Last week I was singing “Blackbird” to Annie before putting her down for an afternoon nap. But midway through the song, my voice snagged at the second “Blackbird singing in the dead of night” and tears started welling in my eyes. For a long minute, I just stood there swaying with Annie’s heavy head on my shoulder. I couldn’t keep singing.
I couldn’t keep singing because for the thousandth time that week, I felt like everything was upside down.
And everything was upside down. Really. Still is.
Schools are now closed for the remainder of the academic year to help stem the spread of Corona Virus. I have been thrust back into being a stay-at-home mom of three/homeschool teacher. A long-anticipated, much-needed weekend trip to the beach with the girls and an old friend had to be canceled. Brad is working from home full time for the media industry, which is bleeding revenue- fueling worries about his job security. We are sequestered in our homes instructed not to get within six (or was it 10 or 20 or 100?) feet of other people. The toilet paper is running out. Ditto for bread and eggs. Businesses are closing. Hospitals are preparing for a deluge of patients and they are short supplied. Thousands are getting sick. Many of them dying.
It’s surreal.
The sensible part of my brain has been attempting to establish order in all this weirdness.
This is an endless job amidst all the existential dread. My fear, anger, anxiety and grief have taken the form of millions of end-of-season crickets hurdling about frantically as the orderly left side of my brain tries to shove them back into their appropriately labeled boxes to address at some as-yet-known point in the future.
But they keep escaping.
Several were bouncing amok as I sang to Annie.
“This isn’t right!” “This is all wrong!” “This is really scary!” “When will it be over?!” “We miss work!!!” “What about Mom and Dad? I hope they stay healthy.” “We don’t think we can ever sleep again!”
All these crickets chirping at me.
So I couldn’t keep singing. I couldn’t. I felt as if my life had been stolen from me. That my kids’ life had been stolen from them. That we’d been robbed of our routines. Of our friendships. Of our feelings of security. Of our ability to plan for the future.
But, the sensible part of my brain kept attempting to soothe me:
“You have a home. You have food. Your family is healthy. There are no gunshots or bombs. No fires. No floods. No tornadoes. None of the noisy hallmarks of calamity, right?”
Instead, it’s just quiet. And the daffodils are blooming. The birds are singing. The grass is greening. Spring is unfolding.
“Don’t panic,” the sensible part of my brain croons into my ears. “You should not be freaking out. You are in a place of tremendous privilege and security.”
The crickets are unrelenting escape artists.
For the past couple weeks I’ve had to re-collect myself at least every hour for my kids. I swallowed garbled cries and wiped away lone tear drops willing the rest to stay behind the wall. Willing the wall to hold.
I’ve allowed myself short meltdowns at the kitchen sink. As I look out the window to the backyard- to the blooming tree and my “Love” sign made from bottle caps. Because my back is to them and the water is on and they’re not paying attention anyway. But I have to hold it together at dinner when they talk about how much they miss their teachers. And at bedtime when Jovie realizes she won’t be doing the “Life Cycles” musical all second graders do. And what about her birthday party in April? What about the Herndon Festival? Lily’s soccer season is more than likely a non-starter. All the unknowns.
I have been grateful to the people who’ve reminded me that it’s OK to feel unsettled. That I don’t have to pretend like everything is OK.
Still, I have to hold it together for the people relying on me.
The other day, I needed to get Annie down for her nap. So I took a deep breath after my long pause and kept singing.
“Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these sunken eyes and learn to see…”
Because this is what we are charged with doing right now. We have to keep singing to our children. Singing to ourselves.
What an extraordinary time.
Even as the crickets fret over empty shelves at the grocery store and not enough masks for healthcare workers and the spiraling economy and, and, and … there’s also this realization- this understanding- that there will more than likely never be another moment like this in my lifetime. There will never be another time when the world demands we stop all our doing and stay home.
Stop commuting. Stop soccer. Stop Girl Scouts. Stop piano lessons. Stop playdates. Stop going to the movies or wandering around malls. Stop dinners at restaurants. Stop going to school and playgrounds and trampoline parks. Stop visiting libraries, zoos and museums. Stop going to church.
Stop.
Stop all of it.
In the pauses between the moments of anxiety and the moments of dread, I find myself immersed in the slowness of things.
Watching the tulip magnolia in my backyard transform from its barren winter silhouette to this eruption of pink petals. In just a week those are already browning and falling and making way for lime green leaves. Every stage has felt like a miracle and an ache.
You know, the arrival of something so beautiful and the awareness that it would be over in a matter of days. Questioning whether I enjoyed it enough? Did I really appreciate all those blossoms? How they were both grand and delicate? A soft milky white and also a screaming fuchsia. It makes me weep again- the thought that this year’s blooms would all be over before I really got to know them.
That’s how I feel about school- my job- how it just ended unceremoniously on a Thursday afternoon. Just me in the hallway after seventh period telling the kids to have a good afternoon. Telling them to wash their hands and make good choices. And then maybe some chit-chat and speculation about potential school closures with some of the teachers. And then pick up Annie and then home.
No meaningful goodbye to any of my students. No final advice. No light-hearted teasing or encouraging words.
