Pandemic Ramblings
When I have inspiration to write something that will end up being an essay it either comes out in one burst, or in small paragraphs, an idea at a time. The latter can take weeks, months, even years in some cases, to end up looking anything like an essay, and usually goes through multiple rounds of editing and rewriting until I am happy with it. Sometimes I jot phrases down in a notebook, or type them up in my Google Docs, and then weld them together, hoping that they stick, working on them until they do. Unfortunately I don’t have the brain capacity to do anything more than write out thoughts as they come at the moment. This year I have mainly been writing in my journal, and not as interested in blogging anymore, and I’m sure this won’t really change much moving forward. But I do have some ramblings that may or may not interest others, and by sharing them maybe someone else won’t feel like they are going mad, or will relate to something within them. I haven’t edited anything, so I warn you, they really are ramblings!
April 9th 2020
Last week was a strange week…I started it off by writing down all of the positive things, all of the good things that could come out of the bad, as a way to focus on the bright rather than the gloom surrounding us. I also told myself that it was OK to be upset about having no income for the foreseeable future, about dwindling savings, about having to try to homeschool when I’m not a teacher and have three very small kids. That I could be angry about missing our much anticipated vacation to England, one that the generosity of my mother only made possible. That I could be worried about how we will pay rent and bills in June and July if this continues, or about how being confined to a 2 bedroom apartment for weeks is going to affect the kids long term. That I could be sad that my firstborn celebrated her 6th birthday during this time, missing her little Kindergarten celebration and party with friends. I told myself I could be worried about delayed open enrollment application letters and Kinder and preschool enrollments, IEPs and speech therapy, school meals, and school stuff in general. There was so much that could have literally sent my anxiety into overdrive every day, but apart from having difficulty sleeping, and having been sick for a few weeks, I felt more serene than I had in a long time. Maybe because I actually allowed myself to feel upset and angry, and also breathed those feelings out and away.
Maybe also because we are all in the same boat, we are doing what is best for everybody collectively: staying home and containing the virus so it doesn’t spread like wildfire. But another part of it was because I was really asking myself to focus on the positive sides to everything. We get to sit down and eat together as a family every night, and as a bonus my partner is a professional line cook and has worked in some pretty amazing restaurants over the years - so our meals are consistently delicious and the kids are trying things they would never try with me. I am making new friends at the senior community across the street by writing letters and sending pictures from the kids, and hopefully once this is all over we can all meet in person and continue our friendship and laugh about everything. I am teaching myself to sew by hand sewing masks and dreaming about everything I could make if I had a sewing machine and knew how to use it. I am watching my 6 year old learn to read despite her reluctance, and my 4 year old write and read the alphabet better each day, and I’m watching them all create games that go on for hours, because we are giving them the space and tools to just be, no rushing about from here to there. I am learning about balcony gardening, about what grows how and where, and anticipating full blooms that attract hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies. I’m talking more frequently to old friends, and making new ones here, even if we are all at home, sheltering in place. I’m doing jigsaw puzzles again, and starting new tv shows, and laughing hard, and also letting myself cry when I need to. I need to keep myself busy constantly, that isn’t anything new, but I am starting to give myself space to just be.
And then suddenly I felt my moods going up and down like mad. I woke up in a great mood, but a few hours into the day I realized I had missed Luna’s first online lesson, and I felt myself plummet: I was a failure! A parenting failure! My eldest daughter was going to fall behind! My other one was bouncing off the walls, and my toddler was asking to nurse every 5 minutes. How on earth was I going to do this?! This was then followed by a full 24 hours of refreshing my email in hopes of finally receiving confirmation that Aurora would be able to get into the same school as Luna next year (we live between two district elementary schools, and the one the girls went to preschool and where Luna is currently in Kinder requires us to go through open enrollment as it is not our “home school”). The email finally came through, as did some positive news about my son’s IEP with the school district for next year, and suddenly the future became brighter again. Then two hours later news about the district’s school meal distribution shut that light out again. As a way to protect the people performing the meal distribution they were cutting the hours and days, which I totally understand… It just means that I won’t be able to get the meals anymore, because I don’t have a car, and Luna has lessons during the timeframe provided. I don’t know why it made me so sad, maybe because these meals were helping us out so much, and provided a sense of familiarity for the girls? At the same time, Cesar also got a call about a job, which is brilliant, because we can’t go much longer without income and neither of us can qualify for unemployment. So ups and downs, ups and downs…
After Cesar started the new job I realized how much easier it had been to do the distance learning stuff when he was here, and that being alone in the apartment with three little ones and no way to escape for 10 plus hours a day reminded me so much of those summer months when Ludo was first born…I just have to continue taking every day as it comes, battle each hurdle as it appears, and appreciate what we have together, because despite everything, happiness still grows strongly every day.
