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 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.
