Week Two

I’ve been writing things down since here and there since the coronavirus really started to impact our lives. I’ve shared some of this as snippets on Instagram but if you’re interested in reading more, feel free to read through these lightly-edited words. As this essay says, I’m craving to see what people are thinking/doing/feeling through all of this. Maybe it’s helpful to use my own still, small voice to give some words to what we’re all going through at this moment in time. You can find Week One here.

Sunday, March 22nd
“If I’m going to be successful at homeschooling I need paperclips,” is a thing I say now.

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Monday, March 23rd
We started homeschooling today. Technically the governor has excused kids from school through this week, but we couldn’t go another week without a schedule. “Are we doing school today?” Brooklyn asked every single day last week.

We sat at the kitchen table and Nolan actually got really into the letter and number worksheets I found for him and Caden and Brooklyn enjoyed having their attention diverted into creating their own little stories with sight words and working though math worksheets. Those two thrive on that sort of stuff. So we did school for a few hours. Science was a booklet about the solar system. Then we watched the StoryBots episode about planets, so. And library, which would have been their “special” of the day, was listening to the Story Pirates podcast while they played, which basically meant they just played because not a single one of us had any clue what we just listened to when it was all done. It was fine.

I’m tired. It’s frustrating to see all the memes about how “bored” people are. I mean, a lot of them are really funny (this sock puppet eating cars and this marble race that I became significantly invested in gave me LIFE) but also, I would LOVE to be bored right now. I would love the time and the space to sit with a book, or with my knitting, or with nothing at all but myself to figure out how I really am feeling about all this. 

As it is, I feel like I’m go-go-going just as much as usual, if not more, with three kids now home all day. They still wake up at the same time (read: far too early) and need meals at regular intervals (And snacks! So may snacks!) and need supervision and they bicker and they talk so much (the talking make it stop) and I just spent part of my evening printing out some more math activities for tomorrow and it’s fine! It’s going to make tomorrow run so much smoother! This is all exhaustingly fine.

And because we’re living the epitome of both/and right now, I’m both exhausted by having children around and so absolutely glad they are here. They bring a sense of normalcy and schedule and routine and silliness to the day that helps so much right now. If I could choose between having this happen with children around or without I would still emphatically choose with.

But also I wish I could drink a glass of wine or three and sit and take some time to myself.

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Tuesday, March 24th
I’m tired of seeing things to the effect of “maximize your quarantine”. Can we just...not? Even leisure seems to have been co-opted into this big thing to DO. Are you binge watching/learning how to knit/baking sourdough/sewing masks/recording a new podcast? Simultaneously? 

In a similar vein, I’m tired of all the “Isn’t it great that we’re not racing all over and bringing our kids to activities and things all the time?”

Well, no. My kids LOVE their activities. To be fair, my kids are still fairly young. I understand that parents with older kids might be glad to not be running somewhere every. single. night. But we had activities just twice a week: dance on Tuesdays and gymnastics on Thursdays. My kids love those things. And baseball was supposed to start up within the next month. Caden and Brooklyn have been counting down the days until they’re back on the field and Nolan is so looking forward to his own first year of t-ball. Will they even have a season this year? Will the activities I’ve signed them up for over the summer even...ever...happen? Will they have a dance recital?

Of course, I don’t have any answers. I’m out a solid $700 (which I’m sure we would be reimbursed) for activities I don’t know that we’ll ever get to do.

I didn’t see their activities as a burden. They brought us so much joy.

To build off the both/and of yesterday, I’m both sad they don’t have their activities right now AND we’re enjoying being home. It is nice to not have to rush in the morning or eat dinner at 4:30 so we get to gymnastics on time. Our evenings are completely free now but so are the rest of our days.

Still, if I could choose, I’d prefer activities.

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Wednesday, March 25th
Today was maybe the hardest one since it all began. It’s rainy and gloomy and the third day in a row of doing school with the kids and I don’t know, I can’t exactly put my finger on what it was about today, but it’s just exhausting.

