When I was little, I wanted a pen pal more than anything in the world. I may even have had a pen pal – but I don’t remember it.
What I do remember is my mother saying, “Why don’t you write to your grandmother? She would love that!”
And so, I wrote to my grandmother. She lived a thousand miles away, so I didn’t know her very well, and I wasn’t even a teenager yet. I had no idea what to say. But I wanted to write, and I wanted someone to send me a letter, so I wrote to Grandma faithfully for a long time.
I have no idea what I said, but I remember her letters to me.
Grandma’s letters were always the same happy tone, lighthearted descriptions of life in Florida. “It’s 78 degrees and sunny,” she would say. Or: “It rained yesterday and all the flowers started blooming.”
She never said anything of substance, and I never knew why.
I was bored with talk of the weather. To me, weather is something that just is – not an entire topic of conversation. If you’re standing in the rain, you know it’s raining. If you look out the window, you can see if it’s windy or sunny or cloudy. Why would it be a topic of discussion?
To be totally honest, I still have a hard time with the weather thing. When Bill talks about the weather forecast as if it’s an actual “topic,” I want to run screaming from the room.
But today, only two days after taking a beautiful bike ride on a gorgeous spring day, I walked outside and I was struck with bitterly cold wind – the kind of wind that shocked, and took my breath away.
So when I sat down to write today – with absolutely nothing going on in my life – I realized: the only thing I wanted to write about was this surprisingly blustery weather.
And that, of course, made me think of Grandma. Which then made me think: I am old and I have nothing better to discuss.
Partially, that’s true. I am old. But the truth of the matter is, the weather is easy to discuss. And I don’t want to think about anything else.
I don’t want to think about the virus. I don’t want to think about online school. I don’t want to think about the numbers of sick people around the globe and in my backyard. I don’t want to think about Bill’s trip to the grocery store, whether or not it was safe. I don’t want to think about the pandemic that’s ravaging the earth, one life at a time.
More than anything, I don’t want to think about the director of the CDC who, on CNN, specifically mentioned “reactive airways disease” as one of the top three underlying conditions – along with diabetes and hypertension – that is likely to cause a coronavirus patient to die. I don’t want to think about how many times he named those three things, over and over and over.
So today I will just say: it is bitterly cold and windy.
So cold. So windy.
And then I will pray for Grandma, who probably just didn’t want me – in my youth and naïveté – to dwell on anything deeper than the weather.
This morning, I read a column from one of my favorite authors, Marion Winik.
I’ve been reading Marion Winik since my kids were very young. I found a book called The Lunch-box Chronicles about a mom raising two boys, just when I was raising two boys of the same age. It was funny and delightful, and made me feel less alone in raising Dylan and Shane.
So I read everything she ever wrote.
Marion Winik’s backstory is rough, in a similar way to my own backstory. Her sarcasm and wit, however, are substantially better than mine – and I love the way she describes the challenges of getting through normal circumstances.
I signed up for her monthly email years ago. Sometimes I don’t have the time to read it, but even the wording of her emails interests me.
So when I read her column about the current state of the world, and then tried to post my own blog post about how it’s going with online college, I simply couldn’t do it.
There’s no depth to what I am writing – mostly because there’s no depth to what I’m doing. There’s no depth to anything right now, except for my black, all-the-way-to-the-earth’s-core gut feelings.
So today, I am doing something different. I am recommending that anyone who wants to read how I feel – or anyone who maybe wants to dig a little deeper into how they feel – should read the latest column by Marion Winik.
I love to write. I will continue to write. But I will never be able to tackle the description of a pandemic with anywhere near as much power and realism as she did.
It’s a pretty cool number, I think, and makes for an awesome milestone marker. 4-4-2020 is the date I celebrated 20 years without a cigarette.
For some people, this is just a number. Those people have never smoked cigarettes. They’ve never felt the tug of true addiction.
I thought about cigarettes before I opened my eyes in the morning. Smoking was the last thing I did before I went to sleep. And I thought about smoking all day long – when can I smoke? where can I smoke? is it time for another one? – and I smoked between 20 and 60 cigarettes every day for fifteen years.
This isn’t really a parenting issue – but for me, quitting smoking had everything to do with parenting. I’d tried to quit many times, but I never cared enough about my own life to do it.
Then I got pregnant. And suddenly I had to consider my unborn baby. Dylan’s life mattered. So I quit smoking, saving both of us.
Holding my newborn, I didn’t think, Gee, now I can have a cigarette. Instead I thought, I finally have a reason to live.
