distance learning – Page 2 – Painting with Words

Posted on April 21, 2020April 22, 2020 by Amy Suardi

The Water Inside Me

I climb into bed at noon. I want to feel relief that I am here, not on the street trying to explain myself to a police officer, my kids’ faces still damp and red. The muscles inside my face feel as if they were pulled with a draw-string. Crying might help, but tears don’t come.

I can hear Sofia, 18, downstairs opening and closing cabinets and banging pots — it’s her turn to make lunch. And even farther down, the sounds of Luke and Diana playing in the basement.

No matter how long I lie here, the ache in my face doesn’t ease. I close my eyes again and see visions of relieving the tension by slashing the muscles with a knife.

Last fall we stayed in a cabin in the West Virginia woods, and I found a book on the shelves called The Secret Life of Water. My family thought I was cuckoo as I took notes on it like it was a treasure map.

Photographs of stunning snowflake water crystals were interspersed with pictures of lopsided runny crystals. The difference, the Japanese author Emoto Masaru said, was the words that the water was exposed to right before it was frozen. Words like “thank you,” “I love you,” and “beautiful” resulted in glorious designs. “You’re no good” and “I hate you” made incomplete, malformed crystals.

From my bedroom, I hear Luke and Diana come upstairs and say to Mark who must be in his bunk bed, “Why hasn’t Mama come back yet?”

This day was not supposed to go this way. It’s Friday, the end of the fourth week of distance learning, and I was going to help the boys tackle the assignments that had haunted them all week. The essays, math workbook pages, and Powerpoint presentations that had been tangled up with dread, avoidance, and paralysis would get swept up and hauled in, just in time for the sweet rest of the weekend.

I sat on the living room couch with Mark, 12, a little before our normal 9 a.m. start time. “Writing in a notebook is like normal spinach,” Mark said, as I insisted he write his climate change definitions on paper. “Then it shrinks when you put it in type.”

Luke has assured me that he doesn’t need help with his 4th grade essay comparing two short stories, but I look over at him on his dad’s laptop. He looks gluey and I see that he is scrolling through emojis in Microsoft Teams chats. “C’mon, Luke, let’s get started,” I say, digging in against the familiar resistance. “You have to get this done done by lunch.”

I go back to Mark, this studious 6th grader who used to tell me that he could take care of his homework on his own. He has fallen backward onto the couch like a pencil, groaning, “I don’t know what to do!”

Some of the miniature boxwoods in our garden along the flowerbeds look almost dead, the kids and I notice. Unlike most plants in spring, they are missing the light green flush of new growth, their leaves dull and tinged with orange. We need to say encouraging words to them, I tell the kids, but I feel kind-of ridiculous as I rustle the little shrubs and say, “C’mon guys, you can do it.”

Diana at 6 years old is a natural. In a high-pitched voice she tells them, “You need to grow buds so you can be bigger and stronger like your daddy.” Then I see her go to the old boxwood by the fence, notice its branches lit with new green and say in a sweet voice, “You need to encourage your babies to grow buds.”

It’s almost 10 a.m. now, Mark is still frozen and Luke is fiddling with text sizes and fonts, but it’s time to get Diana logged in and ready for the check-in with her teachers and two other kids from the Blue Table. She is wearing an astronaut costume for spirit day and is excited to be paid attention to and get to hold an iPad. “Run up and get a book you’ve read this week — but not Captain Underpants!” I tell her. Faces appear in the panes around the screen, and I set her up in a sunny window seat in the foyer, and soon first-graders in meandering voices begin to tell about their week.

I’m supposed to stay close by, but the dishwasher is not that far, so I put in the rest of the breakfast dishes and then check email. My husband has forwarded me an alert from the mayor: distance learning is now going through May 29 when school will end for the year. So many casualties in this pronouncement, including 2,400 cases and 86 deaths in the District, but all I can think of is myself: how can I do this for another 6 weeks?