Though, as I texted to my friends, just wait a day or an hour and I know I’ll feel differently. The emotional roller coaster is real.

It’s exhausting in a way that having three kids under three—or, to be more honest, having two three-year-olds and a one-year-old because that was so much harder—was exhausting. There’s no time or space to think and it’s loud and there are so many needs to be met and it’s loud and I just want space to think, to be and also, it’s loud. It reminds me so much of that time, before Kindergarten, before even Preschool, when we were all together under one roof and it seemed like there was no escape. At least then we could go to the park.

Beth on the Pantsuit Politics nightly nuance last night said something about how her daughter came in the room just to tell her she had a papercut, and then walked out of the room. How just that one little interruption cost her like five minutes of thought process and productivity. And I nodded in solidarity and thought, yes, it’s just like that. About 37 times a day.

To be fair, the kids have been fantastic through this all. They’re more or less their regular selves: sometimes whine-y, sometimes needy, sometimes loving, sometimes disruptive, sometimes cooperative. They miss school but haven’t complained hardly at all about their activities being cancelled, that their days are different, that our life now looks almost nothing like what it did two weeks ago.

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Caden and Brooklyn’s school sent out a video of three of the teachers singing a parody of “Some Things Never Change” to the kids today and I cried.

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Friday, March 27th
Brooklyn broke her wrists yesterday. Both of them. She was swinging and then pulled her arms in through the ropes and fell straight forward onto her arms.

“Why did you do that?” I asked her. She’s jumped off the swing before but this sounded different. I actually didn’t see it. I’d kicked all the kids outside because they were driving me insane. It wasn’t five minutes before I heard Tyson call, from his upstairs office window, “Oh my gosh are you okay?”

“I was showing Caden something dangerous,” she replied.

Beyond the initial pain (“I think it’s a 10” she told me, when I tried to explain the pain scale at the orthopedic walk-in clinic) she’s been perfectly fine. (“It’s a 1 now,” she said, immediately after getting splints on.)

It’s a strange time to be injured, though. Thank goodness for the walk-in clinic. I knew I didn’t want to go anywhere close to an ER. Also her follow-up appointment has been cancelled because of the governor’s stay-at-home order, though we can go back to the walk-in clinic anytime on Tuesday for her to get casts put on.

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Doesn’t “stay-at-home” sound so much nicer than “shelter in place”? A little less ominous, at least?

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I’m totally and completely worn out this week, just in the same way I used to be at the end of week when the kids were much younger. I don’t want to do anything or talk to anyone. I didn’t get a single thing done today besides the feeding and schooling and caring for children. I know that’s important and that’s “doing” something, too. I know. Still. I’ve been used to some time and space carved out during my weeks and that’s gone now. We’re all going to have to adjust accordingly.

But it was sunny and 60 today and we spent the entire afternoon outside and that made all the difference.

On Knitting

I learned how to knit recently.

I’d been wanting to learn for a couple of years. I don’t know why. It could have been Sarah Bessey’s “Knit One, Purl Joy” piece or it could have been the knitting of all the cozy things I see on Instagram or it could be that I’m restless and like to multi-task and here is something I could do while watching TV or listening to a podcast.

Whatever it was, I wanted to learn.

When we found a new church last year, I knew there was a knitting group almost from the start. There were a few women I saw carrying around their bags full of yarn and knitting projects. I saw the “Stitching for Peace” group on the calendar a couple of times a month.

Nancy was the one who found out I wanted to learn. I’d seen her on the other side of church, needles moving as she sat and listened to the sermon.

“I’ll teach you!” she said. “You don’t need anything. I have needles and yarn. The next time the choir sings just come find me. I’ve taught lots of people how to knit.”

She saw me a couple of Sundays later as we arrived at church, in a flurry of coats and bags and too many children. The way we always arrive at church. She was in her choir robe.

“Ready to knit?” she asked, conspiratorially.

We sat on the couches as she pulled out a ball of purple yarn and some bamboo needles. “I like the bamboo because it’s soft,” she told me. She told me more things, things I tried to file away in my brain, but it was the bamboo tip that stuck.