April 24th 2020
Now comes the time when life seems completely surreal and numbers have become abstract, unless you are on the frontlines or otherwise directly affected. I’m glad I have my feet firmly on the ground and my eyes on the news and on my friends’ news because I know I cannot fall foul of the virus’s distance. It’s there, still, and we can’t forget that. How many more people need to die because some of us are carelessly demanding to go outside and back to whatever we were doing two months ago?
April 29th 2020
Teachers are amazing. I tried so hard to engage my eldest in reading and writing, and now suddenly all she wants to do is listen to me read to her, and practice writing sentences together. All it took was one wonderful teacher. I can’t even imagine how hard it is for teachers right now, having to reshape their classes into lessons that work online, engage their students through a computer screen, and often at the same time having their own children to help through their own distance learning programs. I think back to when Luna started therapy, and how alone I felt, and then to when both girls started preschool and how this whole new world opened up for us: community, helping hands, new friends, and the constant surprise when I realize that we are not all alone in this.
May 3rd 2020
“Can I have a snack please?” for the seventeenth million time today.
(Can someone help me find my brain please? I lost it somewhere between the end of March and today).
May 17th
It’s so easy to find words when I’m walking outside by myself, lost in thoughts, music in my ears. I write poems in my head, promising myself that they will stay there until I get home where they will become reality. But I always know that by the time I open the front door, listening for little voices ringing out with happiness at my return, the words, phrases, will have drifted away. I sit in front of my laptop and stare at the screen, hoping that the blank page will conjure them up again. Nope, not happening. Something about the roses in the Capitol Gardens, and a Blue Jay on the camellia bushes, and people walking way too close to me on the sidewalk. Something else about a man talking at me while I was contemplating a new mural, and instead of taking my earbuds out I froze and scurried away, heart beating too fast for nothing. I only leave the house at times when I know the streets will be quiet, and I only take routes that are less traveled, apart from the Capitol Gardens that I love. I miss taking the children there and exploring all the trees and flowers, watching the butterflies and the bees and the birds. I know that I could technically take the children there right now, but there are too many people without masks, too many people ignoring the 6ft rules, and too many areas just waiting to be touched by little hands. Instead we take them around the neighborhood in the evening when we are less likely to cross paths with people, and let them run and scream and jump to their heart's content. Apartment living in a city during a pandemic is interesting, but not as terrible as I thought it would end up being. The kids do need to get out more, the balcony doesn’t quite cut it, but for the first time in forever we have proper weekends altogether, as well as dinner together every night. I try to find positives every day, I try to do something to help everyday, and I try to be present every day: and for the most part it is working. Having three little kids during “normal” times is hard enough, but we seem to have found a certain balance, where temper tantrums are followed by a few minutes of school work, and Zoom lessons require a constant flow of snacks and “sit up and listen to your teacher please”, where I will gladly read book after book in an array of voices, but dread the looks I get when I ask my eldest to do a few sums. Every spare spot on the balcony contains a plant, seedlings, flowers, and I dream of one day owning a real garden where fruit, vegetables, and beautiful flowers grow together.