Mark is still lying upside down over the arm of the couch. I say, “Why not tell the story through the life of a tree, or a rock?” My suggestion is met with snarled lips, so I move over to Luke, who has apparently already learned the art of switching browser tabs when someone comes near. “If the computer is too distracting,” feeling like a witch as I speak because I know that even CEOs and rocket scientists get waylaid, “you can write it by hand.”

By 10:25 I haven’t seen Sofia and Virginia yet, so I go upstairs, creak open the attic door and say, “Hey guys, you up?” Establishing a regular routine for at-home learning was important, all the experts were saying, so at our Sunday night family meeting before distance learning began, I had proposed a 9 a.m. start time. The teens balked, arguing that it was better to not have everyone together at the same time anyway, and negotiated a later bedtime and a 10:30 a.m. start. Let’s see how it goes, I had said.

The window seat conference has deteriorated quickly. I come in after Mark, draped like a rag over the computer chair, has already said loud enough for the teacher to hear, “Your friends are so boring,” and Luke has retorted, “What? She doesn’t have any friends.” And then Mark, this boy who has never gotten in trouble at school, sticks his butt into the circle of faces in the iPad and makes a loud long farting sound.

The subtle energy that exists in all things vibrates in unique frequencies or waves. The synchronization of energy waves — love, fear, acceptance, loneliness — can be sent and received by others. Similar patterns can be found all throughout the universe — from the spiral in a snail to the spiral of the galaxy. The human body is a miniaturization of what is going on in the grandeur of nature. All things are in flux. Nothing is permanent.
My notes from The Secret Life of Water

The kids run in and out of the house to get masks and coats, and then bikes. Luke comes out crying saying that Mark has thrown the card that opens his safe behind the bed and now he can’t get the $6 he was supposed to give him for his birthday.

“I guess Mark won’t get his present today,” I say.

We usually get out of the house by 11:30 a.m. — by then everyone is woozy and pecked over by their siblings and I’m breathing shallowly. We had to leave today with so little accomplished that the boys didn’t even want to ride bikes.

“This is so boring,” says Mark as we get going up the middle of the street toward CVS to get groceries.

“I don’t want to go either but there’s nothing else to do!” says Luke.

Diana is motoring up the hill in her starter bike and the boys loop around her, cutting her off, knocking her off balance, and she screeches over and over, “Stop!”

I can feel the cement that had been hardening inside me all morning become a solid block. And if I am honest, I know it’s not just about the schooling and the fighting.

This morning, before the kids woke up, I had opened my laptop and saw a long-time hope about my writing be shattered. Words were uttered so quietly I didn’t hear them: Nobody cares . . . You’re all alone. For a beat I felt like I had been swallowed by a gulf. Then I swallowed the gulf, clicked the computer closed, and sealed it all up.

Mark, who had to be pulled away from the desk and forced outside, had a warped look on his face. “You don’t have to come,” I tell him. “You can stay home and play.”

“You mean we can stay home and play video games?” asked Luke.

“And eat a bunch of candy and go crazy?” said Mark.

“Do whatever you want,” I say.

“And we won’t get points?”

“Whatever. Do whatever you want.”

Collapsing, like over-exerting, is a form of violence, says the Sunrise Yoga teacher that I see every morning at 7:00 a.m. in the TV in my basement.

I want to kill them with this freedom. They keep riding up the hill with me.

In nature, water is always in motion. Even when it seems to stand still, it is slowly sinking into the earth or evaporating into mist, rotting leaves, or sheltering water creatures we can’t even see.

When the kids ride past the entrance to CVS, I don’t call them back, thinking they’ll realize and turn around. Through the automatic glass door that has just closed behind me, I can see them chatting with Duane, the homeless guy in the parking lot.

Olive oil, milk, eggs, walnuts, granola: the list in my hand says. I don’t even smile at the employees I know as I walk by, figuring they’ll think it’s because of my mask or that everyone is grumpy these days.

