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My biggest complaint before this pandemic was that I didn’t have enough<br />
time to spend with my children. I was working full time and taking classes<br />
full-time, a combination that I wasn’t handling particularly flawlessly, even<br />
though I loved both my job and academic life. Even though I grew up in<br />
the home-and-unschooling world, where education was highly prized if<br />
not traditionally conducted, I knew that I didn’t want to dedicate my<br />
career to educating my kids, excellent as that job may be. As of March<br />
2020, both my daughters were enrolled in school: my eldest daughter at<br />
a Montessori charter, the youngest in a traditional public kindergarten<br />
until she could join her sister’s school in first grade.<br />
And then Spring Break. And Extended Spring Break. School closures for<br />
April. Part of May? Just kidding, school will be closed for the remainder of<br />
the year. Forget normalcy: I was furloughed. All of a sudden I was a stayat-home<br />
mom, a position I have sometimes jokingly, sometimes jealously,<br />
dreamed of.<br />
It’s only been four weeks as of this writing, and already it feels like a lifetime.<br />
We’ve grown tomato plants, established daily yoga routines, set up a<br />
mountain of school supplies on a nearby table so that glitter glue is always<br />
close at hand. I, along with half of America, nurtured a sourdough starter<br />
(delicious). We set up rock candy experiments and discussed the molecular<br />
makeup of sugar.<br />
Even though I lost my job, my spouse kept his, which meant I didn’t have<br />
to worry about where our next meal was going to come from (this is good,<br />
because kids at home eat all day, every day. Meals, and the snacks between<br />
meals bleed gently into each other into a daylong buffet of sliced apples<br />
and snack bars).<br />
We settled into our first week of routine, scrapped it, started a second,<br />
then decided it was no good, and then carried on. A real routine is on the<br />
horizon, or maybe it’s just a mirage. Who can say?<br />
There’s nothing like a pandemic for stripping the imagination.<br />
There are so many things I can barely conceive of, because every new<br />
adjustment is taking all of my coping mechanisms. We wear our handsewn<br />
Civility + You<br />
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