Finding Hope in the Pokemon Journeys Theme Song
The night before the first day of school, Ryan smiled at me as I puttered around in the tupperware cabinet, rearranging the new reusable sandwich baggies and double-checking my stash of lunchbox joke cards.
“How are you feeling?” He asked. “About them going back to school?”
“Great!” I said. It was a true, if incomplete answer.
I’d been homeschooling my kids for the last year and a half. I was proud that they’d learned about the electoral college, food webs, and how to write cinquains on my watch. Less proud that they’d learned to say “what the fuck,” but look, I believe in holistic education, emotional intelligence, and no such thing as bad words. Plus I’m human. A sweary, homeschooling human.
I did, indeed, feel FUCKING GREAT about sending them back to school.
The first week back, I lunged for joy like it was the last slice of cheese pizza at the birthday party. I went to the gym every day, did a jigsaw puzzle on a Tuesday afternoon. I revised and submitted a pilot to a few contests, and I got a spicy lentil wrap from Trader Joe’s on Wednesday, just as a treat, just because.
And I cleaned the shit out of my house. It was time. It was past time. We were sitting on the cusp of condemnable. For again, I am human, and those dog days way down at the bottom of August found me saying yes to every request for screen time while I allowed every flat surface in my house to grow an ecosystem of food wrappers, rejected bananas, Target receipts, mugs of cold coffee, and Lego. Those clean counters? FUCKING GREAT.
We’re almost a month in now, and I’ve got this weird feeling—yes, I still feel GREAT. Not just about my hours of freedom that I can give to my own work, but also about the way my kids are thriving in their classrooms. But I also feel… other… things.
Here are some of the things.
Profoundly changed
Last year was supposed to be the first year both my sons would be in full-time school. But I rounded the corner to what was supposed to be my finish line and found the course had been extended by another full marathon, this one without any water stations.
I’d love to be able to say that I crossed that finish line this year with the same gratitude and elation that I would have crossed it last year. Sadly, I’ve been running this whole fucking time, and when I say I “finished the marathon” I mean I dragged myself across the line with two children hanging on my legs and panted, “Please God let it be over.”
Yes, we made it. Yes, my kids are both in school. Yes, it’s only one year later that I’m regaining my days, and yes, I do feel some of the GREAT I’d been expecting to feel. But that surprise year of running didn’t just wear me out.
It’s not like the Katie of March 2020 hopped in a time machine and landed here, a little tuckered out from the trip a year later. Katie 2020 died a slow death over the last year, and from her ashes rose Katie 2021: a woman who is more of everything she was a year ago: kinder and more merciless, stronger and more anxious, more extroverted and more introverted, angrier and even more EXTREMELY into ice cream and slippers.
Last year gave me the gift of intense gratitude and learning how to comfort myself and my family.
It also blew up my trust in people, systems, and the length of marathons.
Joy Urgency
… which is why you will STILL find me lunging for joy, almost a month into the school year. It is very hard for me to create a routine with these hours. I have zero faith I will have them again tomorrow.
Look, I believed in the promise of tomorrow and the momentum of routine once before - the year was 2020, and the month was March, and if I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have wasted a second of those last few hours of wide-open normalcy on shit I didn’t want to be doing.
Why didn’t I get a fucking HAIRCUT? Why didn’t I get a PEDICURE and go to lunch with my FRIENDS and go to a bookstore and sip coffee and browse??? I MUST DO ALL THE THINGS WHILE I CAN! I’M APPLYING TO GRADUATE SCHOOL AND GETTING A TATTOO!!!
Remember how we all laughed at our grandparents for keeping years of newspapers in the garage and crates of empty jars and boxes and boxes of twisty-ties from bread bags? Remember how our parents tsked us and explained, “They were kids during the Great Depression”?
Okay, so, fast forward fifty years and I believe our grandkids are going to be laughing at us for being like “It’s TUESDAY let’s do KARAOKE and HOOKAH and go to the LIBRARY because we CAN! You never know what tomorrow will bring!!!” Our grown children will tsk them and explain, “They were adults during the Pandemic.”
Vigilance
I’m trying to remain present, and practice gratitude for every day my kids get in a classroom where they’re loved, protected, and nurtured.
I’m also trying to formulate a Plan A, B, and C for every possible future scenario. FOOL ME ONCE, MARCH 2020, YOU SKETCHY HOE.
Thanks to Covid, “every possible future scenario” now spans the fifty-seven square miles between “classmate gets a runny nose” to “my entire family goes on ventilators,” and thanks to the fact that both facts and public opinions about Covid protocols keep shifting, the information I’m using to formulate Plans A, B, and C, for fifty-seven square miles of scenarios keeps SHIFTING TOO.
I am maintaining a mental binder of anti-Covid missions that are ready to go at a moment’s notice.
Self-doubt
… but dammit all to hell if I don’t keep meeting scenarios that are not covered by my binder.
Add another tab, team. Chicken just licked a door handle and Buster had a loose poop. Not like a full blown Taco Bell, but definitely in the neighborhood of “the trots.” Should we get Covid tests? Cancel swim practice in 72 hours? Lock it down? Or proceed as planned?