Passing through the 50%-off Easter section, I grab a box of egg dye for next year, and glance back, not wanting to admit that I’m hoping that they will come in any minute and call, “Mama?”

I feel like a criminal, my whole torso is now churning. In the magazine section, I don’t find any maze books for Luke and Diana but stop to examine a Penny Press “On the Go” Word Seek.

More furious now with myself than with them, I take 2 of the word search booklets and head to the grocery aisles. An employee with a blue surgical mask sets a box down on the ground and begins unpacking.

I see a flash of the three of them with their bikes at Whole Foods, Diana sobbing and frantic.

“Remember when the waves were really big in Italy?” Diana said recently on an evening walk. “That was so, so, so fun!”

I was afraid of those waves — I’d been clobbered too many times by the sea. But she, who had just turned 5 and couldn’t even swim and only had a floaty that we called her ciambella, felt joy. “It was like you were riding a wave to the sun!”

Don’t struggle when you’re drowning. Don’t try to fight the waves. Don’t swim against the tide, you’ll wear yourself out. Just let go and float.

They only had to cross one intersection with a stoplight — they’ll be fine. I find generic olive oil and get two because the second one is half off. Mark is 12. He can handle this for everyone. Semi-trucks on the avenue rumble like a herd of elephants charging a watering hole. I grab the dried mango slices I know they like, and then head to the self-checkout.

Like a vase full of cracks, I gingerly scan all the items myself, something the kids would have loved to have done — jockeying to push buttons, scan bar codes, and insert the credit card. On the walk home alone, the cold sun feels like an x-ray.

I get to the house, the two heavy plastic bags now cutting into both hands. I don’t see any bikes or coats tossed in front, and I know I’m in trouble.

Sofia is taking a baking sheet out of the oven when I walk in. “What happened?” she says. “You should bring your phone with you when you go out. They’re here but they didn’t know where you went, and I was trying to get a hold of you. I thought you would be worried.”

Living in this world is not so much like walking in air but like swimming in water. The waves I create affect everyone around me, and the waves of others affect me.

Holding back feelings like fear, sadness, and disappointment prevent me from healing. Being happy all the time would be like a wave that never falls.

If you have been offended, forgive the offender. And if you feel oppressed for your own offenses against others, forgive yourself.
Emoto Masaru

“Lunch!” Sofia calls after about an hour, and then gathers her laptop and cord and notebooks and heads down to the basement for a class, leaving me and Mark and Luke and Diana alone with each other and our plates of lentils, kale, homemade hummus, and rings of watermelon radishes.

“Where were you?” says Luke. “We went into CVS but didn’t see you.”

“I was holding a bunch of stuff and I was too angry to go running after you,” I say. So many pent up emotions inside me. Enough to power Las Vegas.

What would it be like if, instead of starting my day with, “This is not working,” I started it with, “You’re beautiful”?

Diana looks into my eyes, her eyes wet with empathy, comes over to me and kisses my face.

I begin to open a spillway. Let the lights go dim in Vegas. There’s probably no one there anyway.

Posted on April 20, 2020April 20, 2020 by Amy Suardi

Balloons

The mayor announced Friday
schools will not reopen this year
and distance learning will end
three weeks early

I feel like a balloon in a bunch
when the man loosens his grip
and one by one
we just fly away

Posted on April 17, 2020April 19, 2020 by Amy Suardi

A 1st Grader’s Journal

In the spring I like to…
do a easter egg hunt,
die eggs,
make a easter egg drawing,
plant seeds,
ride my bike on a walk on the streets,
have popsicles outside if it is sunny and warm,
eating lamb on easter,
reading,
writing cards to people in my family,
watching my toolips open,
encourage my baby boxwoods.

Posted on April 6, 2020April 7, 2020 by Amy Suardi

Breaking Me Open

On a lined page, Diana, 6, has written E is for Eating, and “Did you know that if you don’t eat anything for a long time, you can die!”

