Distractions

So we are all stuck at home. According to epidemiologists, we are still 3 weeks away from our peak. We have a road to travel before we get to our new normal, and we are all grieving the life we knew before this.

When I was pregnant with Joey, I read a lot about distraction during the early part of labor. The idea is that the path from early contractions to baby is long, and the less you can focus on them, the better. (This was only true for me with my first baby. The other three arrived so quickly that my midwife wore a catcher's mitt. Not really.)

The process we are going through right now feels a lot like labor, or maybe that's just how I make sense of it. We are still in the early stages. The numbers of sick and dead go up every day, and will continue to do so for a while. We do not know what our world will look like when this is all over, but for now, our job is to stay home and wait, and distract ourselves.

Here is a brief list of the things my family has been doing to keep ourselves occupied during this early stage:

1. I started a neighborhood baking group on Facebook. It began a week or two ago when I realized that I had lots of sourdough starter, and offered to put some on the tailgate of our truck for neighbors who wanted to learn sourdough baking. I gave away nine or ten starters. Then it exploded. It turns out a lot of folks are distracti-baking lately. Is that a word?

2. My kids are reorganizing bookshelves and closets. They like this project a lot less than I do. And we've only lived in our house for five months, so there's not a ton to do, but it's keeping us busy and that's a good thing. The older two are learning a lot about organizing, and have been proudly showing me how they put frequently used objects in the front and rarely used things in the back.

3. Screens. I'm going to be real here. We seriously limit screen time, normally. But this is not normal. Normally we'd be on spring break right now. Our neighborhood would be filled with other kids to play with. We'd be having campfires and inviting friends to stay in our RV and hang out at the beach with us.

We do get outside every single day, rain or shine. But when it's 1:00 and we've done chores and outside time and some semblance of school and had breakfast and lunch? Go crazy, children. Call your friends on Roblox. Build a house in Minecraft. Yes, you can watch a movie on the iPad. We've added 30 day trials of multiple extra channels on the Roku, too. This is not the time (for us) to worry about screen limits.

4. Blogging. Again, here's the reality: it's been hard for me to put together a coherent post lately. Jesse and I went for a walk this morning and I told him that it feels as if I'm standing in a crowded room. All four of our kids are asking me for something, music (of the kind that I cannot ignore) is playing loudly, there's a bad smell in the corner that I should probably do something about, there is something on the stove that might boil over soon, and I hear a dog whining like they're about to go potty on the floor. I have all kinds of ideas and thoughts, but the chaos is overwhelming and it's difficult to communicate them in a way that makes sense. That's okay. The important thing is to write and share, even when it reads as nonsense.

I had a conversation with Faith the other day about the historic significance of this time. She just finished reading Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl. and has been doing some journaling; writing and drawing pictures of her life during this time. One of the things I love about Anne's diary is that she very rarely talks about what is going on outside. What's happening inside is enough, and she recognizes that one day, her stories will be important. Our stories will be important.

What are you doing to distract yourself right now?

In Case it Needs to Be Said

I posted a blog yesterday about my worries, here on the Washington coast. Apparently it rubbed someone the wrong way, so let me just state this once:

I am not an expert, and I never claimed to be one.

I am a wife, a mom, a blogger, a gardener, a baker, and a sometimes fiber artist. I am not an epidemiologist. In fact, I don't even have a bachelor's degree. I can tell you how to get rid of blossom end rot on your tomatoes, and I can make cottage cheese from raw milk without a recipe. I am not a statistician or a doctor or a medical professional.

There are plenty of really good expert articles out there. Note: if your source is a blogger, like me, they are probably not experts either. "I did a lot of research" does not an expert make, because while researching is a very good thing, non-experts (like me) don't know how to interpret much of the information they're reading. And, at least right now, the real experts are way too busy helping and working and trying to save us all to write blogs.

It is up to us, the non-experts, to talk about life during these crazy times. In a hundred years, our grandchildren and great grandchildren will have the benefit of knowing exactly what happened, but they'll also want and need perspective and opinions, from people who lived through it. Maybe they'll read a posting like my last one and laugh, because the crisis turned out to be completely overblown. Wouldn't that be great?

In the meantime, I'm going to tell the approximately four people who read my blog what I see and hear, what I'm thinking about it, what I'm scared of, and what I have hope for. I have no plans to stop sharing my observations because someone doesn't like it. It's not about that person.