She cast on and then showed me the basic knit stitch. My hands were clumsy. 

“Do I go under or over?” I kept asking about the yarn. Every way I stuck my needle in felt like the wrong way— or maybe the right way?— since I had no idea what I was doing. 

“No,” she would tell me patiently, as I stuck my needle in the stitch the wrong way again, “That’s the purl stitch, I’ll teach you that later. This way for the knit stitch.”

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When we got home that day, I picked up the needles and the scant couple of rows I’d fumbled through while we sat together at church. My mind drew a blank. I couldn’t remember what to do. I Googled “knit stitch” and watched a video, kept pausing and re-starting to refresh my fingers and my memory.

I got going for a little bit. Then somehow I slipped half the project off the needles, which had me scrambling to YouTube again to search for “how to cast on knitting” videos.

I properly casted on 20 stitches for my scarf only to realize that, several rows in, they’d somehow multiplied to 28. I unraveled it all and searched for that “how to cast on knitting” video again.

I started and I stopped and I started and I stopped and I began to despair of ever getting anywhere beyond six to eight rows of stitches. People had been doing this for hundreds of years but I was never, ever, ever going to get the hang of it. I despaired of the detailed patterns and projects I’d seen online, grieved even the simplest of projects. I couldn’t get this simple scarf to be long enough for one of my old Beanie Babies, much less for Brooklyn, who’d claimed this project as her own and asked after the status of her scarf on a daily basis, perched on the edge of the couch next to me.

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I realized this was the first new skill I’d learned in I don’t know how long. When’s the last time I learned how to do something for the very first time that was absolutely and completely new to me? 

Baking bread? Kind of, but that built on the knowledge of baking I already had.

Yoga? Maybe. But that just seemed to build off my dance background.

I don’t know. Is it accurate to say this is the first time I’ve picked up something completely new since I was a kid? And if so, isn’t that kind of...sad?

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I finished Brooklyn’s scarf. I made it past eight rows of stitches and then I made it past twenty and then it really seemed to come together. And by “really come together” I mean still little by little. I sat in the evening while we caught up with This is Us or gloried to another season of Ugly Delicious, but I no longer had to rip it all apart and start over. You can see the progression; there’s a hole or two toward the beginning, it’s sort of knobbly and lumpy. Then, you can see it: the stitches even out as you go along.

I’ve started another scarf, for Caden, because if Brooklyn got one he wanted one, too. Now it’s his turn to sit perched next to me. “When will my scarf be done?” he asks. He drags over my knitting bag, usually at inopportune times, and sets it next to me, a wordless nudge to keep working. I’ve tried to tell him that it will be probably 70-degrees and far too warm to wear a scarf before I finish, but he doesn’t care.

Still, despite the rising temperatures, knitting has turned out to be the most appropriate ritual right now.

I thought it would be nice to have something to do while watching TV or reading books to the kids on the couch—look how productive I am!—and it is. But it turns out it’s saving my sanity.

It’s not only giving me something to do while we flip on The Good Place each night, it gives my hands something to do while I listen to our governor give his near-daily press conferences in the afternoon. Every time I tune in I grab my knitting, instinctively, to steady my hands. Tyson and I sit to talk—more often than ever these days—and out comes my knitting, focusing my hands and my attention. I need it, that tactile motion and movement in my hands or I feel as though I could fly apart altogether.

It grounds me when I sit on the couch while the kids watch a movie or laugh uproariously at the antics of Booba. I listen to a podcast: “The Daily” if I want to stay informed, “Pantsuit Politics” if I need therapy. Sometimes my hands shake and I grasp the needles tighter. Sometimes I slip a stitch and I go back now, because I’ve figured out what it’s supposed to look like, what it’s supposed to feel like, and I fix it, without having to unravel it all and begin again.

This post was written as part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to read the next post in this series "All Things New".

When Your Partner Works From Home

In my household, working from home is the norm. My husband has worked from home our entire married life and I, in recent years, have balanced my writing commitments with being a stay at home mom. We’re old pros at this; our children have never known anything different. 