I sit down next to her at the kitchen table during our second week of distance learning. Her brother Luke, 9, is on his dad’s laptop on the couch across the room, and Mark, 11, is on the living room desktop trying to find his live English class on Microsoft Teams.

I open my computer, hoping to be able to look over emails, and say to Diana, “You’re almost done with E. All you have to do is write two more facts,” trying to see if a hands-off approach will work today.

Some days that tight feeling in my chest arises after repeated technical glitches and sibling conflicts, but today I seem to have woken up with it. I feel like an enforcer, not a teacher — a fire tamer, a battle breaker or as Luke recently called me, a warden.

Diana writes a sentence so faint it’s illegible. She scribbles. Then erases a spot over and over so hard she seems to want the paper to rip.

“Mama!,” calls Mark. “I don’t know how to do this!” The middle school is introducing another platform — Canvas Instructure — and I gird myself for another login struggle, another digital terrain to get lost in, another place for my son to worry that he is falling behind.

When I sigh and groan today, Diana is not going to lean her head on me and give me a side hug, looking at me with eyes that say, I’m sorry you’re upset. She is not going to draw me a rainbow, like the ones she used to bring home from school every day, and write “I love you!” on it as she always did.

“So what’s another thing you know to be true about eating?” I return to asking her, then check on Luke with his zombie eyes who says he is doing research for a persuasive essay on whether video games are good for kids or not.

“When you eat, you have to go to the bathroom,” she says in a voice that is not hers, staring at Luke across the room.

“Diana, don’t do your homework if you don’t want to take it seriously,” I say.

Earlier this morning a man had walked up to our door with a big box. It was the remaining two basketballs: he could have been carrying a trophy of gold. Little pleasures, like Rubik’s cubes, picnics, and books of mazes from grandma, have made bright splashes on our days.

“Let’s go play with the new basketballs,” I say. It’s 11am, and Mark is swerving around like a rubber band being stretched, Luke is as glazed as a doughnut, and Diana is sulking in bed reading Captain Underpants.

On the way to the park, sunshine pours over us like a rinsing cleanse. But it doesn’t touch the dread inside. I cannot escape the shadow of the tidal wave that is about to exact its fury on us, pulling everything up into it as it prepares to pound it all down.

There is a single boy at the court with his nanny, hitting a ball with a racket. “Give him some space!” I keep having to tell the kids, as if he were an alien.

After ten minutes, Diana comes crying to me saying that Mark scratched her. Mark yells back that she did something to him.

“Do you want to go see the dogs in the dog park?” I ask, pulling her toward me but feeling as warm as a statue. She says no, even though she loves animals, but I slow down anyway at the fence to see the only dog left. His smiling face, the joy he gets from a simple game of fetch, blurs my eyes with tears. I push them back so Diana won’t notice.

“I wish I could play what that boy is playing,” she says, looking back to the only other people here.

“We can bring a tennis racket next time,” I say, as if what she needed were simply a matter of equipment.

Manage your anxiety, they say. Create a calm setting. Don’t talk about disturbing news stories. Shield them from the worst — assure them that parents have a plan. I feel like I am a steel locker walking around pretending to be a woman.

It’s almost noon, so I say to the boys on the basketball court, “C’mon, guys. Let’s go.” We have become buds. The four of us doing more than we ever have together. Depending on me and each other for everything. “Diana and I have to make lunch,” I say.

“You mean, you’re going to make lunch?” Luke says, still mad about last week, when I didn’t ask Diana to spread cream cheese on bagels because we had run out of time and she was busy setting the table.

“Did you make lunches when you were 6?” I snap. Diana makes some kind of face at him, and he tosses his basketball at her, and she falls to the ground, holding her leg and crying, as if it’s been broken. But it’s not her leg that’s broken.

I tell the boys to go ahead. After a while Diana begins to move her feet inch by inch. Eventually she starts to walk at a more normal pace, and I keep a slow rhythm, trying to metabolize the heaviness inside, and focusing on little things along the way — the purple buds sprouting along the chalky plum tree branches, the abandoned ride-on toys in a yard, the glint of mica bits in sand like tiny diamonds in the sun.

