Whoooo!

So. Before I get into this week's adventures, I want to issue a brief mea culpa for last week's post.

Apparently, I was in a dark place. I know this because my husband got several "is your wife OK? She seems...angry" text messages from at least one friend and several members of his family.

None of these people actually reached out to ME, or offered to help ME in any way, but still...I appreciate the concern. And I apologize for any sleep lost worrying about my fragile mental state.

Also, I fear that I offended the specials teachers of the world, specifically the ones in my kids' school.  For that, I am truly sorry. I meant absolutely no disrespect when venting my frustration about having to help my kids with the lessons that I know they worked really hard to create.

What I was trying to illustrate (sic) was that you guys are amazing at what you do but what you do needs a very specific skill set that I just do not possess.

Sure, my kids can read about music-making and try to do it on their own until I yell at them to PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP MAKING ALL THAT NOISE, but it's not the same as being sung to by an insanely talented instructor who must buy Excedrin Migraine in bulk.

And sure, I can do figure drawing until my hands cramp up (more about that later), but being able to actually teach what comes naturally to me to three kids who'd rather be outside throwing balls totally eludes me.

As for gym, well, just like in fifth grade when I had to climb the ropes and could barely get my skinny ass off the ground, I give up.  No Presidential Fitness Award for me.

I'd like to see the President climb a rope almost as much as I'd like that skinny ass back.

I know my post unleashed a torrent of comments on my Facebook page about how much other parents are struggling with specials classwork and how much we wish it would go away. Again, this is not a critique of the teachers - it's a comment on how totally inferior we are all feeling.  And overworked.  And emotionally exhausted.

We are trying to do our own work while making sure our kids can read and write and do basic math and maybe not be totally traumatized from our daily meltdowns when it's all just too much. But if any gym, music or art teachers were hurt by my words, I am very, very sorry.  I will make it up to you in end of the year gift cards as long as you don't fail my kids in gym.

Now that would be traumatizing.  For the kids, and my husband, I suspect.

As for my feelings about lunch - I have no apologies.  Lunch still sucks.

On to this week.

Monday the governor of Ohio announced that schools will not re-open this school year.  That does not mean that school is over for our kids, but that distance learning will continue for the duration, which is June 4....I guess?  I honestly don't know how much longer we can keep the charade of "we're all learning together but from home!" up but the governor seems optimistic.  Clearly he hasn't been on a first grade zoom call where that one kid won't stop talking about his Pokemon collection. 

Considering that this news came in the middle of me helping one child measure household items with a string and paper cubes while making sure that another one was writing his fairy tale mash-up and not just trying to make his algebra-test-taking brother laugh, it was not received well. In fact, the next day when my third-grader's teacher asked him how he found out that school would not be re-opening I was super relieved that his response was not "Well my mom sat down on the kitchen floor and started crying." 

You may be thinking, how could you have been upset? Didn't you see this coming? Well, yes, but...a small part of me had been hoping and praying for a partial reopening. Even if my kids could go to school for two hours every other day, I would have taken it. They need the social interaction and face to face instruction with their teachers. Even if their faces are partially obscured by masks. Maybe this would be a good time to learn about reading non-verbal and mind reading. Now that everyone's last Botox treatment has worn off and their eyebrows are six weeks overdue for a good threading, there's a lot to work with...

But then I realized that by opening up the schools, we are putting the teachers, the monitors and the administrators - basically all of the adults in the building - at risk. And if the past six weeks have taught me anything, it's that we need them to be alive. Badly.

Another thing that happened Monday was that I co-hosted a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony online. I have been a co-chair of the committee that works with the Cleveland Jewish Federation and Kol Israel (an organization for survivors and their families) to put on this event every year to remember the six million who died at the hands of the Nazis.

This was the second and final year of a two year commitment I had made to co-chair, a role that involved monthly meetings with a lot of Jews and even more opinions about who had it worse in the Holocaust (yes, that is a thing) and how best to make sure that everyone is appropriately honored without making the ceremony longer than an hour, which apparently is the most amount of time we as a people can be expected to be quiet.

When we realized in early March that it couldn't be held live at a synagogue there was much debate over how to proceed (because, Jews) and in the end we decided to broadcast it live over Zoom.  Maybe we would lose a few of the older members of the tribe to technology, but we hoped to gain the younger generation who, if nothing else, might realize that being stuck home with a Play Station and Netlfix is nothing compared to what Anne Frank went through in her attic. 

I felt like a real (internet) celebrity as I styled my bookcase and adjusted the lighting in my home office. I needed to create an atmosphere that exuded knowledge and reflected the solemnity of the occasion but also wanted to make sure that everyone knows that I organize my books by color. My husband did his part by following my instructions to keep the kids as far away from me as possible. This was no conference call with my book club or a happy hour with my high school friends. All of Jewish Cleveland did NOT need to see my son's naked tuchus as he streaked through the room. 

Overall the presentation was a success. I was so nervous about mispronouncing a name or saying "entree" when I meant to say "entry" (waitressing habits die hard) that when I concluded the program with a somber reading and sincere "good-night" and the screen went black I loudly exhaled, leaned back in my chair and yelled "WHOOOOO" at the ceiling.

The giggles that erupted in the family room where my husband and kids were watching the ceremony on our TV instantly told me that the Zoom broadcast had not, in fact, ended when the screen went dark. Oops.

Embarassing? Very. But luckily I had the wherewithal to realize that with my un-filtered mouth, it could have been much, much worse. I could have yelled "It's OVER!" or "F*ck Trump!" A celebratory "whoooo" probably gave people pause, but hopefully it also made them smile.

