On Running Our Collective Marathon

 

There is a lemon seed on the floor of my main level bathroom. This is despite not having cooked with lemon for over a week, and despite having cleaned the bathroom last Friday before a few friends came over, and despite telling myself I'll lean over and grab it after I wash my hands multiple times over the past four days.   Each time I head in there I think this is the time I will deal with it and then forget by the time I leave.  Once this week I washed my hair twice in a row and another time I washed it with conditioner because I cannot remember which has the cream top and which has the white top.  On Wednesday, Sephus found chicken in the oven I had started the cooking the night before. 

So how am I doing?  I am tired.  But not didn’t get enough sleep tired.  That’s a surprising gift of being tied to my home.  It is more like "I started running a marathon last March and I had no idea how many miles this would end up being" tired.  And also – I had no idea that after seven solid months of running that we would get to the hills.   No one has energy left for hills.  But no one can escape the marathon either. 

I have been thinking about this analogy a lot lately – even before watching Maggie do a hills workout out at cross country practice it occurred to me that we were running a race with no fans.  No one is on the sidelines yelling how much longer we have or handing us water or protein gels as we pass by.  Though I had already made the observation, the momentum of it hit when I watched a little guy collapse in tears each time he crested the hill at practice.  A coach would lift him up and give him a pep talk and he was able to make it through another round. 

I am a teacher so that’s my lens, and I could go through the ins and outs of how very hard it is to teach other people’s kids while my own are pulling at me with physical and emotional needs.  I never quite realized how necessary leaving my house and utilizing a new space/other caretakers was for me to turn off working mom guilt…  But that feels too unique and indulgent and more journal than blog worthy, so let me just say that I know everyone is struggling in their own way with how different their days continue to look and how former support systems have been shut down. 

We always tell Maggie the coolest thing about cross country is that everyone who finishes the race is a winner.  I am not sure what crossing the line will look like or when it will happen, but I try to remind myself how good it will feel – and that rest from the chronic turmoil our country and communities and homes feel like they are in will come.  I am trying to find ways to be my own cheerleader, to give myself the protein packs and water, and to shout encouragement alongside my fellow runners as we go.  Thanks for running with me – even if you had no choice 😊. 

On What It Feels Like to Work at the Crap Cafe: Schooling in the Age of Covid

 

I love a good joke, and I love a good analogy…  so I have been sharing this one with everyone I have chatted with lately.  I will clean it up a bit for the worldwide web.  It’s like the school district has turned into a restaurant called Crap Café.  All we are allowed to serve is crap.  So when our patrons come in we are left asking would you prefer our crap soup, crap sandwich, or crap soufflé?  There is really no need to protest about how much a meal of crap sucks.  We don’t want to serve these things.  If we have kids in the district we really don’t want them to eat these things…  It’s really hard when you are in the business of nourishing and nurturing and you suddenly realize that you might make people sick no matter what you give them – mentally and physically sick.  When you put it that way it's suddenly not so much of a joke now is it… 

So what do we do? 

If you can’t see the mental health toll kids are feeling being isolated from friends and normalcy – I mean the real lived out toll that is playing out in homes across the country then consider yourself blessed.  I won’t share those stories out of respect for those who mean the most to me. 

If no one you love has lost someone or been lost to the real horrors of Covid-19 then consider yourself blessed.  I won’t share those stories because no one deserves to capitalize on them to make a point. 

I guess we could close the restaurant down all together, but there are genuine health impacts of an economic shutdown, which schools are intricately connected to and if you are not aware of exactly how those impacts play out then feel blessed that you have lived untouched by true poverty.  Heck – you must not even visit those circles.  I won’t bother you with the horrific details of that either.  It would be hard to really imagine if you never loved someone who could not afford life-saving medical care.    

I have no answers.  Sorry if you came for that…  But I do have some certainties.  One is that no matter how you feel about if schools should open, your opinion is most likely built upon the needs and interests of someone you love dearly as is everyone else’s (minus a few opinionated loonies).  You are sure that your preference meets the more important need.  The problem is we disagree adamantly about what that might be right now.    If we can recognize that driving force in each other’s arguments maybe we could sit back and really find the menu item with the least amount of crap.  Instead of getting angry at anyone who disagrees with us, we have to be willing to be really flexible and creative about what school and learning might look like.  We have to be married to almost nothing except a deep concern for the well-being of children and those who care for them in and out of schools.  We have to be willing to accept and make changes as we go.  We must be gentle, assume positive intent, and be willing to listen.  Just remember, we aren’t voting for which movie to watch on family movie night, we are debating choices that inevitably pit different genuine needs against each other. 

And no matter what, remember that eventually the café will bring back our old favorites along with new dishes discovered due to the kind of creativity only born of necessity.  I can’t wait until both working at and eating at the Crap Café is a distant memory. 

On Things they Don't Tell You About Parenting (Inspired by Sandra Cisneros)

Parenting by Danielle Johnson (Inspired by the opening of Eleven by Sandra Cisneros)

What they never tell you about parenting is all the stuff that comes with it - tennis shoes and crocs and slides and Friday Folders and lunch boxes and deodorant and hoodies and socks and Shopkins.  You are pretty sure your kids drink hand soap and eat toilet paper as often as you run out of each. And even if you do laundry every day you are never caught up and the socks will never equally pair up even when you think you have washed every dirty thing in the house.  And when you empty the dishwasher there is always another load waiting to go in. You never feel caught up. You never feel like a real parent. Instead it’s like a game of house that is never as much fun as it was when you were seven and you never really feel good at it.  

Like some days you wonder if you are a failure at life because you can’t even get a four-year-old to stay in bed and you want to cry because it feels like your shift was supposed to end at nine so you could squeeze in one selfish and exhausted hour of Netflix but instead you are in the hallway begging your child to just fall asleep.  No one really tells you that parents can’t clock out.  

What they also never tell you is that you want your kids problems to not exist because problems means hurt and the last thing you want is for someone you love that much to hurt.  So when your kid tells you about someone being mean to them at school you brush it off or undermine it. This makes your child think you don’t care about their problems, but really it just shows that you consumed their assumed fragility when you first felt that baby soft infant skin or saw their scrunched up face cry for the first time.  You would do anything to keep them from ever feeling pain. But you know their pain is the only way they can have a full life - and you want that even more than you want their safety and innocence. Their best life becomes your driving force. That’s just how parenting is.  

 Excerpt From Eleven by Sandra Cisneros

What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don't. You open your eyes and everything's just like yesterday, only it's today. And you don't feel eleven at all. You feel like you're still ten. And you are --underneath the year that makes you eleven. 

Like some days you might say something stupid, and that's the part of you that's still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama's lap because you're scared, and that's the part of you that's five. And maybe one day when you're all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you're three, and that's okay. That's what I tell Mama when she's sad and needs to cry. Maybe she's feeling three. 

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. 

That's how being eleven years old is. You don't feel eleven. Not right away. It takes a few days, weeks even, sometimes even months before you say Eleven when they ask you. And you don't feel smart eleven, not until you're almost twelve. That's the way it is.