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Sore Throat
I woke up with a sore throat this morning.* I’m writing this at 5:30 in the morning. A few minutes ago, I woke up with a slight headache and a sore throat. It’s the kind of thing that I would have totally dismissed a month ago. I would have pulled myself together, taken an Advil, gone running with Purva and taught a day’s worth of lessons, never thinking about the sore throat again. But these are not normal times, are they? So I’m sitting in my living room drinking honey and lemon tea, trying not to freak out. I can already hear what my dad and sister are going to…
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This Is Not a Referendum
I cannot do 5th grade math. I’m not saying this to be dramatic. I simply don’t understand it. I never have, so the role of helping Claire with her math homework fell to my dad when he was here. But now that he’s gone, she just has me. And now that school has been cancelled, I’m her teacher as well as her mom. You’d think I would do okay with this new role. I mean, I am a teacher, so home school should be easy for me, right? Wrong. First of all, I don’t teach elementary school and I never have. So my content knowledge of things like 3rd grade…
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Be Still. Listen.
Every night, my dad reads to my boys. I’m not sure when this routine began. I know that for a long time after Shawn died, I was an active participant in bedtime for Austin and Tommy. Sometimes I read to them, or I laid on their beds as I watched them fall asleep. But slowly, my dad took over the routine. Because Claire goes to bed a bit later now, I’ve started to sit in the room with them while my dad reads their bedtime story. And that is what I’m doing right now as I write. I am listening to the sound of my 72-year-old father read to his…
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Alone
I may need to give up social media for the next few months. I’m serious. I mean, I’m getting a lot of great information from the journalists I follow and I am able to connect with many people that I can’t see face-to-face anymore. It’s important to my writing that I remain on social media. And really, I find out things happening in my local community a lot easier through social media than I do through any other means. But dear GOD, I’m starting to really hate all the “happy coronavirus” photos. Listen, I’m a contributor as well. I post the photos of my kids playing outside and dutifully finishing…
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Our Safe Space
Like many other parents in DC, I went to pick up my children after school on Friday, bracing myself for what was to come. It felt like the end of the year, in a way. We knew the kids would be out for at least two and a half weeks, and the uncertainty about the future was palpable. Still, the children seemed excited, more than anything else. Austin and Tommy ran around on the field, and I let them, knowing that once we left the school I wasn’t going to let them play much with anyone else. I figured they could have one last game of tag, since they’d been…
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Remembering Shawn and The Tragically Hip
As the second anniversary of Shawn’s death approached, I knew I needed to be more proactive than I had been on the first anniversary. That day, exactly one year after Shawn died, I decided that I would go to work and teach my high school classes. I mean, what was I thinking? I only had two classes that morning, but I cried in both of them, including while I was lecturing to my seniors about something like state sovereignty. (To be fair, this was one of those times when a terrible mistake leads to a real life lesson. Many of the students reached out to me afterwards and later that…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
