The Coronacation Diaries, Episode 45

Keep Looking for Sunshine

It's amazing how much the weather can affect our moods. Today it was dark and rainy and we were all miserable. We were a house full of Eeyores, slogging through the rooms, lurking in the shadows. We were all frustrated by too much homework and too many interruptions and too many meetings and not enough sunshine.

I had to post assignments for my classes by 9 a.m., because Wednesday is ELA day. But I'd managed to procrastinate, and instead of building my assignments yesterday, I'd spent the day prepping for and then recovering from a webinar that I co-led, titled "Reasonable Expectations for Remote Learning," where we talked about how to keep it simple for our students and attempt to be kind to ourselves. Maslow's before Bloom's. And so today, I was up early, trying to create a week-long activity for each class that was structured and simple and would provide opportunities for student contact, student engagement, and student success. It was early, I was cranky, and none of this felt reasonable at all.

As soon as I posted the assignments, the emails started. Simple questions that students wanted answered, simple questions that, in a classroom, would have taken 3 seconds to address. Instead, each email had to be responded to; each message sent needed a reply. It wasn't that the directions weren't clear (they were), but rather, the students just wanted that positive reinforcement. They wanted to know if there was a right answer that they were supposed to know. Interruption after interruption layered on blankets of frustration. I didn't want to be here, sitting at the kitchen table, answering countless emails and trying to grade papers and barely parent my own kids. Outside, it was raining. Inside, I was a cloud of negativity.

Finally, during the window between meeting number 3 and meeting number 4, I announced to my daughter from another mother that we were going to do yoga. We'd been slowly working our way through the 30 Days to a New You yoga series, and were on day 11: flexibility day. It was all about hip openers and stretches and we started to giggle. We snorted as we tried to figure out how to move through goddess pose to skandasana, which seemed like a ridiculous idea. We cracked up as we attempted to even figure out what to do with our feet in lizard pose. But it was the splits that got me. As my feet, now sweaty, began to slide farther and farther apart, and I got closer to the ground, I realized that I was stuck. I couldn't move. The only solution, as I laughed hysterically, was to lean forward until I fell over, face first into the rug, butt up in the air. We laughed until we cried. We laughed at how impossible it was, at how ridiculous we looked, at how funny it all truly was.

The sun never came out. Outside, it never really got brighter. But inside, the mood had lifted. The frustrations from earlier wandered off and sulked in the corner. Things seemed less overwhelming. Less negative. Less dull.

Laughing until you are crying, until you can't breathe; laughing until you are out of control and you are desperately trying not to pee your pants but even that thought is hilarious: these are the moments that will get us through until the sun decides to shine again.