I quit so that my children would have a mother. They needed me. And they didn’t need to live with secondary smoke. Our health mattered.
But there have been side benefits. I don’t stink anymore. I don’t cough up phlegm. And I don’t have the yellow pallor I’d developed after a decade with a cigarette in my hand.
Most triumphantly, I am not obsessed with cigarettes. I don’t have the insatiable desire that forced me to leave home at all hours of the day and night to buy cigarettes. There’s no more nagging in my brain, screaming for MORE MORE MORE.
The bondage is gone. Instead, there’s a calm, quiet peace in my brain. (The nagging sometimes come back in the form of food cravings – but that’s another story.)
I would never have believed, back then, that two decades later, I’d be in the midst of a pandemic that attacks the respiratory system. Not only are my lungs healthy now, but my immune system – even with an autoimmune disorder – is stronger than it’s ever been in my adult life.
And my newborn, who spent his childhood coughing all night long for six months out of the year – until we figured out that he had Reactive Airways Disease – that boy is also stronger now than he’s ever been. He hasn’t had any issue since 2015, when we discovered that high altitudes are tougher on him than most people.
I worry about my husband. He didn’t quit smoking when I was pregnant. He didn’t quit smoking for many, many years after I did. Eventually, he decided that his life was worthwhile. I think.
Bill did quit smoking; I don’t know exactly when. But he’s older than I am, and he started smoking earlier in his life than I did, so he smoked for twice as long as I did. But he smoked fewer cigarettes a day, which gives me an unsettled sense of hope.
These days, Bill coughs and clears his throat all day, and blames the pollen. He doesn’t smoke. Doctors have scanned his lungs annually and found no issues. Still, I worry.
But for me, it’s been 20 years of freedom, 20 years of peace. And now, in a cruel irony, I have the added benefit of having a healthy respiratory system – at least for today – when I really need one.
It’s amazing to me how little any of that freedom would matter if something happened to my husband or children.
We’ve been isolated for the better part of three weeks now.
Most of the time, we’re all on separate computers. I’m not sure this is the best way to be, but it is easiest.
But sometimes, we do family things. We go for walks and bike rides. We hang out together on the porch. We play board games and watch movies and laugh, like we did in the old days.
In fact, the best thing about this horrific, world-ending pandemic is that we’re together as a family. It’s a little like summer vacation on some days. On others, it’s like an evening where both kids have a lot of homework, but we still have a little time together.
It’s hard to believe that anything good could come of a pandemic. But as long as we stay healthy, some good is happening.
Shane was talking last night about some of his beliefs, about God, about fate, about the world. This was an impromptu conversation that happened over dinner, and carried on for at least an hour afterward.
The discussion was philosophical and intellectual and incredibly interesting. All four of us were involved, and Shane shared deep and profound thoughts that gave me a glimpse into his psyche I’d never seen before.
I don’t know if that conversation would have happened without us all being stuck here in this house, being forced to cook our own dinner and sit down as a family.
We used to eat dinner together as a family nearly every night. In fact, we would go around the table and tell about “one good thing” that happened to each of us during the day. This lasted for years and years.
Shane got a box of cards once that inspired dinner conversation. The cards had a ton of questions about meaningful things, and one question could keep us talking for twenty minutes.
We started having “Whatever Wednesday” when the kids were pretty young. Each person made whatever he wanted to eat, even if it was crap – although I made it clear that “Whatever Wednesdays” would not continue if the boys didn’t make proper food for themselves.
Then we got busy. The kids got busy after school and I went back to work at about the same time.
Sometimes we had “Whatever Wednesday” and “Whatever Monday.” We started getting a lot of take-out, which didn’t always make it back to the dining room table. Both boys had play rehearsals and other extracurriculars, and often they had different schedules so that one would be hungry long before the other one.
Pretty soon we were eating at different times, sometimes different foods. Then I discovered my food issues, and I stopped cooking altogether.
But now Bill is home more often – not every day, because he has an “essential” job – but he is home. And Bill can cook. He’s been making dinners that everyone can enjoy. And even if family dinners are brief – without the high-level philosophical discussion – we get to see each other, talk to each other, have some one-on-one conversation. We get to say, “How are you today?”
Best of all, everyone is doing pretty great. The circumstances suck, but so far, we are all okay. And truly, that’s all that matters.
I was scrolling through Facebook, as I am apt to do these days, unless I’m walking the dog, shopping online, eating or sleeping.