Maybe it’s new to you, though, in these strange, uncertain times. While we have office spaces set up and our routines in order, I imagine this isn’t the case for many of you as we all attempt to navigate a new normal.

We’re several years into this routine and have learned—often through trial-and-error—how to balance work and home when they’re both under the same roof. As many of you experience having a partner work from home for the first time, or work from home for the first time yourselves, here are some things that have helped keep our household sane over the years.

Keep a Schedule
Working from home should be no different than a job you commute to. My husband works from about 7:00 am - 4:00 pm each day. He gets up with the kids around 6:30 and gets them started on breakfast while I get ready in the morning. While we both often work in the evenings, it’s after the kids are in bed. Even though his office (and phone!) are so very accessible, they are off-limits for work-related things between the hours of 4:00-7:30 pm.

Setting a schedule is important for my own life, too. I try to get the bulk of my own work done the three mornings a week my youngest attends preschool. The other two mornings we try to get out of the house for errands and playdates. Our afternoons follow a routine of lunch, quiet time, screen time, snack, and outside play and/or indoor creative play.

Dedicate a Work Space
We have a bedroom upstairs that serves as my husband’s office space with—and this is important—a door that locks. If you don’t have an extra room, especially if working from home is a temporary situation, consider converting a corner of your bedroom or infrequently-used room in your basement as an office area. It helps mentally to have an area dedicated to work and could also help your kids understand that when a parent is in that space, they need to focus.

Read the rest over on the Twin Cities Moms Collective as we work to support our local community with resources during the Coronavirus outbreak.

Week One

I’ve been writing things down this week here and there as they come to me. I’ve shared some of this as snippets on Instagram but if you’re interested in reading some more navel-gazing, as my friend Lorren says, then feel free to read on with these lightly-edited words. Maybe it’s helpful to use my own still, small voice to give some words to what we’re all going through at this moment in time.

Saturday, March 14th
My brain keeps trying to compare this to things it knows. 

It’s like the holidays! My head says. And this is sort of true. The kids were off for two straight weeks and grocery stores weren’t always open when I wanted them to be and we mostly stayed home and Tyson was off of work more days than not. 

It’s like the polar votex! It thinks. Then, too, we were stuck inside and didn’t dare venture out of the house. But that lasted four straight days and then it was all over. We could have flown on an airplane to escape it all if we really wanted. It affected only my little region and not the entire world.

It’s like a world war. My brain tries. And, though I’ve never experienced war like that, this seems right. The uncertainty of not knowing what each day, each week is going to bring. Not knowing how long things are going to last or how this is all going to affect us. Knowing that we are just at the beginning of all of this and there will be lasting changes to our society and to our world forever.

My phone alerted me yesterday to tell me my screen time was up last week— 17%, over six hours a day, instead of my usual four-ish.

Two hours more?! Was my initial reaction. Then, Two hours more. Of course. Because these times are unprecedented. Some of those two hours were useful. I’ve been in contact with friends and family far more than usual as we attempt to navigate this strange new world together. My friends and I text each other from across the country to give each other updates on what it’s like in Ohio, in Georgia, in Texas. I look at the news to find the latest update and seem to find a new one no matter how often I look at my phone.

Some of those hours are more negative. The times I’ve spent scrolling because I can’t seem to stop, to see how everyone else is coping, what is going on, how are we all doing this? The time I’ve spent reading too many articles. 

But I’ve got this phone as a link to the world for better or worse. Of course I’m using it more. Of course.

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Sunday, March 15th
I've made up my mind to try to say yes as much as possible. To things that would ordinarily make me cringe. Yes to dragging the Nugget upstairs to make a fort in your room which ends up in the biggest mess and blankets that need to be put away in six separate rooms of the house. Yes to watching Frozen 2 three days in a row. Yes to eating something from your candy stash while we do so. Yes to taking out the paint and the easel and the paint shirts and all the rest. Yes to playing on your tablets. Yes to baking cookies. 

