Making Lemons out of Lemonade

Yesterday was one of the hardest days I’ve had in a while. For the most part, I’ve been fine. I’ve been okay with the whole lockdown thing, okay with the whole distance learning thing, okay with limited social interaction. It’s not ideal; of course, none of it is. But yesterday was the day it all broke loose. Waking up to loud car music outside, much too early after having stayed up far too late the night before. Doing my team meeting with fellow teachers only to find out that, in a move that surprised no one, school is closed for the summer. I expected it. Everyone did, probably. I even half wanted it, at least, preferred it to the alternative of having to be distant from everyone at the school and see myself and all the kids and staff turned into emotionless, distant, masked robots. But I thought I could handle it, hearing the news. I was wrong.

I spent the rest of the entire day thinking about my kids, my school, my friends. I got feedback from a parent that they loved the videos I’ve been sending out and how grateful they were for us. Which, was amazing. Until it hit me that going into kindergarten, this might be his last impression of me. There’s a ton of kids I’m never going to see again, and even if we do a virtual graduation or distance graduation, they’re kids I’m not gonna get to teach again. Most of the afternoon I spent creating worksheets for parents, trying to come up with concepts for materials that many parents won’t even use. That’s more than fair; I prefer the in-person learning too, and if I could, I’d be checked out too. I miss learning by doing art projects or science experiments or sitting around the circle doing calendar, and no matter how many videos I make of it it’s not the same.

I texted my coworkers and friends Bre and Marissa, talking about school and videos and the fact I might have given myself poison ivy doing a video (which to be fair, I was going to get from yard work regardless of whether or not I made a video of it). We sent quirky videos back and forth, laughed at each other. And the entire day I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I miss them. It’s one thing to have your college mates who don’t actually live near you anymore and you only see so often now anyway (but I still miss insanely), it’s another thing to spend your entire day with these guys and all the sudden not even get to say goodbye.

And now, there’s another three months. Three months without friends, three months of isolation. Three months without the kids that bring me so much joy and make me smile every day. At the end of the three months, half of them will be gone, graduated and on to bigger and better things. Three months of nothing, of static purposelessness. There’s a bunch of logistical concerns: will I have a job/be paid over the summer, can I travel or do anything fun without these stupid masks and distance rules, how do I occupy myself for another three months? But I don’t even care about all that stuff right now. I just want to see my friends, and not from a distance. I want to see my kids, not from a screen. Ideally, I’d like the world back. But really, all I want is a hug. I want someone to tell me it’s all okay.

A Bizarro World

The world’s not normal. This isn’t how people are supposed to live, and it’s not how the future is supposed to be. Anyone who tells you that this is the “new normal” is trying to sell you something. You can look at virus infection rates and you can look at the deaths and yeah, it’s bad. Viruses aren’t meant to be pretty. But when you factor in everything else, from abuse to depression to suicides, overdoses, economic turmoil, unemployment, loss of basic freedoms… to me it doesn’t seem worth it. I get it, we should exercise precaution and do what we can to save lives. But put bluntly, this is not life. And don’t take this the wrong way, this kind of life is hardly worth living sometimes.

A lot of people realize that as it is, life like this isn’t right, and a lot of them want to do something about it. There's the do-ers, the ones who work tirelessly to care for others handling medicines or unemployment or food shortages. There's the fighters, the protesters and angry Facebookers who want to take matters in their own hands to return things to ‘normal’. And unfortunately, there's the crumble-ers, the ones who fall under the pressure and feel like they can't do anything, who just want the bad dream to end. You might sympathize with one side or another, or some days, all three. There’s days you pray for a vaccine, plot to overthrow the government, and cry yourself to sleep. Maybe it's all in the same day. Yesterday was one of those days. One of those days you feel hopeless and alone and where you just want the bad dream to end.

The truth is, life is life. And maybe you can't change it with a snap of your fingers. But even if you can't change it all and snap the world back to normal, you can change how you look at it.

Loving Life

Having almost all of your human interaction through a screen is weird. FaceTiming family, texting friends, Zooming kids… it leaves something to be desired. So finding time or motivation to attend virtual church, even when you’ve got nothing better to do, isn’t always easy. It takes twenty minutes for everyone to get signed on, not too many people know how to mute/unmute themselves, songs don’t sound quite right, and you miss the in-person connection you have in real life (but, maybe that’s not too different from most Zoom meetings). Either way, at times it’s a semi-required duty or something that just provides some kind of schedule doing it every Sunday. I can easily pray at home whenever I wish, and God hears me just the same without the lag. But last Sunday one thing I heard really stuck with me, and though I’ll try to keep it from getting preachy, I think it’s worth sharing. And all it really was was a simple phrase:

“Loving what God is doing”.