On to Tuesday, when I started seeing ads on my social media feeds for CBD infused coffee. I suspect that this is how the blond babysitter in the horror movie feels when she finds out that the calls are coming from inside the house. Did Alexa hear my tears when I found out my kids will be doing school from home (I can't even call what we are attempting 'homeschooling' anymore because I'm guessing actual homeschooling has less swearing, even if the bad haircuts are the same)? Did Siri hear my "whoooo" and realize that celebrating the Holocaust was cause for concern? Or are all mothers in states where the schools are shut down being targeted this way? Anyway, they were a day late and a dime bag short because, duh, Monday was 4/20. I might not have spent it the way I did in college, but it was definitely observed.

Speaking of college, I've been feeling a little nostalgic lately. Maybe it's all the Joshua Jackson and Alanis Morissette covers in Little Fires Everywhere. Maybe it's the fact that being home trying to educate my kids and do freelance work at the same time is making me question my life choices. Or maybe it's because we've run out of dinner table conversations and my kids have started asking me to tell them stories about college.

Luckily, I did not go to your typical party school and my stories are, excluding the ones that are 4/20 related, PG-13 (may contain nudity, but it's for art's sake). What they lack in drunken hookups they make up for in a roommate whose art project made out of Jello and plastic baby dolls was left to languish in a shared refrigerator, a boyfriend who dyed his hair purple hair the night before coming home to meet my parents and a teacher who made me cry because my clay sculpture of an acorn 'lacked integrity'.

My kids think my college years sound hilarious and horrible which, fair.

So, when a former roommate (not the Jello one, by the way) posted a picture of a sketch she'd done at an on-line virtual life drawing event, I was intrigued. It's been roughly 20 years since I did any life drawing unless you count sketching people in airports or restaurants while waiting for flights or meals which seems to be the only time I have in normal life to sketch without feeling like I should be doing something more productive.

Enter COVID-19.

In normal life would I ever be available from 4-5 on a weekday afternoon to log into a website that would take me inside someone's Brooklyn loft* where there would be a semi-nude** model doing a series of timed poses? No, I'd be schlepping kids to and from a sports practice, Hebrew school or a friend's house. I'd be trying to figure out how to squeeze in dinner and homework and time everything so that it would dinner would be hot when my husband walked in the door and I could make it to my book club/committee meeting/birthday dinner on time. In normal life sitting at the kitchen table with a sketchbook and collection of pens and pencils zoning out on my kids and dog and laundry and dinner would be unthinkable. Irresponsible. Self-indulgent and kinda weird.

OK, it still felt a little self-indulgent and to my kids it was definitely "kinda weird." But as someone whose graphic design career has been sidelined by COVID-19 and whose creative expression has been limited to making hand painted birthday signs to be held up outside friends' windows this was the definition of self-care.

Because for an entire hour I was able to zone out and pretend I was back in the studio at RISD. Minus the hard benches with no backs and cumbersome drawing boards. Minus the smell of turpentine and body odor emanating either from the crunchy art student next to me or the greasy model on the stand that may have been recruited from the Providence bus station.  Instead I had the smell of a dinner that I had responsibly put in the slow cooker in anticipation of being busy from 4-5 and a model who looked more like she came from an American Apparel ad than the streets of Pawtucket. 

At first I was a little nervous that my kids might get the wrong idea about a topless woman striking poses in her living room being streamed into our living room for me to draw. But once I explained to them that this was what I do to exercise my artistic muscles (totally a thing) and that once you can draw the human body you can draw anything and that the model was (probably?) getting paid to do this, they were like "Cool, Mom, you do you" and went back to their own screens.

I guess even live nude girls can't compete with Tik Tok.

Anyway, that was probably the best hour of my week. All of the catharsis of drawing for the sake of drawing and none of the anxiety of being 19 and wondering if the guy with the earring on the stool next to you likes girls (he did not) or if it would be a bad idea to use the money your parents gave you for art supplies on takeout because you can't stomach another night of cafeteria food (it was not).

What I wouldn't give right now for cafeteria food - something for everyone that I don't have to prepare or clean up!

The rest of the week has been spent on the usual Corona-Quarantine activities:

• Wondering how much of my kids' homework I should be helping with in order to make it look like I'm staying on top of it but not actually doing it for them.

• Trying to figure out how to serve breakfast late enough that nobody needs lunch.

• Watching Mike DeWine's video press conferences hoping he throws me a bone and announces the opening of something - anything - that will make life seem more normal and less like a really boring science fiction movie. I can only imagine audiences in the future coming out of "COVID, The Movie" saying things like "I didn't find the toilet paper hoarding scene to be that believable, who needs that much Charmin?" and "The guy who played Mike Pence lacked warmth...nobody is that wooden and stiff in real life."

Which brings me to Today.  My six year old did a Google Meet with no pants on and bolted from it at 10 am to go watch a "Fortnite Live" event happening in the basement. My nine year old has given himself marker tattoos all over his body which I'm gonna count as art class. And my 12 year old wrote a DARE essay about the dangers of drugs and alcohol without mentioning his mother's coping mechanisms during quarantine.  And other than my husband yelling "Who peed all over the bathroom? Does anyone know how to pee around here?" and making me wonder where he's been the past eleven and a half years, I'm feeling pretty good about week #6.

WHOOOOOO!

*I know it was a Brooklyn apartment because of the Ikea furniture, natural textiles mixed with animal print throw blankets and all of the ceramic pots of succulents. So many succulents.

** The model was topless, which I have a feeling has to do with internet rules about nudity.  Then again, Pornhub is free (so I'm told) so maybe it's just a grooming issue.  Although from the condition of her armpits, it didn't seem like body hair was a problem for this one.