This morning, one of the boys’ teachers called for his weekly check-in. the last of this ten-week term. (For those who are counting, and I AM, that’s twelve total weeks of lockdown, ten of them spent learning from home.) He thanked me for my help in delivering education, and I gave silent thanks that he hasn’t been around for The Dryer Incident or the myriad psychological tussles between me and The Kid. (He also told me that the last assignment turned in by TK, the one that had prescribed the invention of several silly sentences with changing verb tenses, had included ones involving TK showing his butt: I show my butt. I showed my butt. I will show my butt. I wait daily for child services to knock at the door.)
But we’ve learned, all right. A little about verb tenses and noun groups, some about time conversions and area and perimeter, a touch of writing descriptively and a smidge of Olympics trivia. But mostly, we’ve learned about each other. And ourselves. And this form of learning has occurred via the hard way.
Gone, for twelve weeks and counting, are the distractions and activities that filled our days before. Before, when there was soccer and swimming. Now, there are family walks and hours of stillness. Gone are babysitters and social events; now there are iPad supervision and cocktail-accompanied virtual escape rooms. Gone are restaurants; now there is curbside takeaway.
On Sunday, I finally connected with a friend who lives literally down the street when we both made it to the farmers market. My most public appearance besides the grocery store in months. I was complimented on my mask. It was wonderful, and kind of sad that it was so wonderful.
I’m having to hunt down the symmetry and themes and surprises that used to just show up when life was “normal,” when my brain wasn’t fuzzy and themes about which to write materialised as I moved about life, unimpeded by necessary restrictions. Before my arm had been jabbed twice with the fruits of scientific rigour, before the word pandemic was a part of daily life. As some sort of dawn looms ahead, with this week’s provision of legal picnics for five double-vaxxed adults (champagne outings are being frenetically planned) and the return to school on the calendar and the opening of hair salons oh please God yes sometime in the next month, hope springs, eternally but confusedly: what will the world look like? And don’t use the words new normal or I’ll barf.
For my part, I’ll be dipping my toes in slowly, both to stave off panic attacks and to, hopefully, preserve and maintain what good has come out of all this: the secret beaches we’ve found and frequented. The “surfing” the boys did on the shore of one last weekend, standing on their boogie boards in the inches-deep water while tiny waves pummelled them and they dissolved into giggles. The return we made to Manly: The Husband and Little Brother digging on the shoreline while TK and I braved the freezing (to us) water out past the breakers, riding the waves for another season, he on my back as we faced the open ocean. Both of us relearning how to reenter, together.
So yeah, we’ve learned verb tenses. But we’ve also learned what makes each other cry and laugh, what sets us off and calms us down, how to apologise and how to forgive. What we each have in common. How we learn. And today, we made a homemade volcano, so I figure I’m pretty much done with homeschool anyway.
The other day at TK’s speech appointment, as I sat in the waiting room, I heard his therapist taking him through scenarios and prompting him to name the appropriate feeling associated with each: happy, nervous, etc. She provided the example of “walking into a room of friends on your birthday and they all yell out.” The “correct” response was surprised. TK answered, “Scared.”
This surprise of an unplanned pandemic has been scary. It’s like walking into a room full of people yelling while also holding bags of flaming dog shit. Which is to say, not a party. But also, it’s been educational, and not always in the ways expected. It’s been comforting, definitely not in the ways expected. It’s been strangely fortifying and revealing and destructive and reparative.
Walking into a room and being yelled at, as any introvert (like me or TK) will tell you, is terrifying. But eventually the noise subsides, the fire (from the shit or the cake) flames out, and you’re left with what remains. Which can end up being everything that mattered in the first place.