It struck me because it was so odd to hear. Perhaps, not normally, but now certainly. There’s a lot of shit going on. Ignore the grand scale of infections and closures and recession for a moment. I lost the world in front of me in about seventy two hours and haven’t had it for two months. Now it’s gonna be another three, at least. I lost a lot of the kids I was teaching. It’ll be a while before I see any of my friends, from the preschool or college or anywhere. Struggling to make distance learning work, if they even let me stay on for the summer. Trying to find a purpose, trying to find some hope, and seeing your hope constantly rise and get shot down and rise and get shot down. When you look at the surface, it is very, very, very difficult to love any part of what is going on.

That’s why it’s so important to find the reasons that make you continue to love life. Let me try and look at yesterday through a different point of view. I woke up early, and because of that I ended up texting, talking, and sending videos with my friends most of the morning and even into the afternoon. I miss them, a lot, but they’ve become more than just people I work with and the fact that we can goof off sending funny videos back and forth is amazing. I spent the afternoon planning necessary worksheets so I can spend other days doing more silly videos for the kids, which I get great feedback on from parents and coworkers. The weather was nice, so I spent part of the day outside and after work took my sister to practice driving. At the end of the day, chicken cordon bleu for dinner and watching an episode of Worst Cooks with the family (never thought I’d get to the point where I’m looking forward to watching an episode of Worst Cooks of America, but here we are).

It was a rough, and emotional day. And I'm not gonna claim an epiphany that I was wrong about it all yesterday and that just by shifting lenses things got better. But there’s still blessings, even on the hardest and worst of days, if you know where to look.

Lemons and Lemonade

"When life gives you lemonade,make lemons. Life will be all like, "Whaaaat?" " -Phil Dunphy (Ty Burrell), Modern Family

I’m not gonna pretend to say that life is fun right now, or that I love what God is doing, at least yet. Optimism is hard. But I can say that I should at least try. I’m gonna keep counting my blessings and finding ways to spin this in my favor. Some days, inevitably, are going to be harder than others. I’ll breakdown, I’ll feel alone, I’ll trudge through. But I will make it through. I have before. And so I will again.

For one thing, I’m not gonna let the fact that we won’t have traditional summer school get me down. Right now, it’s a month away anyway. So for now, take what you can and work with it. As hard as it is not seeing the kids, I can still connect with them through letters or videos or Zoom meetings. Even if it is less kids, it’s actually become a fair amount of fun making videos, which I’ve now planned out to make every day until the end of the school year. I initially started it to show my face a little and get more interaction from parents and kids, but it’s become something I enjoy making and doing. And more than just giving me something to do and a way to put myself out there, it’s helped give me some kind of purpose for the next few weeks.

I’m also gonna keep reaching out to my friends; preschool, college, or otherwise. I miss you guys. All of you. And sometimes I’m the kind of person that sucks at reaching out or checking in or even having long conversations (especially over text or call), but I do think about all the faces I’ve met and people I’ve befriended over the years and put simply I miss you. They say you don’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone, and I get that, but, it’s not really gone I don’t think. Even though it feels like it somedays, I’m not alone. I never will be.

I’m gonna keep running to get outside and exercise. I’m gonna keep doing yard work at my grandparents to see them six feet apart. I’ll keep going on walks and bike rides and watching Worst Cooks with my family during dinner. I’ll watch the birds from my window while I type up activities for the preschool and check on the nest camera we set up to watch baby birds. I’ll play card games and doodle pictures and write. I’ll bug my sister to help me film videos of calendar and cooking experiments and all that. I’ll watch the full moon in the night sky, the light in the darkness.

If you’d told me I’d have to go through five months of isolation, of distance learning, virtual interactions, and life in a zombie world, I wouldn’t have signed up. But if you look at the blessings you still have, it’s... not nearly as terrible as you’d imagine. Making lemonade out of lemons is tricky. It’s even trickier making lemons out of lemonade. Nothing makes sense, except, the things that always did. Friendship. Laughter. The outdoors, calm music, warm cookies and time with family. There’s a lot missing, but there’s a lot still there. It’s not the end of the world. And even if it was, well, I’d still be lucky because I have so much. There’s a couple things out there that no virus or government can take away. And it’s exactly that that’s worth holding onto.