine.

We have tried a couple different schedules. I even write when each parent is “on” to the right of our schedule on the big white board (that I took from my classroom). I think what will end up working best for us is me taking the kids for the “school day” 8am to 4pm-ish, and my husband taking the afternoon / evening shift of 4pm to 8:30pm ish. My husband also comes up and does lunch with the kids from noon to 1pm. (He’s working down in our unit, where we have a table and chair and a lot of quite.)

I know this gives my husband a lot more covered hours during the day, but right now he needs those hours more than I do. If I can have the afternoons to grade papers and finalize the stuff going out the next day, I can watch The Outside and go to bed at a decent time. (This happened last night! It was glorious!) I can also get some work done during the day, especially when my kids are playing ABC Mouse and Adventure Academy or listening to podcasts and audiobooks (or reading) during quiet time. It’s harder for my husband to get work done with the kids around because a lot of his work involves phone calls and zoom meetings.

He also doesn’t have to work at all on the weekends right now, which is when I get my big chunks of time to front load my planning. It’s only the beginning of the week, but I do think the work I did over the weekend is making this week go a lot smoother than last week.

I don’t necessarily think this a “fair” division of labor, but I also think it’s probably what will work best for our family. I’ve read a couple of articles about how women shoulder more of the burden when families shelter-in-place, and how this pandemic is horrible for feminism, and I recognize so many of the patterns in our set up. Women already have to deal with so much injustice, it’s frustrating that this is going to further stall out the little progress women have made.

I would love to hear more about how couples and families are handling these new circumstances. Please let me know what is working for you.

Last week ended up being way more stressful than I expected. I was up past 1am every night grading my students’ work and creating what they needed to do for the next day. I spend the daylight hours on Zoom call staff meetings and answering my students’ endless trouble-shooting questions (turns out middle schoolers don’t read directions very carefully, or take the initiative when they aren’t sure about something. Shocking!) Oh, and I was doing all that while managing my own children’s distance learning. Every day felt like a marathon-length sprint and by Friday I was absolutely done.

I worked a lot of hours this weekend (probably half of each day) getting my content created so I could spend less time at night doing that. I still think that posting their grades helps them stay motivated to keep doing their work, because they know they’ll see the effects of a missing assignment immediately the next day (I’m lucky to have students that are, for the most part, motivated by their academic standing). But I hoped to have everything created and ready so that every night I could just paste a slide into my agenda and post a saved announcement on google classroom, and I didn’t meet that goal. I do have three days of work ready, but I’ll need to keep doing things throughout the first half of the week to avoid late nights on Wednesday and Thursday.

And then I have a week of spring break (stuck at home with my kids) to figure out how I’m going to make this situation work for the rest of the school year. (We haven’t been told officially that we’re not going back, but I’m assuming we won’t this school year, with hopes that maybe we’ll get to go back in May… a girl can dream.)

I recognize that my current setup is untenable. The volume of work I’m creating is more than I can maintain. Grading and posting scores every night is also not viable. I’m going to have to figure out a better way, because I simply can’t keep this up in the long term.

One of my problems is that I have five different preps, which means I have to create content for five, unrelated classes, and post it in five different places. The good news is two of those are A/B schedule electives which means I don’t have to post that much for either of those classes; I only would have seen them 2 times a week, and no one cares that much if I give them an impressive set of distance learning activities. Now I just need to remember that, and not push myself to meet my own personal expectations about what I should be giving them.

So yeah, I’m going to be mindful of what feels meaningful and what fills me with frustration this week. Hopefully, with a week afterward to percolate and plan, I’ll have a better map laid out for reaching my overarching goals by the end of the school year.

I also need to do a hard reset on our schedule at home. I’ve been watching what works, and what doesn’t, and I will continue to do so. I’m lucky that my kids have met, or exceeded, most of their grade-level standards this year already (I’m so glad we just got their second trimester report cards last week!), so there isn’t much I need to be too worried about as far as their academics. Mostly I just want them to retain the ability to sit and do some not-so-amusing work, and to maintain their grade levels skills. Oh, and to work on their Spanish. So far I’ve protected our “Hora de español” more fiercely that anything (first “academic” hour of the day) and I’m still brainstorming ways we can keep that up. Otherwise I’d rather they explore some topics of their own with a project based learning approach. The problem is, that while my 9.5yo daughter can probably manage that with less guidance, my 6yo son cannot. I still have to figure it all out, but I know I need to make some big changes.

I really liked this article that mom sent me on the topic. Maybe it will help you shift your expectations too.

I promise to keep writing what I’m doing here, in the hopes that it might help others. To all the people who are just doing what they need to do, and not stressing, my hats off to you. Please don’t think my kids are engaged in meaningful academic work all day. That is not the case at all. Mostly I just want to create a routine that brings them a feeling of security, while also maintaining my own sanity. It sounds like that is what most of us want.

I don’t hear well these days. I actually got my hearing checked because I struggle so frequently to actually make out what my husband is saying (he swears no one else struggles to understand him, which I can’t believe is the case). After two hours of hearing tests, the doctor cheerfully declared that I do indeed have hearing loss, but it’s well within the range expected for a person my age.