I just want to stand outside of my fourth period science class one more time and greet the students as they arrive from lunch. “Welcome to science!” I’d say to them. “Welcome to science! Enjoy the sciencey science.” And they’d roll their eyes at me, like always, but also smile, because that was the routine. And the one kid would come up to me and say “High five?!” and I’d say “No high five!” because three times (three times!) over the course of the year, he’d held up his hand to give me a high five and then denied me the high five at the last second. Our not high giving is one of my favorite rituals. Only now I have to say “was” instead of “is” because it is no more. He’s in eighth grade, so will move on to high school next year and that’s that.
God I love them. All those students. And the real sense of camaraderie and teamwork I had with many of my co-teachers. Like we were in this strange, months-long quest together that we would never be able to convey to other people who hadn’t been there. Kind of like in “Lord of the Rings” but with with fewer wizards and talking trees and more Tik Tok dancing and Takis. As we were nearing the end of the year, I was looking forward to that moment of decompressing. Of reflecting on how joyful and infuriating the whole exercise had been. But it’s over.
The petals had barely been open before they fell off the tree.
And I wonder if I’ll have that same feeling when this is all over.
What “this” is I’m not even sure. I haven’t yet found the shape or the boundaries for this life we have now. It feels so amorphous. I suppose our house is a boundary. The yard. The neighborhood. The sidewalks. The trail in the woods.
Will the end point be when the kids return to school? When will that even be? In August as originally scheduled? Earlier? Later? Will the end point be when we can gather in groups larger than 10? When we can hug our parents without fear? When we stop making jokes about hoarding toilet paper? Stop worrying about every cough or sneeze?
It all feels very nebulous. Very hazy.
But when it finally ends, I wonder if I will miss it.
Miss the forced time out.
The other day, Annie started pushing her plastic shopping cart down the sidewalk. Normally, I’d have her turn around before getting too far from home, but that day I decided we could keep going. Not like we had anything else to do. Any other places to go. We ended up walking around the block. It took a half hour or more- long enough for Lily to want to call the police because she thought Annie and I had been stolen. We weren’t abducted. Just inching along with the shopping cart. Sometimes Annie would stop to wave at a dog. Sometimes she would stop to study a piece of grass. A couple times she laid down in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at the clouds. She pushed the cart sometimes. And I pushed the cart sometimes. Sometimes I carried both her and the cart. That didn’t last so long. She’s heavy these days. Eventually, we made it home. I have to say, it had been a really, really long time since I’ve felt so unhurried. So in the moment. It was lovely.
So there’s that, too, right? This little gift we’ve been given. Which is really an enormous gift. The time just to be here. In this place. The time for long walks and epic blanket forts and Doodle with Mo Willems and listening to Elton John all morning because you found out it was his birthday. It’s time to follow thoughts and clear out the weeds and watch the little petals rain down from the cherry tree in the front yard.
With our extra time and the need for a little levity, I got the girls to paint some rocks with me to kick off a project I’d envisioned years ago: Turning an uprooted tree on the trail not far from our house into a gallery of rock art. The project was a non-starter before because I didn’t think I’d ever be able to paint enough rocks to make it look like anything more than a random tree with some weird colored things on it. But it turns out, all I needed to wait for was a bunch of stir-crazy quarantiners to help me out. We installed the rock wall last week and the other day I was pleased to see a bunch of contributions.
It’s also a time for bickering kids. For cabin fever. For fussy toddlers. For fussy moms and dads for that matter. For grieving, too.
Annie hasn’t been herself. I think she’s confused about her routine changing so abruptly. How all of the sudden she’s not seeing the people she’d been seeing every day of the week since August. She’s little, but her friendships at daycare were real. Her face lights up when I show her pictures and videos of her friends. When I mention their names. It breaks my heart.
Just like it broke my heart when Lily’s teacher stopped by the other day to drop off some books and her recorder (to be clear, that’s not what broke my heart). Lily ran out into the yard at a full sprint, a huge smile on her face, her arms outstretched and both her teacher and I had to stop her from giving the hug I knew she was about to share. I was sad that she would no longer be in the classroom with this amazing teacher who– given 10 minutes to retrieve necessities from her class– made a point to grab the next books in a series she knew Lily was reading and drop them off at our front door.
When I told the girls that the governor had closed schools for the academic year, I burst into tears. I just couldn’t hold it back that time. It was too much. I told the girls I was really sad for them and really sad that I couldn’t say goodbye to my students- many of who were eighth graders I might not ever see again. The girls were immediately consoling. And then they started crying. And there we were, all three crying over what we had lost.
We all recovered. Later that day, Jovie wrote this note to her teacher:
Miss Johnson wrote back. Her response made me cry (not that that’s hard to do these days, obviously).
“There is a Walt Whitman quote that I’ve been turning to a lot lately that I think you might like. It says, ‘Happiness, not in another place, but this place. Not for another hour, but this hour.’ It reminds me that even when life feels sad, and I can’t make the sad things go away, happy things are still all around to enjoy.”
My kids have the best teachers. And apparently they have some things to teach me as well.
So here I am. Here we all are, I think. Left in our little bubbles to process all these really big feelings.
Leaving behind my glamorous, fast-paced career as a middle school instructional assistant to return to full-time, in-the-weeds motherhood has been rocky. But luckily, I have years of experience under my belt and there’s plenty of muscle memory.
Enough that I know that when life gets especially challenging, it’s mothers (and I teachers, I guess) who know that no matter what, you have to keep singing. Through the tears, through the fear, through the anger, through the frustration, through the unknown. Through all the crickets.
Keep singing.
“Blackbird fly, blackbird fly. Into the light of a dark black night.”