I also still dream of a little house on the beach, but nowadays that house is on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides (maybe), where I can see the children running around happily with sheep and cows, dogs and chickens. I know the weather is a lot colder there than it is here, and in the winter the days are very short, but the quality of life will surely be better for us all? Fresh air, water, animals, space… A more sustainable, simpler way of life? Cesar and I spend so much time finding things that nobody wants anymore and turning them into something new and special that one day we should turn that into a business. One that could easily be run from a remote island where we have space. But then sometimes I feel guilty for dreaming this dream, especially now that my children have started school, making friends, comfortable in their routines, their lives. We couldn’t move for a few years at the very least, and by that time they will have firmer friendships and roots in this community, and so will we. Having moved around different countries quite a bit as a child I know the good and the bad sides, and wonder if the benefits will outweigh the disadvantages. One of the huge advantages of being here is that there are other children with similar backgrounds to our children (first generation children of immigrants, indigenous, mixed race, multilingual etc etc), but elsewhere this may not be the case. I will never forget the time another kid spat on me because I didn’t speak his language, and how long it took me to actually understand why he spat on me (because I was new to that country and didn’t speak his language). Adults are brutal, but their actions directly teach their kids to be brutal too, and right now I know that our children are in a school where they are nurtured, allowed to be different, and where they are taught mindfulness and kindness, and the importance of living together as a community.
In other news, I was able to snag a sewing machine and taught myself to use it, and am now sewing and sewing away, making masks for people I know and people I don’t know. I never realized how much I would enjoy this!
May 19th 2020
As I was on one of my walks alone I started thinking about how people use animals to insult humans. This is so strange to me, as animals are not only beneficial to us, without them we would most likely die. Chickens give us eggs, cows provide milk (and meat and leather if that’s your thing), cheese, cream, sheep provide wool, donkeys can pull more weight than we could ever think of doing by ourselves, etc. I am happier surrounded by random animals than random humans, and I dream of a life in the middle of nowhere where I can surround us with happy animals (that we will not eat). In any case I would rather be a sheep that doesn’t pass COVID-19 to another person than a “unique” asshole who thinks they are above infection.
May 24th
Things that cause trauma in kids: abuse, neglect, discrimination based on race/ethnicity/gender identity/religion, school shootings (and active shooter training), bullying, lack of food/guidance/love amongst other things.
Things that do not cause trauma in kids: wearing a mask, washing one’s hands frequently, vaccinations, sitting 6 ft apart from each other in class, and science.
I’m so confused by the outrage - there are so many more important issues that our children will face in their lives than wearing a mask to school! Children understand if we explain it to them clearly, and they understand why it is important to follow these rules for the time being. It’s crazy… The teachers are the ones I worry about, having to adapt again to a new set of guidelines, and help their students figure them out as they go too.
I went out for a walk early this morning and while there were quite a few people walking out and about I only saw one person wearing a mask apart from myself. Cesar told me how busy they were on Friday night (the day restaurants were allowed to reopen for dine in), but after that they reverted to reservations and take-out only. Probably for the best, I’m sure people complained about how busy all of the restaurants were, especially those where people were really not adhering to social distancing guidelines. I suspect that after this weekend it’s only a matter of time before we see a new spike in cases. It’s so sad to me that after all these sacrifices that so many people have made we still won’t be seeing the end of the tunnel for months.
May 25th 2020
5,570,092 cases and 346,933 deaths worldwide.
1,704,061 cases and 99,754 deaths in the US, with over 17,000 new cases today alone.
Where do we go from here?
May 26th 2020
Another Black man, George Floyd, murdered in plain sight by police officers; the city of Minneapolis protests the injustice, the racism, the blatant murder of this man, and they are teargassed and fired upon? These continuous murders are exactly what we should be protesting… Where are you all, freedom-first-I-want-my-hair-cut now people?! Why are you not protesting the real issues in this country? My heart hurts so much for George Floyd’s family and friends, and for every single parent who says goodbye to their sons and daughters every morning, continuously worrying about whether they will be beaten and murdered while walking down the street, just for being Black.
May 27th 2020
It is way too hot today to try to communicate anything more than what I have written over the past couple of months. My toddler finally decided to nap at 6pm, the girls are too quiet which means they are doing something really naughty, and I can’t think of anything interesting to make for dinner. My balcony garden hasn't died yet though, so I’m taking that as a win.