Just Enough Light

Mornings are like this, now: I wake early, like I always have. I tell people I haven’t needed an alarm since my daughter was born nearly fourteen years ago, and this is true, but these days my children can pour their own cereal in the mornings and I lie in bed until my alarm goes off.

Or I did. There’s no need for an alarm anymore--not until September. I wake up just before the first light, and I curl my toes and stretch my calves under the bedsheet, having thrown off the heavier cover in the night. My husband dozes beside me. He’ll rise soon and go to work, but that looks different these days. Instead of rushing through brewing the coffee while he showers, he starts the coffee and shuffles into the study, where he begins his workday. He’ll brush his teeth later, after we’ve both drained the pot.

I slip out of bed before anyone else is up. In the living room, I raise the blinds on the large window facing the front yard. I curl up on the couch and just look out the window for awhile, gazing out at the quiet street or up through the branches of our huge tree as the sky lightens. Soon I hear my son’s bedroom door open, and he pads across the hardwood floor in bare feet, his hair wild, his eyes still sleepy. He allows me to wrap him in a hug and he kisses my cheek, a reflex I know he’ll lose soon enough, so I savor even his morning breath as I press my face against his. He pours himself a bowl of cereal or toasts a bagel, slathering the warm halves with butter. He eats at the dining room table while I allow myself to read the news for ten minutes or so before I slip back into the bedroom to change.

In April, even at this early hour, there is enough light to read by.

***

The news we were all expecting came on the Monday afternoon of what was supposed to be our Spring Break, just as I was swimming up from the depths of a depressed nap. Governor Inslee announced in a special press conference that schools would be closed through the end of the academic school year.

Three weeks earlier, on the Friday night of the first closure--the one that had us out for six weeks--one of my friends posted on Facebook: My teacher friends think it’ll be for the rest of the year. I couldn’t even begin to process the possibility. That day I believed I would still be able to meet my friends for lunch after we had practiced appropriate physical distancing for two weeks. I couldn’t have just said good-bye to my seniors. I couldn’t have walked to my car on that chilly Friday afternoon, thin snowflakes falling over the budding cherry blossoms, believing that was our last day.

***

I recognize situational depression for what it is, and I understand that this is different from trying to talk myself out of depression when my life, as it stands, is exactly the one I want. All the same, I find myself sliding into a strange and anxious inertia, which is how depression has always manifested for me. During the second or third week---I’ve lost track---I curled up on the couch after lunch for “just a quick power nap.” I asked my son to wake me after an hour if I wasn’t up already. The third or fourth time he hovered over me at the one-hour mark, I thought I detected a hint of worry behind his impish grin; Mama naps on Sunday afternoons, but rarely any other time. The next afternoon he asked, “Are you going to take a nap today?” And I said, “Nope, not today. Let’s take bikes over to the school.” He really just wanted to play Brawl Stars on the iPad, but more than that, he wanted me up and awake.

I need to be outside as much as possible, though even this becomes a source of guilt: I wouldn’t be walking all these miles under the cherry blossoms, under the trees bursting into bloom, if I were in my classroom. I feel guilty for savoring this gift. At the same time, I have begun to understand that maybe it’s gift and also a necessity, both. For a long time now I’ve managed my unsettled brain more or less quietly and on my own, and I’ve learned what I need in order to do that. And mostly it works.

It’s mostly working now, I suppose. I do try to extend myself that small grace.

***

Many of my colleagues began hosting Zoom class meetings immediately and are finding creative ways to engage with both their students and our staff, our colleagues and friends, and it both fills me with such pride--to work with, to learn from these incredibly dedicated folks--and a deep, unnameable grief. I miss my students so much, and I feel in no way adequate to engage with them in ways that matter. I certainly don’t feel like my efforts are worth posting on on social media. (I know--I do know--that social media is no way to measure self-worth, or competence, or anything at all that matters. Social media lies like depression does.)

I feel strangely detached from my teacher-self, the one that feels at home in a classroom. I don’t know how to navigate this territory as a teacher, or as a professional colleague. There is no feedback, no authentic human interaction that comes from just sharing space. Even meeting someone’s eyes in the hallway when you greet them in passing carries a significance I didn’t grasp until now, when everything happens through a screen.

I am lonelier than I would have imagined, so I should jump at chances to socialize online like a normal person, even though I’m no good at that either, online or in real life, even though I keep telling myself that this is the week I will try. The more days that pass in this way, the harder it becomes. I say that not to evoke pity--I am an introvert, and most of the time I am desperate to escape social gatherings so I can stay home and read my book, unless it’s a small group of friends who don’t need small talk, and who don’t make me feel like I need to measure anything on social media. These days I communicate with these friends mostly via texting or Facetime or Marco Polo, the app that allows you to send short videos back and forth. Like texting, but with a face. But I’m still lonely. I don’t know how to fix this. How to fix myself.