Still, I really have a hard time hearing people, a lot of the time. I have to put closed caption on for most TV shows, especially the ones where people tend to mumble.

My husband and I are watching The Outsider right now. We just started it. It’s very good, and I’m enjoying it quite a bit. I also can’t understand a damn word anyone is saying. We had to turn on the closed captioning about 15 minutes into episode one.

The thing with closed captioning is it’s not just for people like me who can’t make out what the actors are saying. Closed captioning is for people who can’t hear anything at all. It not only spells out the dialogue, it also narrates the sounds.

The Outsider is a mystery thriller based on a Stephen King novel. I’ll admit that I knew nothing about the book before I started watching the show, but I assumed it would be weird, and possibly gruesome. It’s definitely both.

There is a lot of Christopher-Nolan’s-Inception-esque-hard-rumbling-noise-type music in this. The closed captioning is always alerting viewers to the tone of the music playing, even though the music never really seems to change. Sometimes it’s characterized as Ominous. Sometimes as Dramatic. Sometimes as Suspenseful.

I started noticing the different categorizations for the music, trying to discern if I could distinguish between what the CC considers Ominous, as opposed to Dramatic or Suspenseful. To my ear, it all sounds the same.

Maybe I just don’t have the ability to distinguish between Ominous and Dramatic. Maybe I don’t recognize the tones.

Two weeks ago, when my husband and I were preparing to return home from Seattle on the same day that the first death from COVID-19 was confirmed a couple of dozen miles away, he recognized the tone of the music. He knew immediately how ominous the song was. I was sure it was Dramatic, or maybe Suspenseful, but he knew that Ominous was the right word.

His closed captioning still reminds me every day of how Ominous this situation is. I’ve long since admitted that Dramatic and Suspenseful are not the right words, but sometimes I still need him to remind me of where we really stand. This thing is going to get so much worse before it starts to get better. Ominous might not be strong enough a word.

And yet, we need to keep living. We need to make our way through the days. I think sometimes that maybe I need to be reminded of Ominous, because my brain wants to hear it as Dramatic or Suspenseful, because those are easier soundtracks to live with. Dramatic and Suspenseful might play out in a number of different ways, but Ominous always ends up the same.

The reality is, no matter how I go about my own days, ominous music plays, but maybe I’m better off with a different, less depressing, closed captioning.

It’s only been a week of this new normal. Only seven days. Mostly it still feels insane, but I think I’m numbing to the glaring absurdity of it. My brain recognizes that none of this makes sense, but there is something underneath, a vague but powerful influence, nibbling at the edges of my perception. The reality is that the restriction of shelter in place, of not going to work anymore, of not dropping my kids off at school, at not seeing my friends or my family, doesn’t feel so rough around the edges anymore. My subconscious is trying to prepare me for my new reality, and maybe it’s doing a better job that I gave it credit for.

I notice it, the subtle softening of the absurdity, when remnants of my old life rip tiny tears in the facade. In the middle of the week when my phone reminds me to check for my daughter’s flute. I stop, in the midst of the upteenth hour of managing my kids and my job at home, momentarily thrown off balance by this reminder from a past me, a me who knew nothing of this possibility, let alone this eventuality. I shake my head remembering that I used to pick my kids up at this time, from aftercare. Will I pick them up from aftercare again before the fall?

Or when my eyes fall long enough on the family calendar in the kitchen that I see the me who stood there with the marker in her hand, copying each meeting and event, the routine occurrence that peppered our days, with no doubt in her mind that they would come to pass. I can feel her, I can stand inside her, but she doesn’t feel comfortable anymore, there has been a shrinking, and she no longer fits. And yet, there is such a distinct recognition of the world as she saw it, of how all those events that still sprinkle the next two months on that white board, felt so obvious. Guarantees.

These moments of clarity, these little rips in the fabric, allow a glimpse into my old life, that in some part of my mind is still running parallel to this one, just waiting for me to find my way back.

Some days I think, oh, this is just an anomaly, a short detour of sorts. It’s weird, but life can be weird sometimes, and these outliers do littler more than further define normal. But in those moments of clarity, when I am jolted back to the way things used to be, I’m reminded of just how alien this reality is. A huge part of me wants this to feel “normal” because normal is something human brains crave. But this is not normal. And it’s not going to be normal again for a long, long time.

I hope I can remember what normal really is.

The kids and I read about this on our New-o-matic app (a great place for kids to read at-their-level (there are three levels) articles about what’s going on in the world. With the push in common core toward non-fiction text (an important push, in my opinion), News-o-matic is a nice way get your kids accustomed to reading news articles. There is also a “read” to me function (great for my son!), AND most articles are available in other languages. Right now we’re reading one a day in Spanish and discussing it to start our “Hora de español.”

Anyway, back to what we read about on News-o-matic. Evidently Mo Willems is doing a Daily Doodle on the Kennedy Center site! I HEART Mo Willems so much. I love all the Piggie and Gerald books (most are also in SPANISH!) and all the Pidgeon books too. I’ve seen him do kids shows live a few times for SF Sketchfest, which just cemented my love for him. We’ve only watched one of these but the kids loved it (even my 9yo daughter). I definitely appreciate a fun, creative, break during the day. And if you can’t catch the live stream they post them later.