"I Just Need My Friends To Be Okay"

....was the simple, conflicted plea of my 17 year old daughter when I got home from my usual Tuesday night meeting this week. "Mom, I just need my friends to be okay." She was referring to the fact that not just one but two girls her age and her acquaintance had suffered major medical attention for alcohol poisoning over the weekend.
The next day, during my work and her school day, my phone started pinging with updates about one of these girls, now in a medically-induced coma, as a result of her party intake efforts. I work in an active classroom and typically keep my phone in my pocket so as to know if a critical call comes in, but texts like this waver on the threshold of garnering responsiveness. On the one hand, I know my daughter will call if she's in a very difficult moment, but on the other hand, the reach of a connection that the texts provide (I'm sure she was in her Senior Privilege block at the time) is like a rare olive branch of mother-daughter relations. I couldn't respond at the time. But I immediately started thinking about how it's the very same with young children, reaching for us whenever they need emotional backup.

Emotional backup for the young child often sounds something like this, "He won't let me," "She's not letting me," "I don't want her to."
And in my 4's class this year, it's particularly similar to how some of my students empathize so greatly with their peers' needs that they too just need their friends to be okay.

UPDATE: 

This draft, above, was originally started 4 years ago, 9/28/16. I am fairly sure there was a connection going on in my classroom, a young student who was transferring all his anxiety to the more outward display of what was happening with peers experiencing dramatic separation anxiety. How odd that I revisit this moment almost exactly 4 years later, 10/26/20 with no daily physical classrooms to hold us.

My youngest daughter is now 17. We are entering the 7th month of a global pandemic in which her school life is based out of her bedroom. My meetings are online, for which she closes the only separating door to dull the sounds of those, her bedroom door. The anxiety I feel when that door stays closed for hours is the kind of anxiety I felt when I didn't feel 100% freedom to answer my phone during my work days at school 4 years ago. There are very few texts between us, because we are mostly home together, although she has the respite of her dad's house to change her scenery. She has uttered these same title words to me recently, for entirely different reasons, along with more regular intonations of "My friends are not okay. Nobody is okay."

I hear that. I feel this way too, in increasing intervals. The swings between high levels of productivity and lows of listlessness are overwhelming. 
Many of us are existing in this state of not having access to so many things we want. I just need my friends to be okay, too. 

Ether in the End Times: Dating, Episode One

 

SCENE: Online dating message chat.
TIME: The not-so-late hour of 8 pm-ish.
CHARACTERS: Myself, and A person identified by what I presume to be initials

He: hey can we exchange #s?

Me: As in phone numbers? Maybe. 

He sends his phone number. 

Now at this point we had made about 6 short exchanges in one conversation. He had asked my name, which shouldn't have been a mystery since it was in my profile, so it's clue #1 that maybe he isn't paying attention or hasn't even read it. I myself had just learned this man's name after asking. So everything going through my head is not in his favor. But his profile is interesting enough, he's lived all over the world and his work appears to be passionate and interesting. He caught my attention. 

Me: I don't love talking on the phone to people I don't know....what were you hoping would happen with that? 
Keep in mind, I'm doing just fine on the keys of chat. Nothing is compelling me to increase this level of connection. And I suspect he does not realize how much information a phone number provides.
So I plug his ten digits into a google search, the simplest version of investigation I don't even know if I need. 

Meanwhile, he acknowledges he just thought it would be easier to chat on the phone.

Within about 1 minute I have located online what I believe to be his full name and his last two cities of residence. And I reveal that by verifying what I found. 

He: wow how did you dig that up?

Me: You gave me your phone number.....Now you might see why a woman may not want to disclose such information rapidly.

He: wow. no shit. that is the last time I give out my number. 
And - This has taken a very strange turn. Thank you for enlightening me on how easy it was to look me up.

Okay. So now my female brain is only thinking, darn, the tone is set, I don't even know this person and I'm already the person who seems to have more sense, more presence, maybe more sense of self-preservation and maybe I just headed off a waste of any more time. This is a fundamentally female brain experience (I think), that the bigger picture is everywhere, all the time. So I ask.

Me: What usually happens when you give out your number?

He: A lady calls or texts. One didn't, but I didn't take it personally. 