Diana keeps up but stays about 6 feet behind. “You don’t love me because you don’t laugh when I say something funny in my homework,” she says.

“I didn’t laugh because your homework was not the right place to be silly,” I try to explain.

“Well, people do have to go to the bathroom when they eat, and pee when they drink. You don’t know anything. You just look at trees and do that little smile.” On a stoop in a row of townhouses, a father stands over his toddler but doesn’t make eye contact with us when we pass.

“You don’t even do anything when Luke is mean to me. Why did you even make him go alive? He’s always so mean,” Diana says.

“I try to be fair, but it’s just not always clear what has happened,” I say.

“Don’t play with my ball,” she says. I silently obey, propping it under my upper arm and then keep walking.

“You don’t love me, so I don’t love you. I don’t even like you.” In the distance, a lawnmower rumbles and a girl kicks a ball against a garage door in an alley.

“You’re not even good at basketball. You’re not good at soccer either,” she says. “I didn’t do my homework today. I didn’t do my homework for three days. Ha, ha. I’m not even going to make lunch when we get home,” she says, as we begin to pass by the houses where we know people’s names and could knock on their door if we needed a safe place.

“And I’m not going to set the table.” Our house, big and soft, is only a half block away. It looks like a fortress and yet so vulnerable.

I swing open the door — the air is steamy and filled with smells of basil and toasted almonds and salty starch. Virginia, 16, is at the stove, Kanye West is blasting, and she says, “Is it OK if I switch with someone and make lunch today?” She looks like an angel with her flowing blond hair and wooden spoon in her hand like a wand. “Because I found a recipe that uses all the stuff that we have.”

Diana carefully takes off her coat and hangs it on her hook, takes off her shoes and places them by the radiator, and then climbs the stairs to her room.

I don’t know where to go, so I sit in a corner of the empty living room. The last song ends and “No Mistakes” comes on. Bright major chords pump the house with yellow notes. “Make no mistake, girl, I still love you,” a choir sings over and over, and I know it’s the complex gospel of a man telling his wife and the mother of their children that nothing has changed even though so much has. Tears escape and stream down my face. I see our family together in the car last summer — my husband, all of our children, on a road trip — and Virginia is playing this song. We were so happy — the memory bathed in an amber light — and now, everything is so mixed up and messed up.

“Diana, time to set the table!” Virginia calls up the stairs. “Now — I’m serving!” I wipe my face dry and keep writing in my notebook. I can see Diana through the french doors bringing glasses to the table, remembering to give people water instead of milk to save on grocery trips.

“Yay, I’m so excited to eat!” she says while folding the flowered cloth napkins that Sofia and Virginia sewed for me.

When she is done, she comes toward me, and climbs gingerly on the couch without saying anything, and then lifts her eyes to mine. For a moment, she is me, the contrite mother, and I am her, the wounded child.

“Your eyes are watery,” she says.

I know there is love in here somewhere, but we can’t seem to get to it. Trying so hard to hold things up as the world crumbles around us.

Grief, my yoga teacher tells a woman who has just lost someone, is the greatest form of love. It carves a deeper hole in our heart so we can hold more love.

I’m not familiar with grief. And now every day, I am staring it in the face, wrestling with it, trying to stop it from breaking me open.

Posted on March 31, 2020April 2, 2020 by Amy Suardi

Veneer of Normal

The week of distance learning is over.
I can feel the heat dissolving
that had filled my chest
as if the job were pushing a train up a too-narrow track.

Saturday I wake, not to the alarm clock, but
to the sound of hands raking through legos.
Water jerks through the pipes under the kitchen floor,
the first load of laundry is getting clean.
Onions sizzle in hot oil as I drop
handfuls of chopped carrots and celery into the pan.