I cannot tell anyone's story but my own, and I'm not trying to. My blogs are my thoughts and my feelings. They help me to process and organize the chaos in my head, and to tell you the truth, I'm not really interested in debating. Debating is a thing where one of us wins and one of us loses. I'm interested in hearing your opinion, whether it differs from mine or not. Especially if it differs from mine. I'm not, however, interested in arguing about it.

Again, I am not an expert, and I do not claim to be. I'm just a mom, on day 8 of heavy duty social distancing. Keep the faith. Stay at home. Be well. And tell your story.

Pandemic or Panic? Time Will Tell.

Worry, worry, worry. I'm not going to lie. I've been worried lately. I tend to be a bit of a worrier anyway. But, obviously, worry in the time of pandemic is something else.

We moved to our small beach town about four months before we actually found our house. During that time, we stayed in an RV park filled with retirees. We had a campfire almost every weekend night (except during that very weird week in July when it POURED every day,) and our neighbors would stop by, grab a seat, and chat for a while. Our "next door" neighbors were my parents' age and we became very close over the summer. We shared dinners and desserts and they brought my kids this stuff that sends up colored sparks when you toss it in the fire, and knitted me a pair of socks.

Another neighbor gave my oldest his first job. He had a bunch of wood that he needed stacked, and his COPD prevented him from doing it himself. Joey was so proud when he came home with a crisp bill in his hand.

The owners of the RV park are also retirees. We did not make our reservations in time, so there were a couple of weekends (including Independence Day) when we were going to have to pack up our 41 foot RV, all four of our kids, all six of our bikes, and go somewhere else, because our spot had been reserved by people with better planning skills. If you've ever tried to find a campsite in the Pacific Northwest for 4th of July weekend, you know what a nightmare that was going to be.

Luckily for us, the owners of the park are brilliant and thoughtful, and they rearranged EVERYTHING so that we did not have to move. When J, the landlady, came over to tell me that we could stay, she was so excited that she was bouncing. We hugged and I thanked her profusely. Then I went inside our RV and cried, because that level of kindness doesn't come around all that often.

Our neighbors here are an older man and his partner. They have given me a thorough history of the neighborhood, and the day we moved in, they made sure I knew that the path to the beach (which has a sign saying PRIVATE PROPERTY on it) belongs to the entire neighborhood, and not to let anyone tell me that we couldn't use it. When a tree fell across the road after a windstorm this past winter, they loaned Joey a pair of kevlar chaps, for safety, and encouraged him to learn to use the chainsaw. They delighted in our Christmas lights being up until Epiphany.


So here's how all of this fits in with my worry: it is these people, these relationships, this virus...that are keeping me up at night. I do not know how this will all shake out. Maybe in six months, maybe earlier, we will realize that all of this shutting down was a tempest in a teapot. Maybe we will have sacrificed our spring breaks, our schools, our economy. Maybe in 2035, when our grandchildren are finally using the last of our stockpiled toilet paper, we will look back on all of this and laugh at our panic and silliness.

Time will tell.

But here's what I know: it was not for nothing. Sacrifice for the sake of keeping other people safe (even if the threat turns out to be smaller and less threatening than we anticipated) will NEVER be a mistake. Sacrifice of our convenience for another person's life is beautiful, and holy, and good. Sacrifice of, even, our jobs and our livelihood for the sake of another human is worthy.

It's not fun. It's painful and scary, and if this virus does NOT kill hundreds of thousands of people, it will be tempting to look back in bitterness and anger. You mean we gave up months of income and school and being able to find beans and rice in the grocery store for nothing?

No. Not for nothing. For your neighbors. And that is wonderful.

An Open Letter to the Weekend People

Dear Tourist/Weekend/Spring Break/Summertime Friends,

It's spring break! What an exciting time! I'll bet that that you can't wait to come to your beach house or mountain cabin, or for your week at that great hotel where you and your family have been staying for six generations and they know you by name. But as a full time resident of a tourist town, I'm going to ask you a favor.

Please, don't. Please stay home.

I know, I know. That's not what you wanted to hear, and as Americans in the 21st century, we are REALLY not used to hearing the word NO. Maybe you think all of this coronavirus/Covid-19 stuff is a sham, or nothing to worry about, and besides! You're not sick!

