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Tomorrow morning Zeke is taking a class about lemurs and I am super excited about it. Seriously. My friend Dana said her kids were going to try out classes on Outschool and demystified it for me. I’ve seen ads for Outschool on Facebook for months and months–way before pandemic time-but never needed to add another thing to my kids’ schedule. And also they were in school! And learning new things there! But now, as learning has slowed to a crawl and “school” will end in a month and it’s possible that all the camps will be canceled, I’ve gotta do something. Dana explained to me that some of the Outschool classes include several sessions over the course of a week or several weeks, and some are just 45 minutes long! And they cost $10 (the short ones).
One of the reasons I have been lamenting the prospect of no camp (other than the obvious one of my kids being out of the house for several hours a day interacting with people outside their family) is that camp is where they try new things. Camp is where they learn and practice things that we don’t know how to teach them. Camp is where they explore subjects and activities that that interest them and not necessarily their parents. Turns out that Outschool does this! Of course Outschool also includes classes in reading and writing and math, but for my purposes my kids can take digital SLR photography and consumer finance and superhero costume design and, starting tomorrow, Lemurs, Monkeys & Apes! I have no idea what the classes will be like, but I am optimistic. Did you pick that up?
Today included a variety of small, happy moments. Zoe and I unexpectedly found toilet paper at Target. Randy made a delicious dinner of sausage, peppers, and polenta. We used to eat polenta all the time but then we stopped. It was so lovely to see polenta on my plate again. Zeke did the whole lesson plan I created for him today with no actual complaining.
His video was a collection of images by Yayoi Kusama, who he learned about when we were looking through the Outschool course offerings (we signed him up for this class which I am definitely going to be taking with him but silently off camera. He made it completely on his own by googling Kusama and taking screen shots of photographs of her and her work. At the end, he showed it to me and I asked him if he could add the artist’s name to the first screen. He couldn’t remember how to do this so he looked up instructions in iMovie help and on YouTube and he made the edit, 100% on his own. I was super impressed.
While he was playing with the Sculpey, Zoe joined in and made this adorable little pig.
AND in an special post-Mother’s Day treat, both my children played (or perhaps hung out?) outside in our micro-back yard for a while this afternoon. I don’t know what they were doing except that involved the hammock and funny accents. But they were laughing and they were together and they were outside and that filled me with joy and delight.
(Another post-Mother’s Day treat was my husband using the plumbing snake kit I ordered online to snake all of our sinks, none of which back up anymore! It’s a Mother’s Day miracle!)
Our family decided today to cancel our beach vacation scheduled for July. We’ve gone to the beach together–in various combinations of extended family at various beaches up and down the East Coast–since I was a baby. These are not glamorous excursions to fancy resorts. But they are familiar and fun and something we always look forward to. It’s hard to imagine not going, but I understand that it’s too risky for my parents. At least we have tomorrow’s lemurs.
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The mood swings are killing me. And not my 13-year-old’s mood swings, but mine.
The quasi-quarantine (I acknowledge, as a friend pointed out recently, that we are not actually in quarantine, which is more serious) feels a little to me like what I remember of being drunk. Admittedly it has been decades since I’ve experienced that. Now after having a bottle of hard cider with pizza for dinner I wake up in the middle of the night and have to eat crackers and take Tums. What I mean, though, is that every emotion seems to be magnified times a thousand. For a few days this week I felt like I was trying to swim through molasses. I couldn’t motivate myself to do anything. I was napping even more than usual. I wasn’t showering until 6pm. I was yelling at my kids. After reading news stories about the projected future of this virus and trying to wrap my head around the idea that our lives will never be the same, I was despondent.
Reading, which is usually my refuge, has been doing me a disservice. My default activity was scrolling through Facebook and clicking on articles about epidemiology, the current administration’s irresponsible and deadly response to the virus, the response of white vigilante terrorists to measures designed to save lives, the actions of white vigilante terrorists who killed a black man who was out for a jog, the number of people suffering because they have no jobs and therefore not much food, and the fact that my zip code has the highest concentration of COVID-19 cases in Arlington.
So during the 4am-6am period that I was awake last night, I deleted Facebook from my phone. This is a step I’ve taken many times before, and I always re-install it after a few days. But today was so much better.