The familiar rhythm of our weekend
lulls me into thinking
that everything is OK.

But this weekend, a refrigerated semi-truck is backed up
to a hospital in Queens to hold all the dead bodies.

Ancient holy sites in Jerusalem, like the church
where they say Jesus was buried and resurrected
are shuttered, the first time since the Plague of 1349.

In India hundreds of thousands of destitute migrant workers
leave locked-down cities in a historic exodus. Without trains,
they must walk back to their villages, some hundreds of miles away.

After lunch my husband and daughters help the little ones
with their Italian homework.
Then steam hisses from the espresso maker
signaling the end of quiet time.
Feet thunder down the basement stairs
to play Rocket League and Death Run.

This is familiar music, but I know it’s a lie.
A veneer over a disaster
of biblical proportions.

Posted on March 27, 2020May 5, 2020 by Amy Suardi

Day 3 in the Schoolhouse

The late afternoon sun casts a golden glow in the sunroom where I sit watching the kids at the table, bent over scratch art boards that have just arrived in the mail from my mom in Ohio. Sixteen-year-old Virginia is sitting with her laptop, scrolling and listening to The Weeknd, and Sofia, 18, is soaking porcini mushrooms at the counter for dinner.

My husband has just come home from his work at a psychiatric hospital (still considered an essential employee), cheerful and jokey, tickling and teasing the kids. He’ll drink the espresso I prepared for him, check email, and then head off to his second job at a clinic where he now sees patients via Zoom.

It’s the third day of distance learning at our public schools, and my new job is running this home school. I want to feel satisfied after a good day’s work, but I don’t. My chest is heavy with a pulsing heat and a gloom has settled in.

It should be easier by now. Why don’t I have a better handle on this? I hear about how hard distance learning is for teachers — struggling to learn how to teach online, constantly responding to questions from students, trying to take care of their own children at the same time. We have so much — a whole house and a yard, an at-home parent, a secure income — that it’s hard to feel compassion for myself.

I thought we were doing well when my first grader, Diana, who is often the last to get my help with schoolwork, was seated at the table — dressed, fed, teeth brushed — at 8:50 a.m. drafting her A to Z book. She was writing three facts about ‘C is for Caring’ while her 11-year-old brother Mark snarked about each one. “I guess you want to do a lot of jobs today!” I told him, as I kept writing points next to his name.

“Is this how you spell ‘example’?” Diana asks.

“It has two Ms,” her 9-year-old brother Luke tells her while doing his morning chore of emptying the dishwasher. She erases and rewrites “example” with two Ms.

Crash! A glass shatters and Luke freezes, his hand still poised over the shelf. “It’s OK, it happens to everyone,” I say as I get the dustpan. One of the teens floats by and heads into the basement for a class conference call, and I get the vague feeling that neither are getting enough sleep these days, but it seems like a quaint concern from the past when I worried about parties, where they were, and what they were doing with their friends.

Upstairs Diana tries to finish the ‘D is for Drawing’ page of her A to Z book on her shaggy rug, while I try to log into Microsoft Teams to find out what else she is supposed to be doing, but realize her username and password are not saved on my computer.

“Crunch, crunch. Yum!” she began her page ‘A is for Apple Picking’ on Tuesday when we first started this project. Because I’ve been writing these days, it felt natural to help her try the strategy of hooking the reader with sound words, as her teacher suggested in her daily Powerpoint.

Luke is supposed to be brushing his teeth and starting school too, but he keeps going into Diana’s room and messing with her toys and criticizing her homework. She whines and cries repeatedly, and I start threatening to send anyone who can’t stay in their own area to an outdoor study space.

Finally he starts brushing his teeth, but when I hear him tell her to write, “You can draw many things” for a supporting fact, a suggestion that seems idiotic and passive-aggressive, I blow up. “I don’t need your help,” I tell him, and realizing I have to follow through on my threat, send him to study on the porch.

