Our morning routine

We set out tomorrow’s clothes, run the dishwasher and make at least part of the lunches, which we tuck lovingly into patterned lunchboxes stacked neatly in the fridge. The children put on their pajamas, brush their teeth and are in bed at a reasonable hour, reading quietly, each in his or her own bed. Once everyone wakes up they put on the set-out clothes, brush their teeth and come down for breakfast, which is at least somewhat healthy. Waffles with peanut butter and bananas, for instance; yogurt with granola. We finish the lunches and pack them in backpacks - if we haven’t decided to opt for school lunch that day, always a delight to busy parents! - and fetch coats or sweatshirts. The kids put on their socks and shoes, which are easily accessible and clean. Nobody has food on their t-shirt. No one is screaming at us that we “never listen to them” when they are trying to explain who actually hit who. We set out to conquer our respective days, one parent by car with the 7th grader, and the other on foot with the younger two to enjoy a pleasant walk to the elementary school, which is just down the road.

That is what happened the first day back from spring break a few weeks ago, when my children all returned to five-days-a-week instruction after a year of cobbling together hybrid schedule details, which I felt unquestionably grateful to have, yet each child’s week was a little different and I would often arrive in the pickup line at day’s end not remembering which kid I was there to retrieve. Both of them? One of them? Was someone getting the third? Wait. What?

On that first day back I felt a surge of energy, contemplating being in the house alone for a few hours a day, able to work without interruption. Without a sudden someone kindly or aggressively requesting a snack, the former, of course, preferred, but both, it just so happens, quite disruptive.

On that first day back our morning routine was notably successful as we embraced the glory of a new phase!

On the second day - the second day - our morning routine had lost some of its sparkle. It had reverted back to a version of our actual morning routine.

The one where we haven’t laid out any clothes because the night before we were very tired, despite it only being 8:30 pm, but J and I wanted to get in bed early and watch “Westworld,” which I haven’t decided if I like for its philosophical take on the idea of consciousness, or hate for its frequent violence and weirdness, and often weird violence. And the truth is I’d always rather be watching “Schitt’s Creek.”

So, when we wake up the next morning, maybe there are clean clothes that the children like neatly folded in their drawers, or, as happens too frequently, there are not clean clothes that the children like available, especially one child who is still, after all these years, very particular about which soft pants fit just right. I try to be sensitive, but I also try to soothe myself with the reminder that one day he will likely have a life partner, and this will be their problem.

Nora, who has never been a morning person - not since birth - tries to remember and set an alarm the night before, note the “tries.” If she forgets and we have to wake her up, she treats us with the vitriol her morning brain believes we deserves, shouting “No,” and “Stop” and both words together in a run-on sentence that ends with her turning over in her bed and decidedly not getting up. If she remembers to set her alarm, which, it should be noted, J and I never remember to remind her to do, she is, at least, mad at the alarm, and we are spared.

She is the world’s most lovely child. But. Once she is up, whatever the means, she sits at the kitchen counter and glares at the family because mornings are UNFAIR. Gabe is playing piano, or playing with Legos or has pilfered the detached head of one of Aidy’s beloved LOL dolls and is building a cage for it, and Aidy is, naturally, screaming. She is wearing her robe, hair wild, asking for breakfast, and asking again, and again. Aidy eats more breakfast than anyone I know. I am throwing cereal boxes around the kitchen counter and hurtling frozen waffles into the toaster oven.

J and I sometimes start the day with quiet coffee in bed, which is wonderful, or coffee while getting things going for the day, which is fine, too. Wherever we have our morning coffee, though, someone is making a complex structure out of paper, cardboard and plastic beads at the dining room table and finishing it is an emergency. You might argue, in a friendly fashion - so as not to anger the artist - that, hey, getting to school on time is a more crucial emergency! But you would be wrong.

The lunches are made, occasionally including the dregs of a bag of tortilla chips as a “side” if I have not been to the store in awhile. I deliver my regular speech about how we need to get the lunches at least partially made the night before. I deliver my regular threat to Nora that this is the last day for real that I will help her make her lunch because she is old enough to do it herself. I have a lot of pre-prepared speeches about lunches, it seems.

Nora is coming alive a little, at last, but she is also staring at the wall and school starts in ten minutes. I cautiously suggest that this is not the best use of her time and she tells me that she KNOWS STOP TELLING ME I KNOW before she and J finally get in the car and are off. As I stare lovingly out the front door at the two of them, I wonder, if you know, then why do you do it?