But here's the deal:

If you do get sick, this tiny tourist town cannot help you. Our hospital has 25 beds and no isolation rooms. We don't even have a maternity ward. You absolutely don't want to get sick here. You know how in Italy, folks in their 30s and 40s are dying from this disease, because their hospitals are overcrowded and underequipped? That could happen in a day, in this town. Maybe you're not sick today. But if you are coming from an area with hundreds of cases, you might be sick tomorrow. Do you really want to GET sick in a place where you cannot get the help you need? What if you need a ventilator and we don't have any? For that matter, what if you have a heart attack, and our ER can't get to you because they're too busy dealing with Covid-19 patients?

What I have not mentioned yet are the people who live here full time. For you, this is your summer home. This is your vacation. This is the place where you go to let your hair down and fly kites and have fun, and we WANT you to have that. Frankly, our economy depends on it. But for us, it's home. Everyone deserves to feel safe at home. When the population of our tiny village triples overnight, the stores are suddenly empty, and you're coughing into the avocados, our home starts to feel scary and unsafe, especially for the 60% of our full time residents that are over 65.

Once this is all over, please come back. We will welcome you with open arms. We will rejoice in the go-karts re-opening and the bookstores being packed, and the restaurants having a two hour wait time for a table. We will greet you happily on the beach and share our clamming guns and hand you a glass of wine when you stop by our campfire.

But for now, please stay home. And buy gift certificates.

Sincerely,

Your tourism-loving, full-time resident neighbor.

Reach Out Anyway

"That is my spot. In an ever changing world, it is a simple point of consistency. If my life were expressed as a function in a four-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, that spot, at the moment I first sat on it, would be [0, 0, 0, 0]." Dr. Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory

We moved to this town four months ago. Actually, technically, we moved here back in May, but weren't official residents until we bought our house, four months ago. We haven't really found "our spot" yet. We've met some wonderful people. Our neighbors and the ladies at the library are friendly and sweet. But we are not church-goers, and our kids are homeschooled, so our opportunities for making solid friends are a little limited, especially since we live in a tourist area where 80% of the population leaves in September.

It's okay. There are six of us, and we live at the beach, so we are not exactly short on social time. We've had lots of guests come up, sleep in our RV, and hang out with us. Yesterday my kids ran around for hours with the weekend kids in the house behind us. We're far from desperately lonely, but we'd like to have some local buddies to do stuff with.

Yesterday we found a new couch at a yard sale, so this morning we gave away our old one to a woman about my age, with a teen and a preteen. We got to chatting, and found out we had gone to the same high school. Spotting a chance to (hopefully) make a mom friend, I sent her a friend request on social media, along with a message asking her to come over for coffee.

Her reply was short, and came hours later. She is too busy, and will be for the foreseeable future. She declined my friend request.

Do you have an Inner Bully in your head that whispers mean things to you? I do. It tells me that there is something wrong with me; that I am broken or weird or gross, that I am clearly too selfish and too eager and too MUCH for anyone to actually want to be friends with. My IB tells me that I have nothing to offer; that my current friends aren't friends at all and I'm some icky project person that they feel sorry for because they're so nice.

There are lots of ways to get an Inner Bully. Maybe you got yours from an abusive parent, or a bad marriage, or bullies when you were a kid. It doesn't really matter where you picked up your IB, except to know that you are not alone. Many of us struggle against that voice, right along with you.

Now hear this:

The Inner Bully is a liar. Yesterday, when I read that reply, I got upset. I felt rejected. And my IB got really loud for a moment, until I remembered that IBs are dirty lying punks. None of that stuff is true. I'm enough. I'm sweet and smart and insightful and kind. I'm funny. I see the good in humanity. I'm optimistic. Anyone would be lucky to have me as a friend.

If this particular lady doesn't want to be my friend, that's okay. Because a long time ago, I realized something: I will never regret reaching out, even if it ends in rejection. Maybe she has stuff going on in her life that she can't talk about, and is scared to open up to a new friendship. Maybe she's just not interested. But she will always know that someone cared. Someone wanted to be friends with her, and that's important. My reaching out might be the incident that reminds HER that her own IB is a liar.

Here's to reaching out. Every day, if possible. Here's to rejecting each of our Inner Bullies, and telling others "You are enough. You are worthy of friendship and kindness and someone bringing you a coffee at work, and listening to you complain about your kids." Here's to saying YES to the possibility of joy, even if it feels risky. Here's to finding our "spot" and if it doesn't exist, here's to making a new one.

(PS: if you haven't watched The Big Bang Theory, go watch it already. I'll loan you the Blu-rays. I know, I know, it's a painfully uncool sitcom and there are problematic bits and it's not perfect. It's okay for things just to be funny sometimes, though. Go laugh.)