I feel bad when tears come to his eyes, but I can’t accommodate everyone, and I am beginning to question whether I can accommodate anyone. Every morning Diana looks at me smiling and says, “School!” and I feel like every day I disappoint her with my repeated failures to make logins work, to have the time to spend with her, to get her set up on a computer.

I know that you as parents want to support your child in every way that you can at home. But the reality is, learning will be very different in the coming days and weeks, and that is perfectly okay. It really is.
Our elementary school principal

Today I finally get into her first grade Microsoft Team and find in the Class Files folder a ‘Would You Rather’ YouTube video check-in from her assistant teacher. She is so excited to see his name, so I click play and head downstairs to get the boys settled.

I drag an old table from the garage to the porch and pull a chair in front of it. It actually looks kind-of inviting, with a view over the flowering peach tree in the garden and the neighborhood houses across the street. “Get your coat on and come out, Luke!”

Yesterday I had set up a child account for him with parental controls on my husband’s laptop, but every time he would log in, it would list about 15 random utilities that he was not authorized to use, and every time I had to enter the administrator name and password he would duck his head under the table, a sign that he appreciates the privilege he once tried to steal by guessing our passwords.

He plops down grumpily on the porch swing in his coat and shoes. I tell him he can log on now, and he brightens for a moment, and pulls the computer on his lap. The mesmerized look on his face doesn’t assure me, but he says, “I just have to go to Teams, Mama.”

I’m still dizzy trying to move around in the Office 365 platform the school district is using for virtual classrooms, but he does seem to know where to find his assignments, which are also coming in from his specials teachers — make a video puppet show, code a new game, design an American Revolution persuasive poster.

I go inside and check on Mark. As a sixth grader, he might be the most independent, but the amount of information and channels and teachers and schedules he is dealing with is overwhelming. He often walks around in circles saying, “I don’t know what to do. Can you help me?”

After a relatively disastrous first day, we had sat down together for over an hour in the evening to try to understand the expectations of each teacher — English, Math, Geography, Science and Spanish — reading through the team newsletter and various emails and following links leading to PowerPoints, PDFs, Office 365 Teams, Clever, YouTube, and the online grading system.

“What do you have to do today, Mark?” I ask, coming in from the porch. He tells me that he has nothing to do. “Thursday…” I say looking at his agenda, “you have a live lesson with Ms. T at 9:30. That’s in 5 minutes!”

He finds his Period 1 Team window and clicks on a Join button and miraculously, his teacher appears. Other kids are joining in as video squares begin piling on top of each other — some with faces, some just black screens with a name.

Once I see that he and his classmates are involved in a discussion with the teacher about how to copy, transfer, fill out and turn in digital reading logs and other assignments — a process that will take almost an hour — I go upstairs to check on Diana, then to Luke on the porch, then back to Mark, out, up and down, making rounds among the three kids, responding to cries for help, conflicts between siblings, or that dazed look when someone has fallen down an internet rabbit hole. I kind-of feel useful, but I also have the sensation that nothing is getting accomplished.

Diana, who has scarcely used a computer until this week, spends 20 minutes typing, “I would rather eat pasta, swim at the beach, and bake cookies,” but when it all disappears, I am so tense that I yank the computer towards me, retype her words in half a minute, and don’t give her a chance to even click “Post.”

By 10:30 a.m., Mark looks bleary-eyed, Diana has watched four math videos and collapsed beside her A to Z book pages, and Luke has spent most of his time tweaking a video game he already designed in his digital communications class, so I say, “OK, everyone outside!”

I dig my hands into an open bag of Virginia pines mulch, and toss handfuls into the flower bed as if I were bailing myself out of a flood with buckets. The kids argue and whine, but eventually I hear bikes and scooters being dragged up the gravel driveway, and then the sound of laughter and calling from around the block.