Literally by accident, I stumbled upon a video that took my breath away. I was transported back to 2006 – a time when my children were so young, I couldn’t even imagine they’d ever be teenagers.
It was a band video, with four musicians in four little boxes, patched together for the sake of a complete song. The video starred four guys I’ve loved for more than a decade: Rich, Dave, Scott and Smitty – right there on my screen – singing a song about a unicorn.
Maybe you don’t know them like I do. So let me back up a bit.
When Dylan was in kindergarten, I found a DVD in the library that looked cool: four guys singing children’s songs – but they were not the Wiggles. I thought the DVD would provide some positive role models for Dylan and Shane.
Sure enough: the kids loved the music. We watched that DVD a few dozen times, returned it to the library, then got it out again. Eventually, we bought it for ourselves.
About a month later, an internet search revealed that those four guys were going to be performing at a tiny venue near our home. I grabbed four tickets, and we went to see them.
The concert was on Mother’s Day. It was a fun-filled romp of great songs: “My Favorite Snack,” “First Day of School,” and “I Want My Mommy.” We knew all the words, and sang along from the second row.
But they didn’t play “Please and Thank You.”
Shane was two, and that was his favorite song. The stage went dark. And Shane looked up at me with those huge, toddler eyes and said, “But dey did nawt pway ‘Pwease and Tank You!'”
In the lobby, the band was signing autographs. We were thrilled! Dylan got his hat signed by all four of them, and Shane got four high-fives.
I casually said to Rich as he signed and high-fived, “You didn’t play ‘Please and Thank You!’ It’s Shane’s favorite.”
Rich didn’t even flinch. He said, “We can play that for you. Can you wait until we’re done with autographs?”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“It’s not a problem,” Rich said. “Dave, can we play ‘Please and Thank You’ for these guys?”
“Sure!” Dave replied enthusiastically.
Twenty minutes later, the band was back on stage for an audience of two: Dylan and Shane. My boys stood on the stage, awestruck and beaming. Dave knelt down and held Shane’s hand, singing right to him. Rich, Smitty and Scott smiled for five straight minutes as they played.
And I fell in love with all four of them.
Within a year, the Imagination Movers were signed by Disney and became world famous. The original DVD – which I still have – isn’t even available anymore. They had a TV show for years, and they’re still touring.
May 2006 Olney, MD
Now, 14 years later, we’re all in isolation – and I found this video, this little slice of heaven that they’ve pulled together from their individual homes, so that the children would have some joy.
It brought me some joy, too.
In fact, watching them sing in isolation made me cry for the first time since this pandemic became a reality. It took this one glorious, uplifting, happy video to make me realize: we’re not all going to make it through this thing alive.
And the world isn’t going to be as wonderful when this is finally over.
Over the weekend, which didn’t even feel like a weekend, I went to bed late. It didn’t matter. We had nothing to do. We will continue to have nothing to do for the next several weeks, maybe months.
I was feeling kind of depressed about all of that, so I decided that I would comfort myself by using my favorite comforter. Usually, I reserve that comforter for very cold nights in the middle of winter.
But sometimes, it just feels nice to have that extra weight on the bed.
I dragged myself to my closet, and pulled out my favorite white comforter, and put it on the bed. Then I went back to turn off the closet light.
When I returned to the closet, I found something unexpected. At first, I thought it might be a mirage – but no.
There, in the back of the closet, were 24 brand new rolls of toilet paper.
They were still in their original Costco packaging (with 6 rolls missing), but they were a Godsend. Just as I was wondering what we were going to do – since I didn’t go insane and buy out the stores when people started isolating – these gorgeous, fluffy rolls appeared.
In our house, with Dylan home, these should add another two weeks to our comfortable isolation. Maybe by the time we run out, the world will have enough – again – to sell us some more.
Meanwhile, the word “Hallelujah!” is echoing in my head. And I am thanking the Lord for this small mercy.
Dylan’s first virtual week of college started Monday. He’s taking all of his classes online for the rest of the semester.
He finally got some sense of normalcy back into his life. Unfortunately, it meant that he “went back” to college and we were shut out.
Dylan’s classes don’t start until noon – 11:00 Tennessee time – and some of them are not even meeting online. Dylan is doing ad-hoc assignments and projects, posted regularly for some classes, and meeting virtually for others.
Dylan’s Group Games class is the saddest: instead of playing games with friends, Dylan is now taking a solo walk, twice a week, and using software to monitor it, for P.E. credit.