In the lull between their departure and mine, to walk the little siblings down the road to their elementary school, I ensure I am presentable enough to leave the household, at least by post-pandemic standards, and off we go. This is when I breathe a sigh of relief as all of the minors are out of the house and will not return until this afternoon. Except, wait, they will because Gabe forgot his mask, and obviously, he only likes three masks, and will we find one in the area designated for masks? The area inside the coat closet I’ve carefully curated with hooks, despite the fact that I get almost no reward for such organization and people like to leave masks, oh, in the garage, instead? We are pushing it on time but I don’t want to say we might be late because Aidy, the most carefree six-year-old I know, cares, in fact, very much about one thing, and it is not being late to anything wonderful and school, thank goodness, is solidly in that category. So, “hurry up,” I tell him gently, “we are…”

“ARE WE LATE?” yells Aidy and I tell her no, we are fine.

We are fine! He found a mask! We make our way, me with Aidy’s unicorn backpack and Gabe with his own. He tries to trip her and she shows him all her teeth as though, I don’t know? She might bite him? Then sprints ahead and does ten round-offs in a row, landing with her feet planted solidly side by side in the wet grass, hands above her heads like a baby Olympian. I am awed by her athletic prowess and her brother hates her inclination to show off, which is, let’s face it, exactly what this is. But we arrive at the school intact and happy and, also, fairly ready to part ways.

After saying hello to friends and the school staff - perpetually energetic, a perpetual inspiration over these nearly 14 months - I am on my way back. Alone, cheerfully plodding the sun-dappled straight-shot back to our quiet house, and convinced of one thing: tomorrow we will be more prepared.

I know, with a deep certainty, that most likely, we won’t. But we’ve got 24 hours to get there and, anyway, the potential is always the thing.

March to March

A little over year ago we got a call from the school system.

That afternoon I went to pick up my children and help with the play, “Seussical Jr.” I was on the committee, in fact, with two children enthusiastically in the cast and one (omg Gabe obviously) enthusiastically not.

But…should we go ahead with that last rehearsal? Some parents took their kids home right after dismissal, skipping it. Most of us stayed. The play would go on after this was over, we figured. There was no harm in gathering one last time, we figured. Already we were making decisions way above our pay grade.

That night we watched apocalyptic news, Nora sat down at the piano and announced she might as well learn to play the Journey song “Don’t Stop Believin’’” on the piano - something she’d been meaning to do anyway - with all this sudden free time. She was an premature adopter of the goal-setting state of mind associated with early quarantine, a stage most of reached a week or so later, and then decried a week after that, noting the hilarity of making goals in a brand new, long-term emergency state, who did we even think we were?

I drank like a half bottle of wine, while writing and responding to an incessant stream of text messages. A less productive reaction than my 11-year-old daughter’s, you might say.

It’s been a year/it’s been a year. I wanted to write about it but must admit it’s difficult to do so without encapsulating my sentiments into one of the obvious themes. So I decided to I wouldn’t try to resist, or even be creative, or even do the thing where I maintain perspective about this tragedy in the midst of illustrating my own experience. I just want to make sure you know that I have that - the perspective - and know well where our story lies among all the others. This year was hard, and it was hard for me in many ways, but our story is easy.

Even after giving myself that excuse, I tried writing and couldn’t find my momentum.

At first I thought I’d write a little about the things we’ve gained, without pretense, and without sabotaging my efforts by listening to the voice in my head warning me that writing about what you’ve “gained” during a really difficult year is pretty annoying, isn’t it? It is annoying! But it is also therapeutic, like the things themselves.

This year I went snowshoeing, for instance, and finally learned a way to truly enjoy the outdoors during a Connecticut winter, even for people like me, who are intensely nervous about winter sports like skiing, lacking the skillset and grace to enjoy them. We’d purchased snowshoes several years ago after becoming enchanted by a couple of hikers we’d met in the woods on a trip to the Berkshires, thinking, “That could be us!” J used his a few times, but mine mostly hung in the garage, giving the illusion that I was a person who did things like that, when I very much wasn’t.

This year, however, prompted by the need to get out and having nowhere really to go except, well, outside, I took them down from the garage shelf. I went with friends several times. Not every day. Not up mountains. Along easy trails just a few miles from my house, in the sunshine, making tracks in the sparkling snow. We said, “I can see us doing this every winter.” And I hope that is true.

There were, it must be noted, days I didn’t feel like doing anything inspiring in the slightest. But overall, there were many small victories.

Like figuring out that the grass surrounding the creek a few blocks from our house works excellently as a social meeting spot for moms, when suddenly there’s a pandemic and one’s social life must be conducted at creeks; that the garage is capable of serving a similar purpose when your husband pimps it out with stools and a record player even, and your 6-year-old tells her teacher in one of her writing assignments that her parents turned her garage into a bar, GOOD WORK AIDY; that running with neighbors was instant motivation and camaraderie, and that walks with women I’ve known forever is how we kept our monthly dinner-out-on-the-town habit going when “the town” part isn’t feasible; that scaling the boulders on the trails at Sleeping Giant State Park keeps you warm when it’s below freezing and that because J and my friend Molly know the way I won’t get lost, because trust me, I would get lost.