This part was easier when we were homeschooling, to be honest.
If one of my kids sneezed on a Wednesday morning, it was like, “WAS THAT A SNEEZE?!? … … … Okay, well, as you were. No change I guess. We’ll stay home, like we do, because we are homeschooling in a pandemic.” It wasn’t like an errant sneeze could cancel our date to play Minecraft on FaceTime with their cousins in Tennessee.
It wasn’t like we were canceling swim practice—there was no swim practice.
NOW THERE IS SWIM PRACTICE. There are DIMENSIONS to our days, vectors, contacts, and risks to others we have to weigh.
Now we are carpooling with our neighbors, which feels both environmentally responsible and epidemiologically perilous.
Between all the kids we’re schlepping back and forth, we’ve got crossover between five classrooms. What do I do if a kid in one of the classrooms is coughing? What do I do if one of our kids does the Wednesday morning sneeze? What do I do if I wake up with a headache?!?
Fresh out of fucks
WE DIDN’T HAVE TO FUCKING BE HERE A YEAR LATER YOU ASSHOLES
1 IN 500 PEOPLE DEAD WHILE THE NEW YORK TIMES PUBLISHES AN OP ED LIKE “IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE, IT COULD HAVE BEEN 1 IN 50 DEAD!” LIKE THAT’S A FUCKING HOT TAKE WHEN ANYONE WHO’S SEEN SOMETHING ABOUT MARY KNOWS THAT THIS IS JUST AN OP ED ABOUT SIX MINUTE ABS
AND THIS IS A GLOBAL PANDEMIC, SO NAMED BECAUSE THESE VARIANTS CAN SPREAD “ANYWHERE ON THE GLOBE”
SO QUIT HOARDING THE FAUCI OUCHIES LIKE A PATRIOTIC PANDEMIC SMAUG
AND GET VACCINES TO EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO CAN HAVE ONE
EVEN IF YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT LIVES YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR SUPPLY CHAIN DON’T YOU SO YES
EVERY PERSON
YES EVEN THE ONES WHO SPEAK OTHER LANGUAGES AND EAT SPICY FOOD
BECAUSE I AM OVER IT
DO YOU HEAR ME
OVER
IT
Disappointed in myself
I live my life and I’m happy in it. I believe I’m generally optimistic. But I see other people making travel plans and I fear that I’m choosing a small life, that my reality is somehow my fault, and that fear disappoints me.
I know I’m making the best choices for my kids and family. But dammit, I see people weighing possibilities by how much they want them and how good they will feel, and not how much they might cost, and my jealousy disappoints me, too.
I’m doing a bang-up job of faking certainty when my kids are around, but they’re in school now. So I have six hours a day, every day, with no one to fake it for.
True, those flat surfaces in my house are pretty fucking clean, and that feels GREAT. But even that disappoints me. Clean counters please you? How embarrassing. The most important thing you could do with this precious gift of time was wipe a counter? Oh, honey.
The disappointment sends me running into the arms of Joy Urgency (It’s Tuesday! Dye your hair!!! The salons could close tomorrow!), which gets stopped in its tracks by Vigilance (Do you have a plan for if you find out the woman at the salon is unvaccinated?) which diverts me back around to Fresh out of Fucks (WHY WOULD YOU REFUSE TO PROTECT YOUR CLIENTS) and after an hour of feelings during which I folded towels, had a cup of tea, wrote this blog post, and legitimately felt GREAT about it, I remembered I just spent 60 minutes waffling on going to the salon and I’m disappointed in myself again.
I feel certain this cycle is my new normal.
I am a human dryer ball, bouncing off the hot walls of a machine that never stops running.
And I just realized… I’ve made the same mistake, just now, that I made in March 2020, only instead of believing that outside life today is as it will be for the foreseeable future, I’m believing that my inside life is as it will be for the foreseeable future.
How can I possibly know such a thing? In fact, the only thing I know for sure is that someday soon my insides or outsides will totally change, by an inch or a mile, to the left or the right or outside the fucking lines. I don’t know how or when, but I do know.
As the Pokemon Journeys theme song says, “Whatever happens, in the end we’ll forever be changed,” am I right?
Yes, I’m quoting the Pokemon Journeys theme song.
It’s a GOOD SONG, OKAY?
And as much as this season feels like an emotional hurricane, it’s also a relief to be in a position where my feelings don’t have to be pushed under a mask of confidence because I have little humans to model stability for.
So today I am GREAT. I’m seeking joy urgently. I’m vigilant and skeptical, consumed with self-doubt, fresh out of fucks, and disappointed with myself, again. Holy shit, how fantastic that I can feel this!
I’m kidding about that last sentence, I would like to stop feeling my feelings immediately, but right now I am, in the words of the Pokemon Journeys theme song once again, “Headstrong, stepping headlong into the dark.”
And tomorrow, who knows! If the world can fall apart seemingly overnight, I can certainly start to put myself together in the same amount of time.