Surviving

So far, we’re surviving. I don’t know when my generalized anxiety about the world has ever felt so warranted.

One bright light in my life has been my Harry Potter and the Sacred Text virtual “local” group, the European Floo Network, that meets weekly on Zoom to take a deep dive into the HP books and use them to make meaning in our lives. Some members have had to distance themselves from anything JKR related, but most of us have found a way to engage with the texts despite the author. This past month we did a gift exchange, mailing each other packages “Secret Santa” style. I knit a light blue hat with an owl cable-stitch pattern for our moderator who, as organizer for the exchange, opted out of participating. It was very sweet how happy she was to get it, and an almost surreal moment to see this fabric that had emerged from my hands appear on the screen as she put it on.

Overall I’m just very very tired. And it’s only the fourth week of school.

Turtle Mode

I slept 10 hours last night and woke up in a fog. There is rain in the forecast for Wednesday. My plan all summer has been to send the kids in a taxi to school on rainy days, because according to my calculations we’ll still recoup the cost of the bikes even if we only use them 60 days this school year.

My husband, it turns out, has other ideas. We coordinate with two other families for getting to school. One family walks, the other bikes. Because of work schedules, Gimli and I have picked up most of the accompaniment duties. I take Oz and go with the bikers, he takes Illyria and goes with the walkers in the a.m. One of the other moms picks up the walkers in the afternoon. They do take a bus part of the way back; it’s not too full mid-afternoon coming into the center of town, so I’ve been ok with it.

Gimli says it’s flaunting our somewhat higher income if we send our kids to school in a taxi when the other families walk and bike even in the rain. So we had a big fight about it this morning and I retired to my bed in tears.

Really, though, for me, it’s about fear. My boy has been biking with me and two other kids, but I don’t want him biking in the rain. I am overwhelmed with terror just to think about it.

On Friday, our schedules are weird and it was awkward to coordinate between bikers and walkers, and so one kid who normally bikes with me ended up coming home with the walkers. I was re-organizing all the schedules in the middle of the school day and it slipped my mind that a) the walkers take the bus part of the way home, and b) the mom of the bikers is adamantly opposed to using the bus due to the risk of Covid. I’m sorry if this is confusing. All these logistics are confusing to me too. Anyway, the mom was livid when she found out her kid had been on the bus.

We worked it out but I still feel wretched. Same kid fell off the bike one day last week and face-planted on the asphalt. No serious injury but it ratcheted up my anxiety and I also felt wretched about that too. The responsibility for other people’s kids is wearing on me a lot.

When I think of my kids taking the taxi, I just feel this sense of relief. It feels like they’re safe there. For that mile and a half to school, for the duration of those 15 minutes in a cushioned seat, peering out like turtles from a shell, they are safe.

I know that’s not entirely true. I know accidents happen and nothing is ever truly safe. But I don’t worry about them, for those 15 minutes. I don’t worry.

What day is it?

Oh dear; I wrote on the 11th that “School starts in person tomorrow,” but what I meant was Monday the 14th. Not Saturday the 12th.

On Wednesday (yesterday?) I wrote in an email that “we are in our first week of in-person school,” then I thought no, it must be longer than that. Deleted “first” and wrote in “second.” Then thought again no, yesterday was Tuesday and that was our second day biking. So no, first week. Third day. It felt like a month.

All the news is overwhelming. And it’s here, too, in this tiny little country, which is considered such a backwater by Europe that it’s where Voldemort fled to hide after failing to kill Harry. Two nights ago the smell of wood smoke filled the air, and we went out on our balcony after dark to see the fires burning on the mountains above the city. We came back inside to hear a booming sound, then read in the news the next day that a car bomb had detonated a block from where my son’s best friend lives.

I grew up in a country plagued by car bombs, although that was political; this is mafia business. I want to move to New Zealand.

Til We Have Faces

School starts in person tomorrow, face to face, for our school and all Albanian public schools. Some private school have been operating already, and the Ministry of Education has given all of us strict guidelines for distancing, masking, and screening which we have been rehearsing and building into school structures and policies diligently for the past two weeks.

I see the admin at our school, and help them as much as I can; I am glad not to be in that position myself but I know what it feels like. This current situation reminds me acutely of our time in Colombia: the constant daily cycles of risk assessment and mitigation, looking after a diverse and dispersed international team, the constantly changing parameters and contingencies shifting all the time. As an international community, the crises multiply and become layered as we all watch our passport countries from afar and the sense of helplessness increases.

We feel responsible for things that are beyond our control.

Signs, measuring tape, e-mails, touchless thermometers, a proliferation of hand sanitizer. Battling traffic that is already crazy on the way to school. At the end of class yesterday, checking for understanding, but they only had questions:

“Is it true that we aren’t going to be allowed to eat at school?”

“Not indoors. Only outside.”

“What if someone faints from wearing a mask?”

“Then the teacher will administer first aid, and take you to the front porch, which counts as outdoors, to lie down.”

It’s my job now to have the answers to these questions. We just have no way to know what is actually going to happen this year. We never have, we just thought we did.

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ETA – I thought I was fine, excited and happy even, but now that it’s about to be real I am scared spitless. Irrationally, unmistakably terrified.

School is underway

We have begun school online this year, with a plan to switch to face-to-face on September 14 – the same day that Albanian schools will launch. All summer, I watched workmen refreshing the paint on the school building next to our house (a “Nëntvjeçare,” or 9-year school which is the basic guaranteed education level in Albania). It’s an old building, known as “The Red School,” because of the color – not necessarily any Communist affiliation although that would have been a given at the time when the school was built. Anyway, I figured when I saw them sprucing it up that the plan would be to return to school face to face in the fall.

I just deleted a long explanation about ministry of education requirements in Albania because I was even boring myself! The long and short of it is that this is where I am right now – in an empty second-floor classroom, facing an open window and maskless. The day is warm, but not as scorching as it has been this past month. I can see a glimpse of the mountains out the window. The chairs and desks behind me are spaced a careful 1.5 m apart, but there isn’t quite enough space for the teacher to stand at the front a full 2m from the nearest student, so we are going to have to do something about that before the 14th. This morning I taught two 90-minute classes online. A few of my colleagues are in the other part of the building, but most are teaching from home. Still there is coffee in the pot and the requisite temp check and screening every morning when we come in.

So I’m hoping to find the odd hour here or there to work on my passion projects, the memoir (now conceptualized as auto-ethnography) and a fantasy story for young readers.

Meanwhile, we are severely short-handed as an admin staff member had to leave the country for a non-COVID medical emergency and we’re scrambling to redistribute his workload among those of us here. It looks like I’ll be picking up Student Council advising and a few more study halls and lunch duty supervision days… but what the heck. At least today I have time to write.