Zeke and I made wonderful French toast with the delicious challah bread I picked up yesterday from Great Harvest Bread Company. I had more energy than I’ve had in several days–the molasses was gone–and I coerced my family into helping clean the house. We threw away so much stuff, and organized, and dusted. We have now–over the span of the quasi-quarantine–accumulated four large boxes of things to give away or sell. I am still not sure when I will be able to give these things away or sell them, but at least now they’re in boxes instead of scattered all over the house. We played Jackbox games over Zoom with friends who we used to have dinner with often and friends who live far away who we haven’t seen in a while and we all laughed and laughed and all our kids played too and it was pure joy.
Saying that taking the Facebook app off my phone immediately led to a state of bliss would be an oversimplification. But it helped for sure.
I have a stack of notes I need to write. These blank cards, addressed and stamped but not yet written, had been piling up on my desk since December. Since Randy is now using my desk to work, the notes are now cascading in piles of my stuff on the edge of the dining room table (where Randy’s papers used to live). If you are a member of my extended family and you have not received a Christmas card, Valentine, thank you note, or other expected correspondence from me over the past six months, I apologize. And I promise I will write the cards. But when I think about what I would say, I start to have that molasses feeling again. Looking back on what our lives were like back in December, and January, and even February, my heart hurts. I feel naive. I feel nostalgic. I feel overwhelmed, like I need to sit down because I’m going to faint. Despite the abundance of news and information, there is a distinct lack of clarity and certainty. I still can’t wrap my head around our existence right now. My Dad asked for Washington Nationals face masks and a donation to a food bank for his birthday. My sister and I debated at length how to make it as safe as possible to spend time with our Mom on Mother’s Day. Almost every ordinary activity takes on extraordinary meaning when you have to decide how much danger is inherent in each decision.
I used to be a person who possessed a lot of energy. While I am not quite a sack of potatoes yet, my motor operates at a much slower speed than before. I know this happens to people in their 40s, but I don’t like it. The precipitous decline for me came after Zeke was born. No matter what anyone tells you, having two kids is way harder than having just one. And Zeke’s sleeplessness for the first two years of his life is probably what led to my sleep disorder. Not that I blame him. He’s worth it. 🙂 But this quasi-quarantine is squeezing what energy I have left. Of course there are moments–even hours!–of fun and diversion and creativity and relaxation. But they seem to be bracketed by confusion, doubt, and exhaustion. There’s a heaviness that lingers, a longing for freedom.
Since tomorrow is Mother’s Day, my family decided it would be just like my birthday in that I could make the plan for the day. My aspiration for tomorrow morning is to get myself out of bed and do yoga. I have many yoga teacher friends and so many sources for online classes, but I have not done a single one of them since we’ve been staying home. Partly because there always seems to be something more urgent demanding my attention, and partly because my house bears no resemblance to the clean, peaceful emptiness of a yoga studio. I have never once regretted going to a yoga class, but I have also never succeeded in sticking to a practice at home. I struggle to stick to much of anything sometimes. I know, however, that if I’m going to survive this thing, I need to take better care of myself. Making myself a priority has always been anathema to me. It seems selfish, and to me selfishness is a serious character flaw. Of course I’ve been told by friends, therapists, and many people who love me that I need to put on my own oxygen mask first. I know this is true. It’s just so much easier to do when everyone else is out of the house. I can take fabulous care of myself when I have plenty of time and resources. Learning so many new ways to be is a lot of work. No wonder I’m so moody.
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When they first announced that our schools were closing because of the virus, it was only supposed to be for a month. The kids would return to school on April 14, after spring break. I can’t believe this decision was made only two and a half weeks ago. Already it feels like forever, since everything has changed and changed and changed again since then. But way back then, I naively thought that we might still be able to have spring break. We weren’t planning any exotic trips–just an overnight to Baltimore to visit the American Visionary Art Museum, explore the National Aquarium, and take the water taxi to Fells Point. And another overnight to Pennsylvania to spend a day at Hershey Park, which Zoe requested as a birthday present and where she and Randy were going to ride all the roller coasters. Still, we had something to look forward to.
Now our schools are closed for the rest of the school year, although perplexingly that’s not the case nationwide. And Virginians, along with residents of many states, have been ordered by the governor to stay at home unless we need to leave home on essential trips. The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Arlington has surpassed 100 and continues to climb. It seems like we are stuck at home for the foreseeable future. I just hope to God we can have our summer. Please don’t tell me otherwise right now. I cannot handle it.
I am feeling discouraged. My family will not be able to be together to celebrate my or my kids’ or my parents’ birthdays, or Easter, or Passover. We won’t be able to see friends or go to church.
Everything was glitchy today. Apps froze, devices crashed. Zeke collided with a bookcase and cut his arm. I cannot concentrate on writing anything for work when any children are in the room.
