Not a Wasted Word

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.

Yesterday I acknowledged all the things I’m grateful for during this difficult time. Now I’m going to mention the challenges.

And there are a lot of challenges.

Teaching distance learning is hard. Supervising my kids’ distance learning is hard. Shelter in place is hard. Social distancing is hard. Being isolated from the people I like and love is hard. Negotiating with my husband is hard. Keeping the house inhabitable is hard. Managing the anxiety is hard. Accepting the uncertainty is hard. Coming to terms with the fact that we’ll likely not go back this school year is… devastating.

I wanted to write more about it, but it’s midnight and I just can’t. All week I’ve been with my kids most of the day and then working until the early hours of the morning and I can’t keep it up. Something has got to give. I’m going to reassess this weekend. If we were just doing this for one more week I could get through, but if it’s for 2.5 more months I need a whole different game plan.

I hope you’re all making it work somehow. These are hard times.

This situation is horrible, but there are quite a few things I am very thankful for as we begin our likely VERY LONG stretch of quarantine and social distancing (Governor Newsom said yesterday that he thinks schools will be closed through the end of the school year. I absolutely cannot wrap my head around that possibility, but I appreciate him planting the seed so that I don’t totally lose my mind when the announcement does come).

So what am I thankful for when it’s only Day 3 of Distance Learning (both as an educator and a parent)?

Well, for one thing, I’m SO F***ING THANKFUL that we got rid of our tenant before all this hit. Our original agreement required he vacate by March 15. That date just passed. Who knows if he would have been able to leave if he were still here in early March. I was so surprised that he left in mid-January and now I’m even more thankful that he is gone.

I’m glad he’s gone because he was a hoarder who didn’t maintain adequate levels of cleanliness during the best of the times. If he had been quarantined in our unit it would have gotten very bad. Also our electricity and heating bills would have been through the rough (because it was impossible to separate those bills out by unit, we just included those costs in the rent. So stupid.) And if the bed bugs had returned? I shudder to think…

I’m also glad because now that he’s gone, we have that space for ourselves. My mom and I painted it during the February break and we’ve set up a little table and chair down there for the parent who is “working” to utilize. We’re also going to put our bed down there tonight. For at least a month one of us needs to sleep down there, with the bed in the middle of the room in interceptors so we can watch for possible bed bug activity. I’ve steam cleaned the floors and baseboards and blown Diatomaceous Earth into most of the cracks (I want to say all the cracks, but man are there a lot of cracks). I feel hopeful that, without all his furniture and belongings, the bed bugs are gone. But I certainly don’t expect that and we’re going to be very careful moving forward. (more on this in a later post).

We also have the refrigerator and I can’t tell you how awesome it is to have an entire extra refrigerator right now. Plus all the storage space in that kitchen. Oh my god the cabinet space. SO. MUCH. CABINET. SPACE.

And another bathroom. A big bathroom! It’s only 400 square down there feet but it feels like a cavern of treasures.

And of course, as we move pieces of our bedroom downstairs (we will ONLY be moving the bed for at least a month), our old room will provide more space for the family. Before that didn’t feel so important, but now that we’re confined to our house it feels like the most precious gift.

So yes, our tenant being gone is something I thank my lucky stars for each and every day (more like every hour).

We’re also lucky that we had no travel plans for spring break. We didn’t even buy our tickets for St. Louis yet and those are our only summer travel plans. We expect that our week at Camp Mather will be cancelled, and the kids will be devastated by that, but it could be so much worse. (I personally, will not be that sad to miss out on Camp Mather, but I feel for my family.)I know so many people who had amazing trips cancelled because of this. My poor friend (a single mom) hasn’t been on a vacation in four years and was supposed to take her kids to Hawaii in a week. She cried for a whole day when she finally cancelled the trip. My sister was supposed to come home from London for the first time in 1.5 years and her trip was cancelled. My mom is devastated. I am also really sad, but there is so much more stressing me out right now that I haven’t had time to be upset by it. So many people missed out on much anticipated travel plans. I know that is very disappointing.

Usually at this time of year we’re doing our final push for the Spring Carnival, which usually takes place in the first week of April. Luckily for me I was so burned out that I refused to attempt any of our regular spring events, so nothing is cancelled, no hard work has been for nothing, and no money was spent on an event that can’t happen. I am so, so, SO GLAD we did not try to put on the carnival this year. Cancelling that would have been a disaster.

I am also very fortunate that I attended that professional development about utilizing EdTech this summer. Almost every tool I’m using to provide distance learning to my students I learned about this summer. I would be way more stressed out about this, as a teacher, than I am now because of that class. It’s a very happy coincidence that I learned so much more about using tech tools to teach during the one year that I HAVE to use tech tools to teach.