But Dylan hasn’t talked to us about any of it. He wakes up mere seconds before class, maybe 11:58 a.m. He rushes in and out of the bathroom and then, slam! He shuts the door and turns on his laptop.
After Day 1, I stopped in and asked how it went.
“It’s fine,” he said. He briefly gave me some of the details – something was “boring” – and that was all I heard.
All week. For three days, I begged him to come out of his room and eat, at least, before class. Take his vitamins. Stuff like that. Then I gave up, and shut up.
I spent ten years explaining to him that his ADHD is exacerbated by lack of sleep, but he doesn’t care. He stays up all night now. I spent ten years explaining that preparing ahead of time makes a difference in how you approach your life, but Dylan has no interest in preparing anything ahead of time.
And perhaps most importantly, I drilled into his head the fact that his vitamins will not work without animal protein – and that focus is going to be harder for him without having both vitamins and animal protein before class – but I don’t think that concept has even occurred to him since he got to college.
Dylan doesn’t care about taking care of his sleep, his food, or his vitamins. He doesn’t care about making life easier for himself with ADHD. He cares about doing everything his way – the way he’s found that works for him. The way that will have him completely screwed, should he ever need to work in the real world.
If he ends up singing for a living, this way of life will suit him fine.
But he won’t end up singing for a living – maybe not performing ever again – because he doesn’t prioritize the things that will get him there. And getting there – a career in music – requires a ton of work.
He doesn’t want to work. He wants to stay up all night with his girlfriend on FaceTime, and sleep all day while the world revolves without him.
He reminds me very much of me, and that’s not a good thing. He’s going to be very frustrated until he finds a job that works for him, that gives him a reason to get out of bed.
But for right now, he’s happy as a pig in slop. His choices will create his consequences. It’s just not my problem anymore. It’s his.
Shane is finally getting a little education back into his life. With the schools now closed for another month, we’re not sure how much of this we’ll have in the near future.
But today, Shane participated in an AP class – online. The College Board (responsible for things like AP tests and SATs) has decided to allow kids taking AP classes to take the AP exams for those classes. In other words, they can still get college credit.
Only a few weeks ago, we had no idea if the AP and IB kids would get credit, even though they worked all year long with that goal in mind.
This year, Shane is taking AP Government. He has loved both of his teachers, and he’s learning a lot. Sometimes he even talks about it at home, which is when I learn something, too.
Today’s class was through the College Board’s (new?) You Tube channel. Shane was doing a jigsaw puzzle and missed the first few minutes of class, but we (I) quickly got him signed on when we (I) realized what time it was.
There were nearly 8,000 other AP Government students “in” his class.
“Even if you went to Virginia Tech,” I told him, “you wouldn’t have this many students in your class.”
While he was sitting at the computer, and the teacher gave an overview of our voting system – the topic for today – I noticed that Shane wasn’t looking at the screen. The teacher was using visual aids and Shane was twirling a stick instead of looking at the screen. At one point, he was completely backwards in his chair.
I noticed – but tried so stay quiet. When he was literally not facing the screen, though, I got suddenly frustrated.
“What are you doing?” I shrieked.
Shane stopped twirling his stick and looked at me. “I’m listening,” he said.
And I remembered: he really was listening. In kindergarten, Shane was the kid who would be lying on his face, not looking at the teacher, and yelling out the correct response to every question. Part of it was his vision processing disorder. Another part of it was just … Shane.
I corrected myself pretty quickly. “Sorry, Shane,” I said. “I forgot you can listen without looking like you’re listening.”
“This is a review of stuff we’ve already learned anyway,” he said.
“Oh good!” I said. “So this is actually going to help you study for the exam!”
“Well I have my notes,” he said. “But yeah I guess.”
The mere fact that Shane knew the material – even a little – excited me. Since the College Board has decided to only test on Units 1 through 3 in this particular class, I was afraid they might be teaching him new material. Fortunately for everyone, they’re just reviewing.
The reviews will be helpful. If nothing else, they will give Shane a chance to regain a tiny sense of normalcy in tumultuous times.
Once a week, for 45 minutes, he can study the U.S. government. And that is something. It may not be wildly entertaining or even helpful. But it brings with it the sense that, on the other side of all this abnormal life, we will continue.
A lot of people seem to have “come down with” OCD lately; it’s a joke on social media everywhere. All this hand-washing is essential! they say. I must have OCD!
Even though Shane really does have OCD, and I probably do, too, the jokes really don’t bother me. In fact, it’s kind of nice that people know how it feels to be obsessed with avoiding germs.