The thing is, we’re saying no to so many things right now. Especially this week, supposedly our spring break, where I had plans for the movie theater and museums and indoor playgrounds. None of that is happening anymore.

And that’s nothing to speak of next week when there will continue to be no school, no gymnastics, no dance class, no playdates, no eating at restaurants. Next week and for how much longer?

So I’m going to try to say yes to what I can.

+++++

Monday March 16th
It feels strange to know that time is still marching onward. Spring is coming. You wouldn’t know it from the forecast over the next week, but it is. 

Time feels frozen in so many ways. 

It feels weird to see the sunshine blinding us through the blinds in the morning and lengthening our shadows in the late afternoon, to see grass outside our windows, to see March 16th on the calendar.

I saw the first tiny shoots of green sprouting in the remnants of our day lilies outside. The ground is waking up, literally growing up to stretch toward the big blue sky.

Spring is coming. I feel it.

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Tuesday March 17th
My right eye has been twitching since last week. It’s not terrible; I’ll go several hours or even a day between twitches. Sometimes it will do it several times in a row and then go away, for so long I forget about it.

Of course I looked up causes of eye twitching. Stress, it said, right at the top.

I don’t feel all that stressed. I feel all sorts of things, anxious, scattered, uncertain, but not exactly stressed.

Then again, maybe those are all just euphemisms.

Also I’ve been planning the shit out of everything there is to plan. So. That’s a thing.

It could be my body just trying to tell me something, reacting to what it feels in the air and sees in my newsfeed and senses down to my very bones. It seems like too much of a coincidence for an eye twitch to begin right when everything coronavirus here in America was ramping up. None of this is normal. Including eye twitches.

We tried to explain just how abnormal this all is to the kids the other night, even as we answered their questions. They asked us a dozen questions, probably a week ago now, kicked off by Caden asking, “Mommy, what is coronavirus?”

We sat at dinner and talked about what was going on and reassured them that they were safe, we were safe, life was probably going to look different for awhile (we didn’t know just how different then) but we would all be okay. 

We continued eating and it dawned on me.

“Hey,” I blurted. “Just so you know, this is not normal. This doesn’t usually happen. Daddy and I are 33 years old and this has never, ever happened before in our whole entire lives.”

I wondered what they were thinking, these little six and four-year-olds. (Well, the four-year-old didn’t seem to be paying attention all that much.) Did they think this was just routine, that once every six years or so everyone’s lives just shut down? That this is just a regular part of life, like sometimes you just don’t go back to school for the rest of the year? Did they think Tyson and I had any idea what we’re doing?

I wonder what they’ll remember of this time. Will they remember being out of school? (Will they go back to school this spring? Oh, we love their teacher, it will break my heart if they don’t.) Will they remember Tyson and I in conversation about this and not much else? Will they remember us watching the news on TV? Of not being able to go anywhere: not to stores, not to restaurants, not to gymnastics, or dance, or indoor playgrounds, or other people’s houses? 

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Yesterday, Monday, I tried to place a grocery order. I usually place my grocery orders on Tuesdays, for pick up on Wednesdays. This has been my routine for almost two years now. I went to select my time slot and...the earliest I could pick up my groceries is Sunday. Almost a week. And here I thought I was doing good by getting it in a day early.

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Wednesday March 18th
Just 10 days ago it was over 50 degrees outside and we bought ice cream from the ice cream truck that rolled through the neighborhood. From a stranger. In a truck. Who handed us food and we handed him money. With our unsanitized, unwashed hands. In a crowd of neighborhood kids.

That feels like a lifetime ago.

I keep checking myself when I watch or read things. Tyson and I watched The Two Popes last weekend (which was excellent, btw) and one of the first shots was of a huge crowd, packed together shoulder to shoulder as they awaited news of the new pope.

But you can’t do that! my mind cried.

Same when I read a metaphor in a book recently that went something like, “she stuck around like a virus”. Yikes, I thought, That reads a bit differently right now.

Video of people shaking hands or reading about people having a party or just the idea of a bunch of people going to the store all leave me with the same reaction. But that’s not safe!