***

On our very first evening home after schools closed, my daughter made herself a detailed to-do list and a weekly running log.

“This is my homework for Conditioning,” she explained, as she used a ruler to section her paper into symmetrical boxes, complete with a space for a parent’s signature. “We’re supposed to run three times a week.”

We have our routines. Every day the kids read for an hour or more, though not usually all at once. They’re used to time set aside both at school and at home, and this is a thing I haven’t had to fight. I don’t know what they’re reading; I don’t keep track, and I don’t care at all whether they are reading books that are at their appropriate level. I don’t have them log their minutes or write anything down. We all just read. If my son wants to curl up on the recliner and reread Calvin & Hobbes, I don’t care. If my daughter wants to swing between comfort-reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid and a novel she slides off my shelf, I’m entirely fine with that.

I entered this period of quarantine with the idea that I would read everything on my list, everything I bought at Powell’s and the Elliott Bay Book Company for my birthday in February. I would write every single day.

And I do. I write, and I read, because it is the only way I know how to be in the in world. The only way I know how to connect, or to understand what I feel. But it is not the voracious, hungry reading I do when I feel the pulsing rhythm of my life and the necessity of reading to make sense of it all. Reading, for me, is not entertainment or escape; it is a way of understanding, of being. Only now I feel adrift, purposeless, unmoored. I want my reading to ground me, and I can barely focus. I think about what I said to my students on our last day together, my cheerful “You’ve got nothing but time!” What did I know?

I haven’t done a great deal to manage my children’s “distance learning.” Or whatever it is we’re calling it. They take turns at my old laptop, the one I’ve set aside for this very purpose. They practice typing. They work on math. My daughter reads the e-mails her teachers sends; she watches the videos and she she dutifully works on the packet the district sent home the second week, to tide us over until we can figure out which students need access to technology.

“The packet is boring, though,” she says. I don’t contradict her. This isn’t what education is supposed to look like. My daughter can “demonstrate mastery” of a standard or skill to satisfy a requirement, and it means absolutely nothing without human connection. I didn’t become a teacher to help my students check off standards and skills from a list of things that will eventually lead them to a diploma; I have to believe it means more than that. I have to believe that the purpose of education still includes engaging people in their world, so they can participate in changing it for the better. So how do I respond to the e-mails from my students who ask, “If this isn’t graded, do I have to do it?”

I was going to wait to tell my kids. I had to think about it first. My daughter is in eighth grade, and next year she won’t be following most of her friends to our feeder high school; she’ll be attending the school where I teach. That means this is it. There will be no more band concerts with the director who brought her out of herself to be a force on a trumpet. No more field trips, music contests, or lunchtime banter.

But my daughter walked into the kitchen while I wiped tears from my eyes.

“What is it?”

So I had to tell her. She wrapped her arms around my waist and tucked her head underneath my chin. She has to bend down slightly to do that now.

Later she threw a fistful of crumpled papers into the recycle bin.

“What’s that, Bug?”

“My conditioning log and my reading log. It’s not like it matters anymore.”

***

In the meantime, I have become someone who walks, every day. Every morning, I slip out of the house before my husband and daughter are awake. I walk the cool, quiet streets, zipping my hoodie against the chill, and I feel a strange and overwhelming gratitude: for these views of Puget Sound, the mountains rising beyond the water. For the scent of spring. The budding trees, and the very last of the cherry blossoms drifting in the morning breeze and collecting in soft pink piles at my feet. I think this walking is what will save me. This is what keeps me moving and breathing and grateful to witness the world coming to life around me, bursting into bloom.

Never believe I don’t understand how senselessly privileged I am.

***

Last Tuesday night, April’s full moon--a pink supermoon, the first full moon of spring--rose above our city. I woke in the middle of the night and parted the blinds to gaze across our backyard. I wondered who else might be awake at that hour. The silence in our neighborhood at that hour is deep; some leave porch lights on all night, but I couldn’t hear even a passing car in the distance. Still, I suspected that the silent sky covers other restless sleepers, kept awake by their own churning anxieties. All the same, even this pre-dawn glow offers a different glimpse of a world I’m still learning, and that, too, seems like a gift. The kids’ swingset cast a shadow across the grass, and it seemed like almost enough light to read by.