Shane and I both wash our hands ridiculously often, and we have since long before we heard the term “coronavirus.”
The other day, Bill was – quite seriously – trying to tell me how to get gas from the pump, that I should use hand sanitizer before and after touching the pump. If he hadn’t been so dead serious, I would have laughed. I’ve been using hand sanitizer three or four times during the course of getting gas, and using my sleeve to open my car door, for as long as I can remember.
But Shane doesn’t have “typical” OCD.
Shane’s disorder, in fact, is Responsibility OCD. Basically it tells him that his thoughts can trigger tragic or catastrophic events: anything from the death of a loved one to the end of the world.
It’s akin to when I was a child, with my own OCD symptoms. I constantly looked down at the ground when I walked, partially to avoid stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk.
This was because I once heard, “Step on a crack, break your mama’s back” – and I didn’t want to hurt my mother. So I didn’t step on a crack for about ten years.
When I finally did, around age 23, my mom’s back was fine. Go figure!
But here we are, having a global pandemic. And Shane has Responsibility OCD, where he sometimes feels responsible for catastrophic things that are entirely out of his control.
The world is (hopefully) as close to ending as it will be in our lifetimes and less than a year ago, Shane was overwhelmed by the feeling that he was able to cause horrible things to happen, just by thinking random thoughts.
I didn’t want to mention this to Shane, because he’s been doing well in therapy and he has been pretty good at taking care of his own problems. But sometimes he doesn’t talk when he really should.
So, finally, I asked Shane if he felt like the pandemic was his fault.
“What do you mean?” he asked. There was a slight flicker in his eyes.
“Do you think you caused this with your thoughts?”
“No,” he said. “Not at all.” And since Shane doesn’t lie, I believe him.
Then, before even a minute had passed, I started to worry that, with my question, I’d caused Shane to believe that he caused the pandemic.
And a few days later, I was still worried about it. I had to write Shane a note, to make sure he knew that there’s no way he could have caused anything to happen with his thoughts, let alone a global pandemic.
Which one of us has the worst case of OCD, I wonder?
Day five of self-induced seclusion: starting to look like all the other days of seclusion.
I sleep in – way in. Shane and I both get up around 10:00. Dylan sleeps in until well past lunchtime. We’ve talked to him about that, but he doesn’t seem to care that we’d like him to get up in the morning.
We eat. We are fortunate to have enough food to last us a month. None of us want to cook, except Bill, who has made chili, steaks, tacos and stew. We’re always happy when Bill cooks, but we complain about it anyway.
We play board games: Monopoly, Uno, Stratego. I beg to play Labyrinth and Zootopia but no one will play those with me. They say they take too long. What do we have, if not time?
Yesterday, Dylan figured out a way to play online games with people in other areas. It didn’t work well, but it did work. We’ve mastered FaceTime and Skype, and are learning WhatsApp. This will come in handy when the kids actually get to travel overseas – although Dylan’s trip to study in Italy has finally been canceled.
We do stuff on the computer. Dylan is still choosing classes for fall, which is great fun for me. Shane is preparing to be an election judge when the primaries roll around – although the primaries in our state have now been postponed until June.
Shane has lots of time to do his online training. He’s also got some school work he can do. But he doesn’t do it. He plays video games and watches YouTube and puts stuff on Instagram.
We walk the dog. He gets two or three walks a day now, since everyone wants to go outside.
We watch some TV. I don’t know why we don’t watch movies or read more books. We got several dozen of each at the library, just in case.
We talk. We spend time together at meals, during games. It’s the best part of the whole pandemic. If there is a good part of a pandemic.
I go to bed around midnight. I dream that I stumble into large crowds, anxiously trying to get away from the sweating, spitting bodies.
I wake up in the middle of the night, every night, and can’t get back to sleep for an hour or more. I toss and turn and think about coronavirus. It’s why I sleep until 10:00.
Every day looks like every other day. Doctors, dentists, oil changes and orthodonture: all canceled. We don’t even get takeout from our local restaurants. We just stay home. We avoid the large crowds that I dream about, but I still dream about them.
Down the street is a park with basketball courts, baseball fields, picnic tables and a playground. I’d love to say that it’s deserted, that our efforts are worthwhile – but in real life, every day those parks are packed with people, playing ball and sliding and swinging and running. No two people stay six feet apart.
I want to run screaming into the park, “Go home! Go home!” but I know they won’t listen to me. Apparently they won’t listen to anyone.
I stay home. I wait. I pray a lot. I hope. And then I wait some more.
