Pandemic, Day 1071

We are knee-deep in it now: the noise, the fights, the altered sleep schedules, the lack of physical activity, the reliance on screens and internet for work and school and play, the movie nights, the endless snacks, the moods, the slammed doors, the laughs and the tantrums and all of it, really, that makes the days and weeks and, now, months blend into each other like one long weekend where everybody both has too much time and also no time at all. It is exhausting.

It is the end of April. Schools have officially been closed for the rest of the spring, so distance-learning/learning-at-home/homeschool is now a reality for the next 12 weeks or so. The three students in the house have all weighed in on this and the general attitude is not surprising: this sucks.

Andres does not like school-from-home. He has too much work, has to spend too much time in front of the computer, and he misses his friends. The pandemic has turned him and his friends into office workers: they roll out of bed, turn the computer on, check their assignments, and go to work. It's depressing to me, and, to my occasionally prying eyes, the work seems meaningless to him as well. Why should he care about the differences between Athenian and Spartan societies? We're living through a pandemic. He just wants to go out and play soccer.

Celia, too, is showing signs of struggle. She generally likes school and is trying her best to complete all of her assignments. (She recently did a report on Colorado with one of her friends, creating a final presentation in Google Slides, which was kind of cool.) But, like her brother, the interest isn't really there. Sure, she's doing school. Is she learning? I doubt it. Do I blame her? Not at all.

(One upside to the pandemic, I guess, is that Celia has really blossomed into a reader. She's always liked to read, but the past few weeks she has taken off, and spends hours in bed reading--often until 11 or 12 at night. Harry Potter is her current favorite, but she also takes breaks from that and reads shorter fiction as well. I hope she maintains this new habit--the reading, not the late bedtime--for the rest of her life.)

Then there's Lucia. Being out of school has hit her the hardest. She is generally uninterested in doing her classwork, and I've become tired of fighting with her about completing it. You win, kid. Like her siblings, she misses her friends terribly, and she is handling that separation worse than the other two. She vents her frustrations on me and Natalia daily, leaving us (and her, probably) mentally and physically exhausted.

That said, last Thursday morning she sat next to me for two and a half hours and wrote and illustrated a book titled "Objects in Nature," a compendium of quick facts on pine trees, bushes, and grass. (She even shared it on a work Zoom call.) And this week, she has been working on another book in her nature series titled "Types of Birds." The pictures are detailed and precise. She writes sentence after sentence after sentence without any prompting. It's more writing than I have seen her do at any point in first grade. I think everyone is processing anxiety, grief, and fear in different ways.

I, meanwhile, am starting to lose it. I am tipping the scales now at 10 pounds above my usual weight which, while not putting me in The Biggest Loser territory, is dispiriting. I am not exercising much. I have gone heavy on the snacks and am drinking a lot of (good) beer. And perhaps worst of all, I haven't found the drive or motivation to change things. I now have all the time in the world to get out of these bad habits--I can get up early! I can workout after the kids go to bed! I have nothing to do on weekends now! But I just can't, or I just won't. I'm not sure which it is.

Which leads me to my final point, which is that this endless sprawl of time uninterrupted by actual activities has tricked me into thinking that I have tons of time to do things, and that if I don't do those things--which include: improve my Photoshop skills, pursue a passion photo project, learn how to shoot video, study a foreign language, write more, raise my own crops in our garden, and, yes, get in shape--then I will have failed at quarantine. Whereas the truth is that between trying to work, helping my kids with their school projects, dealing with my youngest child's emotional needs, making dinner, cleaning up, spending some non-yelly quality time with each of my children, and generally puttering around the house in between all of the above, I feel like I have even less time, energy, and drive than ever before. What a kick in the ass that is. No, I have not re-learned French yet; I haven't picked up my camera in weeks.

So I think we are all struggling, individually, to come to terms with what this extended isolation is doing to us and our lives. (Silver lining: we finally have toilet paper.) Nobody is thriving. Everybody is just maintaining as best they can. Hopefully, we'll all still like each other when it's all over.