How quickly we accommodate this new life, even while it still feels so very, very bizarre.

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I did yoga tonight for the first time in a long time. Too long. I noticed my body in recent days has been tense and tight, my shoulders creeping involuntarily toward my ears.

It needed a release.

As we lay down to complete the practice my YouTube guide told me to hug my knees and “take the biggest breath you’ve taken all day”. It was then that I realized I’d been holding my breath. 

My breath needed a release, too.

+++++

We dropped groceries off to my parents this morning. I made a run to Target first thing, I got one of the last loaves of bread off the shelves and so much was still empty and barren. I had the hand sanitizer at the ready when I got back in the car because that’s a thing we do now.

I got home and wiped everything off. Tyson had mixed up a bleach solution and I picked up cereal box and wiped it down with a damp cloth. Then I looked at him across the room and shrugged. He burst out laughing because what even is this life?

I loaded the kids up in the car so they could get out of the house and we delivered things to my parents. Bread and eggs and peanut butter and a sunny bouquet of tulips, because we all need a little bit of brightness right now. I explained on the way over that we wouldn’t be going inside or giving hugs and we couldn’t play and had them recite the rules back to me. We left their bags of groceries on the front step and talked to them through the glass door instead. It was weird. I don’t have many words lately but weird is one of them.

Friday March 20th
I cried for the first time today. At least tears filled my eyes and I sniffled a lot and it stayed that way for several minutes which for me is the equivalent of a full-on emotional meltdown. 

What triggered it, of all things, was Taylor Swift’s song “Mine”. It reminded me of college, or the tail end of it, right before I Tyson and I got married because the lines “We’ve got bills to pay/we’ve got nothing figured out” were particularly relevant to us at that moment in time. (Ahem still relevant to us at this moment in time.) And it reminded me of graduating with a design degree in 2010 into a recession and how absolutely impossible it was for me to get a job at that time, and all the “no”s I heard and the resumes I blew through. And then, of course, I thought of all the college kids who are about to graduate college right now into the same damn thing (Or worse? What is this?) and I just couldn’t handle it.

Especially the students like me, who were told that if we just followed the rules and followed our dreams that everything would work out, and so we did. And we went out and we got A’s from the first time we ever got report cards and graduated with honors all the way up to walking across the university stage with our cap and gown and special tassels and still, because of the economy, because of that moment in time, we couldn’t get jobs with our degrees in design and humanities and history and architecture.

Anyway, that’s what did it for me. Those college students who are ready to launch and are about to be launched out into a world that’s even scarier than the height of the recession I graduated into.

Unrelated: Brooklyn thinks the opening line to “22” is “It feels like the perfect night to dress up like hamsters” and I want her to believe that forever.

And That's Okay

Brooklyn went through a spurt, a couple of months ago, where she told me several days in a row, ”I care about everybody. Even people in different worlds than us. I care about everyone.”

(First off, lest you think she’s talking about other planets or that we know something about extraterrestrial life that you don’t, you should know my kids use the word “worlds” for “countries”, which I think is fantastic and adorable and I am 1000% committed to NOT correcting them.)

I cannot convey just how seriously she says this. Her voice grows low and quiet and she meets my eyes dead on and delivers this statement with all the seriousness of a person giving a speech to the UN.

I love this about her. I told her that. I gave her a hug each time and told her, “I love that about you. I care about people everywhere, too. That’s an important thing we get to do, is love other people and care about them even if we don’t know them.”

Her teacher, at conferences, also said this is her favorite thing about Brooklyn. That she goes out of her way to help and stick up for everyone in the classroom. If, for example, a student is having trouble sitting still on the carpet and gets moved to sit in a chair, Brooklyn will pipe up to say, “And that’s okay! Because they can still learn in the chair! That’s what’s best for their body right now.” 

And it’s one of those moments where you realize that they’re listening. Because that’s exactly the type of language we use at home.

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Home has not exactly been a haven these days. It’s cluttered and messy and I’m not sure you can actually walk in Caden and Brooklyn’s bedroom right now. Every time I tackle one space I think three more become overwhelmed with papers and LEGOs and stray socks. (Seriously, where do they come from?)

