The past seven days have been so surreal that I keep repeating the sequence in my head, hoping that at some point, I’ll be able to metabolize it. Last Monday, I had a normal, busy, productive day at work. I came home. We made pasta. We put the kids in bed. We rented and watched Uncut Gems (good! intense!). By Friday afternoon, I was clearing out my desk for an indefinite period of remote work and filling a grocery cart with nonperishables. On Friday night, our school district closed through April 12th. We, like many of you, are social-distancing for at least a month (and I suspect it will be longer). For now, my husband is still required to report to work, so I am taking care of the kids while working(ish)-from-home in the morning, then swapping the primary-childcare role with him once he returns home in the afternoon.
Yesterday was Day 1. Some field notes:
9 AM: Exercise Time, right on schedule. Amelia does a Cosmic Kids yoga routine while I sit on a conference call. Mallory, who seems not to feel very well, lays on the couch and watches.
9:30 AM: Morning Activity. Today it’s drawing on the kitchen window with Expo glass markers while I respond to some email. I figure it will keep them busy for forty-five minutes; they lose interest after about twenty. Snack is served very early.
10:30 AM: Mallory is indeed not feeling 100%. She has a low fever and keeps pitifully requesting various comforts. “I med-cine? I ‘nuggle wif you? I head on shoulder?” She finally asks to take a nap a full two hours earlier than usual. Fortunately, Amelia has brought her A-game to independent playtime today, achieving the most ambitious crossover event in history when her Frozen figures forge a bridge to Ahtohallan that’s made of My Little Pony Candyland cards. I rock Mallory and put her in bed.
11:30 AM: Amelia is still busily and successfully entertaining herself, and I am very lucky in that my workplace is being wonderfully generous about this startling and dramatic transition. They’re allowing for a lull while we all figure ourselves out, so I don’t have any pressing work tasks on my plate at the moment. This frees me up to really sit with the anxiety and stress that, up until now, I had been redirecting into planning, preparing, and shopping. I eat a weird, early lunch (tater tots and baby carrots??? Yum…??), refresh Twitter every four minutes (do not recommend), and generally have a low-grade freak-out.
12 PM: I enjoy a brief boost of confidence in our modeling of health practices when Amelia offers me a dab of imaginary hand sanitizer and directs me to rub it in between my fingers, not just all around my hands. She needs lunch so it’s time to stop spiraling.
Afternoon and Evening: Ken arrives home just in time for me to get on another call with teammates, Mallory wakes up much revived from her three-hour nap, everyone spends some time outside, and then we proceed through the evening as usual (TV, dinner, bath, bed). It’s over. We did it. Onto Day 2.
How about you? How are you doing? What lessons have you learned in the early days of COVID-19 cancellations? How are you all staying busy? Email me at extracredit.newsletter@gmail.com or reply to the newsletter from your inbox. Air high-fives from a six-foot distance. We can all do this.
Ask A Teacher
I can guess why he hates his peers at school. Our neighbors are all very rich and are the kind of entitled jerks that pass their crap values on to their kids. I have met a few of their kids who go to the high school, and I appear to be right. These kids are all like their parents—they think they can do whatever they want and can walk all over people. We are by no means rich, but we are comfortable, and we have raised our son to have a work ethic. He behaves very differently than these other kids.
Well, it seems like a very long time ago that I advised (and slightly checked) this dad, but here it is! Plus, letters from the parent of a burgeoning student activist, a sister concerned about her sister’s social experiences, and a tutor with ADHD who wants to better help his students with the same condition.
Stay tuned for an emergency all-school-closures edition of the column!
Recommendations
I’ve subscribed to the Longreads Newsletter for years. Every Friday, you get an email with links to the editors’ choice of the five best pieces of journalism or nonfiction storytelling published that week. I rarely read all five, just picking and choosing what interests me from the newsletter’s blurbs. It’s a great way to feel in the loop with current events, learn about topics you wouldn’t come across on your own, and absorb beautiful personal essays.
Currently reading Dani Shapiro’s memoir Inheritance, in which she learns, after taking a DNA test on a lark, that her late father was not her biological parent. It’s a quick, compelling read, and evokes the shock and disorientation of her discovery very effectively.
If, in the next few weeks, you find yourself desperate to watch some grownup-oriented television, kids’ presence/the fact that it is not the regularly scheduled TV Time be damned, I’d like to alert you that there are endless back seasons of Survivor and The Amazing Race streaming on Amazon Prime. Both shows are:
Completely appropriate to watch in front of little kids, if not exactly interesting to them (mine kind of tune in and out of watching if I give them something else to do, like a puzzle or some blocks)
Mindless and predictable enough that you can fold laundry or pay bills or wander in and out of the room without missing much, yet engrossing, dramatic, and somehow soothing
Set in far-flung locales that will help you mentally escape the confines of your self-isolation bunker
I very much anticipate that there will be times to come in which I am done with parenting long before the day is actually over, and it is good to have some options in your back pocket for when you’re the one who needs to disrupt the routine for some extra entertainment. Some other shows in the same vein include The Great British Baking Show, The World’s Most Extraordinary Homes, Queer Eye, and Top Chef.
Get in touch and share your coping strategies:
Email: extracredit.newsletter@gmail.com…or just reply to the newsletter directly from your inbox!
Twitter: @carrie_AB_