And then I take stock of how there's probably no point to any of this. I already know I can make a chat fun, fast and witty and enjoy that for what it is worth. But I'm not really likely to meet a stranger 7 months into a pandemic, a stranger who tells me he usually meets up with people masked, gets to-go coffees and goes on walks. I mean, that sounds sort of reasonable, but risky enough that I'd have to think I really like someone before I do that. 

What I didn't know at the time was that as my comedy was unfolding, my teen was in her room slogging through AP Biology and dissolving under the weight of life. Looming college deadlines, a mom she needs at 11 pm but rarely accepts when much more easily available (and awake) all day long on the weekends, a crap week behind her. 

So we snuggled up and slept together. I woke up this morning wondering why in the world this seems remotely important, to be dabbling at all through the ether of online dating. Because that is an excellent metaphor for what it is like - a pleasant-smelling volatility, used as an anesthetic for the pandemic process of fatigue and isolation.

Going with Grief

As we are each in our own personal circles of protection with our self-defined levels of risk, I sit down to write a unique newsletter piece veering far off the classroom spectrum. Our new classrooms are the original classrooms - the hearths of love and security and creating foundations. I process heavily in words, so I know whatever I write will be lengthy. We are in an era of constant adaptation flooded with offerings. I hope I will aptly acknowledge the remote togetherness of our experience as this month turns.

We are collectively participating in an interlude of unprecedented, unfamiliar griefs. I am sure we can all create lists of shared losses, peppered with unique and distinct personalities that make our individual circumstances uniquely wonderful and simultaneously woeful. I am equally sure many moments of delight and ease have erupted from this societal state of things.  And thank goodness for that! After all, many young children may largely be in their treasured fantasy experience of ongoing access to their parents, home and attention. How wonderful to make space for operating on their time, with greater permission to ourselves, to the best of our ability! 

So I will also dare to say that the most dire grief among us is that we have no collective end date, no aspirational idea broadcast to us to aid our ability to cope and reason with this landscape of physical distancing and isolation, of meeting the children’s needs alongside our own without a clear roadmap to guide us. We are coping with a new set of societal rules that we didn’t get to make together, and we are coping with not knowing when they will change again. This is unlike challenges we’ve known before.

I have two daughters. The oldest is a full time college student adjusting to an online schedule and also working full time - in the essential work force of grocery. Need I mention how unsettled I feel about that? My youngest is a high school junior. For the first 14 days of our isolation, I witnessed my teen daughter existing more happily than I’ve seen in a long time. She had a self-driven interest to complete her school work for the first week, and a sense of unbridled ease to direct her days on her own rhythm of sleep and wakefulness for the second. She was also largely unconcerned with me, while I myself acknowledged a massive ease on anxiety with this new reality that I knew where she was and what she was doing (more or less) at all times - it may feel remote now in the parenting of young children, but that’s one of those autonomy issues we eventually gain as parents. I was also anchored by the small but functional daily story times on Facebook, in an effort to maintain normalcy and familiarity with students.

And then everything changed. My daughter’s cycle of acceptance of our new normal, like mine, is functioning at a messy, unpredictable, personal pace. And I fear that we have been felled by the one thing that can best help us see the future beyond  - knowing when that future will be. It is not our first rodeo with intense isolation. Five years ago we spent the entirety of a hot summer indoors in a therapeutic program that limited her activity to door-to-door access to a day hospital program and home. It was every arc of difficult emotion you can imagine. But we latched on to a timeline of 8 weeks that made each of those days feel less impossible to make it through. As the 8-week mark loomed, we learned that the timeline was an arbitrary and minimum point of reevaluation to resume life as we knew it. It was devastating. It was disastrous. We almost fell apart as all our motivation was redefined for us. Five years later, here we are now - similarly limited, severely isolated, and flailing toward aspirations that aren’t yet identified. So we make peace with each day as it unfolds.
I think it may be the hardest thing in the world to be greeted by grief. It doesn’t expire, it doesn’t end and it takes its time becoming recognizable and companionable. And it is now more than ever a non-negotiable skill to find balance with that presence.

I’m currently in the stage of adapting to our crisis conditions. The thrill of productivity that often surges through me hasn’t arrived for me yet, and I am okay with that. I know my brain needs time to process this gap between the familiar and the unfolding unfamiliar.  I’m also working at recreating my foundations. The most important thing is for everyone to feel loved, secure and accepted in their compounding and evolving truths.