We sat around fire pits. Our clothes smelled like smoke. We sent our children to each other’s yards. We texted through the toughest times. We stayed up for hours on Zooms laughing hysterically from our individuals houses in different states and it felt like we were all together, honestly, it did. We tried paddle-boarding. We let the kids run free. We sat under blankets on the porch. We had drinks in a cemetery, a cemetery. We walked it OUT, like gerbils on an exercise wheel, which always seemed like a sad analogy to me until I realized how much purpose there is in it. They aren’t going nowhere, they’re engaging in beneficial habit; they’re making it work.

(We got gerbils, by the way, a pet I’d sworn off entirely, but here they are in our house. I can barely remember their names half the time but I love them with the ferocity of a thousand mothers).

Anyway, I couldn't quite find my way trying to write about the things we gained, until I realized that what I was actually trying to say is that we found ways to make it work.

And that idea has got me thinking about this music game J and I are playing.

A few weeks ago my friend Lani invited a bunch of her friends to something called “Music League,” an online game seemingly built for pandemic times. Here’s how it works: you create a “league” of people (in this case it’s a group of Lani’s buddies, many of whom I know in person, some of whom I don’t), then for each round, guided by the group’s moderator, the league receives a music category. Each member submits a song. Once all the songs are in, the program generates a Spotify playlist, everyone listens and eventually votes on the songs, doling out a total of ten points between them all, and you can’t vote for your own pick.

The first week was “Dance Party,” and I submitted “Groove is in The Heart,” by Deee-Lite, because when that song came on, my high school friends and I had to dance to it, as though it were the law. For “New Wave,” I chose “Our House,” by Madness, because the lyrics, depicting scenes of loving insanity in a family home, remind me of my own. For our 90s round I chose “Laid” by James, which I’ve sung my heart out to countless times in countless scenarios and for my “Desert Island Tune” I chose “Jesus Etc.” by Wilco because it’s the soundtrack to all my favorite memories, including listening to it live under darkening skies in Massachusetts a couple summers ago, the mountains framing the field where hundreds of people sang in unison. I can’t wait to do that again someday.

Why are you writing about this music game, you might be asking. Fair question. In part I’m writing about it because it’s all J and I and the other friends involved talk about lately so, by extension, I am talking about it here. I mean, we talk about it like it’s our job; there’s joy but there’s also real scrutiny. Why a certain song was a good or bad fit for the current category, or how we “respect” a certain artist but don’t like them personally.

The game itself is accompanied by a group chat that Lani started and I feel like I’ve truly gotten to know these people through their musical tastes, one of the best ways to get to know people, in my opinion. There’s been good natured ribbing that boils over into overt criticism, and there is potential for musical soulmate status when two people try to pick the same song for any given round.

A few days ago, as J and I and the kids were standing and sitting around the kitchen counter, where we’ve gathered for approximately a trillion hours over these past 12 months - doling out dinner, watching the news, discussing our jobs, our plans, politics, how the school day went and the latest infection numbers - and we were talking about Music League (um, again), when Nora said, “This is like the steps, but even worse.”

She was referring to the steps challenge J and I had taken on at work a couple months back, bouncing around our house at the end of each day trying to get to 10,000 on our fitness watches. “Almost there!” we’d yell, while jogging to deliver clean laundry to one of the kids’ rooms. I mean, absolutely ridiculous.

I think, though, that by “worse,” she didn’t mean that either situation was bad. She was smiling when she said it. I think she meant we were even more obsessed this time, and with another silly situation, at least to a 12-year-old. Pacing from the kitchen to the living room to the sunroom while screaming at the digital face of a watch…picking the just-right song while debating “alt” vs. “grunge” and where the two genres overlapped, as though our lives depended on it.

Which brings me to the main reason I am talking about Music League, which is what I told Nora when she said that.

I told her that this is how people get through things. To be clear, I realize that the way people get through things is also by inventing vaccines, volunteering their time and being goddamn citizen heroes - not just by getting into it with a friend over whether or not Heart qualifies as “Guitar Rock.”

Sometimes, however, getting through means leaning with every ounce of your integrity into just that sort of thing. Like learning “Don’t Stop Believin” on the piano, I might add.

Each phase of this strange adventure has delivered new coping mechanisms, and I think when it came down to it, that’s what I wanted to write about, really, in trying to explain what we’ve “gained.” We’ve gained the ability to muddle, stride and sprint our way through these days. To unpack the snowshoes and fight for our favorite songs. Or, when the day is a little too much, to lean into the easy comfort of our desert island tune, and simply listen.