And of course, the biggest thing I’m thankful for is that, for the time being, my job, and my husband’s job, are safe. I feel very confident that my job will be there for me when we eventually resume classes. My husband does not feel very confident about his job in the long term (he worries that six or twelve months from now, when the recession hits, and the city is aware of just how hard its budget was hit, he will be let go). I feel more confident that they will keep him, because he is incredibly well respected and I think they would find a position for him even if his current position disappeared, but he doubts that. He believes this is an economic apocalypse and that they won’t be able to keep him even if they want to.

So yes, his job is not guaranteed, but my job is still very secure. Even if my position disappears (I do teach a middle school elective and those are not generally as secure), they have to offer me another position and I keep my Multiple Subject Credential renewed in case of that possibly eventuality (it also gives me more flexibility in my current position). I have been in my district a LONG time and I have tenure and seniority so I feel pretty good.

I know that so many people who will be financially devastated by all this. And I know that the economy is going to take a long time to recover. I think my parents’ retirement is okay and my in-laws is similarly secure (there is a pensioner in both sets), so we’re very lucky this isn’t devastating our parents financially either. So many will be hit so hard.

So yes everything is horrible, and the day to day feels downright torturous (an ADHD mom managing the distance learning of her ADHD daughter, and her emotionally volatile son is NOT pretty, let me tell you), but every hour I am reminded of how lucky we have it right now. And I thought I’d put that out there, in case it brightened someone else’s day.

As of 12:01am this morning, the Bay Area is officially instructed to “shelter in place.” We are only allowed to leave are home to buy food or medicine, or to care for others. I guess if we’re caught not doing this, there could be legal consequences.

I am going to work tomorrow to grab some materials I need to provide distance learning to my students. Evidently schools are considered critical service providers and teachers are critical personnel (phrasing?) so I’m supposed to say that if I get pulled over on my way there. (?!) So I don’t get arrested?! This is absolute insanity.

Today was the first day I was expected to provide distance learning for my students while guiding my own children through theirs. It… did not go well. I do think it will get better as we have fewer zoom meetings as a staff, and I don’t have to write so many “this is how distance learning in my classes is going to go” letters to students and their families.

It’s a lot. It’s so, so much.

I suppose with shelter in place we’re not supposed to go outside for any reason, but I will be taking my children out at least once a day. We’ll hit up big open spaces where we won’t cross paths with people. Truly, if we get arrested, so be it. I just can’t stay locked in my house without seeing friends or extended family for three weeks and keep my sanity.

{My husband, who works for the city, just assured me that recreation is an essential activity and that we are allowed to spend time outside as long as we practice social distancing. Yay!}

I feel like I should have more to say, but right now I have to write plans for my students for tomorrow. It’s going to be a really long three weeks, after which we may learn that we’re not going back for the rest of the school year.

I suppose we’ll see. Everything now is uncertainty.

When I got the comment asking how the COVID-19 outbreak was affecting life in these parts, there wasn’t much to say. It was Thursday morning and the only changes to my day-to-day life were increased hand washing, our dojo being closed, and an extremely light commute. By Thursday afternoon there were rumblings that things might change in the next day or so, and by Friday morning SFUSD, where my kids go to school, officially announced it was moving to distance learning for the two weeks before spring break. My own district followed suit on Friday, but we’d been told to be ready to send home materials the day before.

So Thursday night I taped the spines of 30 new graphic novels so my 7th graders could read and work with them at home for the next two weeks, and decided what to plan for my 8th graders. I knew I had time to figure out my lower level elective classes later. I also started thinking about how I would structure my days with my own kids at home, while I was supposed to be providing distance learning to my students.

This morning I went to Costco and experienced first hand the insanity that is the world right now. It was crazy there, but there was also plenty of everything (Costco is implementing a one-per-membership on toilet paper, paper towels, and water). I found everything I needed, and while it was hard to maneuver in the over-crowded line, I got out of there relatively unscathed.

And now I guess we wait, at home. My son has a stuffy nose and slight cough (both appeared last night before bed) and my daughter suddenly has a sore throat, so we’ll definitely be staying home exclusively for at least a week.

I will say, since schools have closed I feel very differently about “social distancing.” Before it felt like things were pretty much business as usual, since I was going to work where I had contact with hundreds of kids throughout the day. Canceling face-to-face instruction is a significant step, and now I feel very differently about being out in public. Mostly we’ll avoid it unless absolutely necessary. We definitely won’t be seeing either pair of grandparents any time soon.

My husband works for the city supporting night life industries and he’s spent the last two weeks fielding calls from the owners of music venues and other entertainment industries that are having to lay off their workers and are worried about losing their spaces, or their businesses entirely. We’re going to be seeing the repercussions of this in the economy for months, and years, to come.