I do not intend to whine. I should just go for a walk. I feel this obligation to make dinner though, since we got takeout last night. I know it could be much worse and we are exceptionally privileged and lucky. But the indefiniteness of it all weighs heavily on me.
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Zeke’s original art, made for me in Panda class
In real life not every special day turns out perfectly, and not every moment is worthy of photographing. But my Mother’s Day weekend did include plenty of mothering, which is something to be thankful for.
Zeke has had a fever since Friday afternoon, which translates into a lot of intense snuggling. Not that you ever want your child to be sick, but the snuggling is not so bad. Even when he wakes up from an intense nap, during which he has burrowed so intensely into me that we are covered in sweat and possibly his pee, I don’t even realize what’s happened or particularly mind. I’ve had plenty worse bodily fluids showered upon me by my children. Sometimes, even years after the spit-up phase has ended, I have to change my shirt two or three times in a day when a special mixture of tears, snot, and drool saturates it.
Zeke’s card, made for me in Panda class. His teacher’s translation: “I love you!”
Or sometimes I have to change my shirt because I sweat through Zoe’s activities, like her soccer game yesterday afternoon, which ended up being a massive defeat, so much so that her team was invited to bring an extra player on the field at some point. It was a hot day and her team was missing a few subs and we were in full sun, but I stayed on the sidelines (along with my dad, another loyal fan) to high five Zoe every time she came off the field and hand her a water bottle. I often sweat through her martial arts classes, even though they’re indoors and not because I’m doing martial arts, but because the studio can get stuffy with all those kids kicking and punching and running and I am sprinting around after Zeke for 45 to 90 minutes, depending on how many classes Zoe has that day. Zeke’s usual state is in motion, which is why it’s all the more surprising when he’s sick and wants to be still.
So this morning I couldn’t go to church because I couldn’t bring Zeke to the nursery with a fever and Randy had to take Zoe to a learn to ride a bike class we’d signed up for months ago. There was no breakfast in bed because Zoe was rushing around to get ready to go this morning. Fortunately our church streams services live online, so I was able to watch at home. At first Zeke was watching with me, and even said “church” a few times, which was a new word for him. (He also learned the word “boob” this weekend because he kept poking mine and giggling when I said “hey! don’t touch my boob!”) He pointed at the people on the screen and I explained who they were a few dozen times. Then he snuggled up to sleep while I watched the rest of the service and wept. I cried during the song that the director of religious education sang about mothering people whose own mothers just weren’t good enough, and during the rendition of “For Good” from Wicked. And when Rev. Aaron talked about the cards that he and an artist in the congregation developed for members in the congregation hand out to people to show that we recognize the divine in each other. And when he talked about his Tibetan friend who was identified as a rinpoche–a reincarnated spirit–at age three and who went to live in the Buddhist monastery and whose family had no idea they would never see him again. And I wept some more at the end of the service when he invited some children up to make the Tibetan singing bowls sing.
A little while after the service ended and my tears subsided, Zeke woke up and I decided to give him a bath. He requested bubbles and we had fun throwing animals into the air, listening to them plop into the water and disappear under the bubbles. After a while Zeke had the idea to put some bubbles on me, and he gently scooped up bubbles and arrayed them on my arms. Then he decided I needed to get clean too. He took the extra washcloth that I had gotten out in case he wanted to wash himself, and he squirted soap on it, and dipped it in the water to get it wet, and washed one of my arms, and then the other. It was kind of like Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, but the two-year-old and his mom version. With bubbles.
I didn’t want to leave Zeke to go to the planned Mother’s Day celebration at my parents’ house, and I didn’t want to share his germs with his cousin, but Randy insisted that Zeke would be fine with him and that Zoe and I should go. We arrived late, and on my parents’ back porch, Zoe shared with everyone the Mother’s Day gifts that she and Zeke and Randy had given me. My favorite was the letter she had written to me in school. The past few weeks have been more exasperating and exhausting than usual, as we’ve faced epic tantrums from Zeke and have been helping Zoe address some physical challenges. All of us have been a little crankier and more fragile than usual. Randy has been by my side every night, united on the parenting front. He has typically been the only one who has been able to finally subdue Zeke into sleep at the end of the long night. But there has also been the blowing of bubbles, and the drawing of chalk pictures on the patio, and the doing of many puzzles.
So there’s been a lot of mothering. And moments when I had to go outside and sit on the front step in my pajamas late at night before I completely lost my mind. But then there’s this. Deep, slobbery snuggles, and “always remember that you are my star.”
You Ask a Lot of Questions 