There’s no winning here.

Tyson has been busy with transitions at work and also working on another project in the evenings. Our February was chaotic, a month in a series of chaotic months. I’ve been busy with writing and volunteering and attempting to stay on top of appointments and keeping Nolan occupied with things other than “watching every episode of Ninjago” and “eating literal spoonfuls of sugar from the canister on the counter”.

Last week, Tyson and I had that conversation of “Hi, I’m really busy, can you do more?” “Hi, I’m really busy, can you do more?”

The house is supposed to be our shared responsibility and yet it’s been easy to fall into the trap of self-pity and frustration lately. It’s been easy to think I’m doing more than my fair share, that if he helped more it wouldn’t be this way, that if I just literally never sat down I could get on top of it.

Of course, none of these things are true.

There’s definitely no winning there.

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“And that’s okay!” is basically Brooklyn’s catchphrase.

“This boy at school likes to wear pink. And that’s okay! Because pink is just a color,” she’ll say.

“Caden likes to put his snowpants and boots and jacket on in a different order than me. And that’s okay! That’s what works best for him.”

“I don’t like cucumbers. And that’s okay! Because I like other foods.”

”It sounds like your friend had trouble controlling their body,” I’ll say, after she tells me about a friend who was removed from the classroom, “You and Caden have a pretty easy time controlling your bodies, and it sounds like your friend has lots of energy and has a harder time sitting still than you do.””And that’s okay!” she’ll say. 

And it is.

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“And that’s okay!” is a pretty great mantra to live by. You’d think I would know this already since I’m the one who gave the phrase to her.

I was originally writing this with a different ending in mind. Though let me assure you the endings to the essays I write frequently surprise me. Rarely do my drafts get written so clearly and predictably that they travel from A to B to C in such a logical, unsurprising order.

I thought I was going to end by talking about how I often want to read instead of tackling one of the 34 tasks swirling in my head or to get takeout instead of making dinner because even though I love to cook doing it every. single. night often seems like just a bit much, and how sometimes I just need a moment but you don’t often get that moment with small children and so you react in ways you wish you hadn’t just a second later. And I was going to tie it back to how our house is a disaster but we’ll figure it out because that’s what we do. And that’s okay! Because we all do these things and that’s okay. We’re human and we can embrace our humanity. This is all true.

However. I’m not finishing this piece at the same time I started it. I jotted that opening paragraph as a note in my phone a few months ago and that feels like a different time entirely. And also I wrote that paragraph about our house being a disaster last week and it already doesn’t seem quite so important anymore so it’s going to sit up there like a loose end. (And that’s okay!) Instead, I’m writing these very words right now in light of coronavirus and what feels like a very uncertain, bizarre, weird time. Just when I think we’ve hit peak crazy something else happens and here we are, finishing an intense week in a series of intense weeks, cluttered houses and all.

So instead I’ll end with this:

Sometimes we need to sit with our feelings and emotions, particularly when they’re confusing and conflicting. And that’s okay.

Sometimes we scroll longer than we should through social media and read six articles too many about the same damn thing. And that’s okay.

Sometimes we have to mourn the loss of things, like predictable schedules, events we were looking forward to but are no longer, trips and travel plans being no more, our daily routines being upended in ways we didn’t expect. And that’s okay.

Sometimes we despair the clutter in the corner or the crumbs on the counter even when there are much bigger things going on in the world. And that’s okay.

Sometimes we forget that our anxiety can be quelled with things as simple as “taking deep breaths” or “making a fresh cup of coffee”. And that’s okay.

Sometimes all we can do is take care of the present moment. And that’s okay.

Sometimes it takes a six-year-old, using the words you’ve given her, to remind you that we need to take care of people in different communities, in different demographics, in different “worlds” than us. And that’s okay.

Sometimes we need to just be and rest and exist without putting pressure on ourselves to produce or perform. Especially when it feels as if the whole world has lost its mind. And that’s really, really, really okay.