“School”
In mid-May, I sent a vulnerable message to my friend Morgan: ha ha ha ha what are you guys doing for the summer? Morgan’s kid is my older kid’s best friend and we live a few houses away from each other.
In 2005, there was a guy in his twenties in South Korea who collapsed and died after playing StarCraft for several days without stopping. Heart failure caused by exhaustion. It felt possible that Nick and I would experience our own version of death-by-StarCraft if we did not get some childcare relief.
From there, Morgan and I struck a heavenly arrangement. Morgan had been in talks with a longtime family friend, a college student, to babysit for them. The addition of our two kids meant peer socialization for all the kids, full-time childcare for the parents, and with two families paying up, the babysitter could earn more than she would make at the Amazon fulfillment warehouse, which was her only other option in pandemic summer.
The kids were at the neighbor’s half the week, and at our house half the week. Nick and I experienced our home without children in it. The kids arrived home sweaty, cheerful, and exhausted at 5 p.m. I inhaled properly, using my diaphragm and shit, for the first time since March. My brain unshriveled like a dried-up plant finally tasting rain.
For a few weeks, I was able to just float in the salt tank of it; every day was a snow day, stolen time. Dependable childcare was a summer camp romance made more sweet and more tragic by the built-in end date. I downloaded a countdown widget on my phone so that I knew how many days we had left before our sitter went back to college. It was meant to motivate me to take care of myself and get things done. Only 40 days left to take a PTO day and spend it watching TV! Thirty-nine days left to paint the trim in the bedroom! The countdown made me too sad and I dragged it into the trash pretty quickly. I didn’t need the countdown on my phone to know that the sands of summer were bombing down the hourglass.
Summer couldn’t last (it never does) but autumn was unimaginable. I mean, we very much were not able to imagine it! It wasn’t until July 28 that my son’s school district announced plans to start the school year fully remote, whatever that means for a kindergartener. Desi wasn’t even 5 yet at that point and lasted about 30 seconds on WhatsApp calls with my parents before wandering off or saying to their [video] faces that he was bored. It wasn’t until August 3rd that the college where my husband teaches announced plans to go remote for the semester.
My daughter’s daycare was set to open at the end of August and we planned to send her back with the knowledge that even that blessed arrangement was one dry cough from coming undone. What was the point in trying to have an expectation? In August, we learned to expect major job cuts from my husband’s and my employer later this fall. In August, my father-in-law, hundreds of miles away in Ohio, received a terminal cancer diagnosis.
We were able to hire a sitter for two days a week for Desi, and Nick and I are splitting the remaining three days of the school week. Having a plan, and that plan not immediately falling apart, has given me a psychic boost.
Endurance athletes hit a “wall” when their glycogen reserves get depleted. It’s why I used to cram jellybeans in my sports bra before a race and fish around for them at mile 20. The first bite of those jellybeans, half-melted by tit sweat, gave me the thrust to keep moving. I needed the sugar but I also just needed to know relief was coming.
Eventually, I will run out of leave to do this. What will happen with Desi at that point? Three things seems equally likely to me: that my son’s school will stay closed all school year, that our school district will get corrupted by our stooge of a governor and reopen prematurely, or that our rural, low community transmission county will be able to safely reopen sometime this school year. I have not bothered to imagine childcare solutions for any of those contingencies because each is flavored by the national election, by flu season, by the speed of metastasis, by job insecurity. The fractal of the next few months exceeds my powers of imagination. I have been playing StarCraft for 184 days straight and I haven’t gotten any good at it.
yr mate,
Evie
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