About 20 minutes later, when I am pulling up wild Queen Anne’s lace around the daylilies, Diana’s face appears, and she says, “My head hurts.” Not sure if it’s an excuse to go inside, I tell her to lie down on the porch swing. Ten minutes later I find her on the living room couch sucking her thumb. Her forehead feels a little hot, and I remember how she had a tummy ache last night, and wonder — could these be symptoms of the virus?

I ask Virginia, who is tending to several pots and pans on the stove while checking her phone and playing Jhené Aiko on her laptop, if she could also set the table because Diana doesn’t feel well. She doesn’t seem happy but starts getting out the cloth napkins, and asks “What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know,” I say, and go outside to clean up the rake, shovel, and bucket of weeds, thinking what will happen if she is sick, who else will get it, who we have infected, how will I be able to take care of everyone.

When I check the thermometer under her tongue, it only reads 98.4 degrees. Diana gets up and eats all of her sister’s new healthy vegan-style cooking — green lentil pasta with basil pesto and a side of sautéed broccoli — and then jumps down and starts doing a puzzle on the floor. Filled with caloric energy, Mark climbs on the couch grabbing onto the curtains, and Luke throws Diana’s shoe in the litterbox, and she begins crying.

“Sofia, can you enforce the dishes rule?” I ask, as I get up and say, “C’mon guys, outside in 10, 9…”

“Why are you lying on the ground?” Diana asks, when she finds me on my back in my winter coat on the brick circle in our front yard next to the yellow and red tulips. The boys, after digging up dandelions in the driveway as jobs, had started shooting each other with the hose, calling each other genitalia, and wailing, so I sent everyone in for an early quiet time.

“It feels good to have the sun on my face and the earth under me,” I tell her. Diana lies down next to me for a while, her head in the crook of my arm. If someone walks by and sees me, I figure they will understand. In a time when everything is weird, nothing is weird.

We are saturated with sunlight, and the world looks blue when we open our eyes, and we go in to lie down in our beds. I read the paper from cover to cover as I do every day now and then take a nap.

When I get up, I will make coffee for me and my husband and the kids will bound down the stairs like a herd of bisons to open the package of scratch art that has just arrived from their grandmother in Ohio. When they get up and wander towards screens, I will notice my journal on a pile of magazines.

I will start writing about this day, and my journal, like a therapist listening to my angst, receives everything without judgment. And I begin to feel better.

Before the schools were closed, I used to spend my mornings writing in a quiet room. Now my laptop is used to log into Microsoft Teams where one-inch squares represent my children’s classes, and I feel like a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse on a desolate prairie who is beginning to lose it.

But another thing has changed. Before I was too scared to share my writing. Now I need to share to survive. Here, ease has sprouted from difficulty. From scarcity, a bewildering abundance.

Posted on March 23, 2020March 25, 2020 by Amy Suardi

You Can't Cry on Zoom

The day before the start of distance learning
the middle school principal told parents in a Zoom video conference
our faces at the top of the screen like squares in a quilt border

You are not expected to be your child’s teacher.
The most important thing is grace.
We need to give ourselves grace,
our children grace,
and the world grace.

And I wanted to cry
for her kindness, her forgiveness, her grace
but my camera was on

Posted on March 20, 2020March 24, 2020 by Amy Suardi

Endings without Goodbyes

Distance learning packets stand in towers of varying heights
on a table at the high school
I have come to take them for my daughters
but they’re really for me

I want an excuse to come inside here
before they close for good

I want to fill my arms with paper
to feel something solid
I am trying to stay afloat
in a sea of skinny blue links,
invalid usernames, and
portals that lead to no one

I scan the packet titles — World History, Biology, English —
but I don’t see my daughters’ courses
Do you have AP classes? I ask the counselor
“These are for people without internet access,” she says
and I feel embarrassed of my neediness

I take a COVID-19 fact sheet and walk out of the office
to the front door, pausing in the atrium

It smells of cafeteria food, cheap industrial cleaner, and feet
and I realize how much I love this place

Tears bulge, as my thoughts travel to
my daughter, in her last few months of senior year,
who may have to leave without saying good-bye