I believe it is necessary and prudent--but I still don't much like being under the stay-at-home directive.
I'm getting used to it for the most part, and have developed some compensatory practices. For example: Did you know that you can freeze whole milk in its original plastic container, and thaw it again, and it will be totally fine? I sort of knew you could do that, but I've never had a reason to do so before. Half gallons are easier to deal with than gallons. I built up a six-(half-gallon) buffer in the chest freezer. Now every week I order one gallon and 1-3 half gallons, depending on how many half gallons we used last week; the half gallons go straight into the freezer and the gallon into the fridge; later, as needed, I pull the half gallons out and thaw them, either overnight in the fridge or in cold water in the sink.
Even though we are able to weather this fairly well in our own house, venturing out only for exercise in the outdoors and the occasional takeout dinner, I don't like it and I don't have to like it. Every morning I wake up and in the place where my brain always says Let's see, now, what do I have to do today? I get this sinking, it's-not-a-dream feeling instead. And that's without anyone I know and love really living in peril!
Only the conviction that sooner or later, someone will be. And that's bad enough.
+ + +
I probably spent the first month in a fog of being alternately pissed-off and anxious, and feeling very stuck there.
The fog is, however, just now beginning to burn off in the late-April sunshine. I honestly think the improving weather has a lot to do with it. There are green leaf-buds on the cherry tree now.
I can sit in the patio chair and put my feet up and read, or watch birds and squirrels, or listen to the next-door neighbors working on constructing the patio behind their half-rebuilt, roofless house, standing open to the elements since the last time the contractors went home for the weekend and never came back. Their younger children are playing, their older children are helping, while they dig and plant and lay pavers. We chat over the high fence; we can look down from our second-story windows, right into their walled-but-open-topped living space, and see them doing what they can while they wait to come home.
+ + +
Two signs that I've finally started moving on with my life, in the place where I find myself.
(1) I'm starting to close out the school year, at least as far as grades are concerned.
I know, grades are not terribly important for homeschoolers. But my tenth-grader needs a transcript this year for various applications, and I'm supposed to include some sort of assessment or grades for some of them. I try at least to give a sense of the student's relative strengths, and a sense of what has improved over time, not to mention communicating the true fact that yes, this young person has experience being held to some kind of standard.
And I owe an objective assessment to H. for the two teenagers of hers that I have been facilitating through Latin II, geometry, and American history. So I'll be counting up how many assignments were turned in, how they did on the exams, that sort of thing.
We are not done with the year, not by a long shot. And we may continue studying together past the ordinary end of the school year, if the summer activities continue to be canceled and there is nothing else to do, at least in those subjects that we've had to cut back on. But I think that, like lots of other kids around the country, our high schoolers are going to get a grade for the first semester (or maybe the first three quarters) of the year, and then a pass-fail type grade for the rest. And if that's the case, well, then, I already have all the data I need. Might as well start pulling it together and writing up the narrative.
(2) I finally stopped moping around and wishing I could go to the swimming pool, Pilates class, and running track at the Y, and started daily strength training and yoga in the house.
I'm trying not to feel embarrassed that it took me about a month to get my head on straight about this. I'm trying to go easy on myself, because--considering my track record--it honestly isn't surprising that I reacted poorly to having all my plans changed at once.
(I still can't really bear to go running. Huffing and puffing out on running paths where I can imagine clouds of exhalations and droplets emanating from every other person I pass--the idea does not appeal.)
Here's where I lucked out. My teenage son has in recent months taken to weight training at the YMCA as an interesting hobby. When everything he was enjoying and looking forward to this spring was yanked away from him, he became so downcast that Mark cleaned out a corner of the basement shop/storage room and gave him permission to order a squat cage, bench, bar, and weights. I turned over my old set of fractional plates and resistance bands, too. And Mark helped him make a hang board to practice finger grips for climbing.
This was totally the right call, by the way. He's a lot happier now that he can stay fit for indoor climbing when the gym re-opens again someday. And it's an hour or so of time he can kill productively while stuck in the house, every day. Yesterday he benched 200 pounds for the first time, which means that he needs more weight plates; it will be a while before he can get more, as every weight plate in the country appears to be on indefinite back order. (Next year will probably be a great time to buy a used set of weights. You heard it here first).
But as for me.... I am also, for the first time, set up to do weight training at home, in the time I have, anytime I want.
+ + +
Let's just pause for a moment and inquire why, even as I cheerfully told people that I would get back into lifting as soon as I could find the time to do it regularly enough to be safe, I never realistically thought of exercising this option--setting up a home weightlifting gym--for my own sake.
All I am going to say about this is that it was not out of any expectation that Mark would object to the cost, or to the use of the space. I just never took this option seriously enough to let it rise to the top of my consciousness. But it somehow became the obvious solution when the teenage boy got sad about his gains.
I don't know. I can psychoanalyze myself some other time. I just wish I would remember to think things through to their possible ends more often. There's some kind of barrier in there, and leaping over it is hard for me.
+ + +
Speaking of leaping over things--see that wooden box girder over the safety bars in the squat cage? Mark built it for me so I can reach the chin-up bar. I went upstairs and asked him to build me a box to put on the floor for me stand on, thinking of the sort of things that Cross-fitters use for box jumps. He countered with a built-to-fit platform across the safety bars, which he put together for me yesterday morning. It's got rubber foam underneath to keep it stable on the bars, and it just leans on the wall out of the way when I'm not using it. It's very stable and lets me stand with the bar just under my chin, so I can use it for leg-assisted chin-ups, which is the only kind I can do at this point.
After a month of not even swimming, I am seriously de-trained. I cannot use the oly bar for anything except to set it on the rack at the right height to use it for inclined pushups. (We have an aluminum technique bar on back order. That will help, if it ever ships.) I am doing a lot of bodyweight squats, or squats holding a single weight plate in both hands. Lacking dumbbells, I am doing one-arm rows by piling plates in a strong canvas tote bag. The ten-pound plates have convenient handles cast into them, so I can reasonably safely press them overhead, one arm at a time.
It's getting easier. Between that and livestreamed YMCA yoga classes for the off days, I am settling into a lunchtime routine.
+ + +
I take my yoga mat downstairs to the basement gym, for friction and cushion on the smooth cold concrete floor. I lie on my back on the mat to do static stretches afterward, gazing up at the unfinished ceiling, at the row of the family's downhill skis arrayed by size in their ceiling rack, where Mark put them away when we came back from our aborted trip on March 14.
A thing that is a little daunting about this, that's never far from my mind while I am down there: I literally do not know what future I am training for. Training myself, training up the children. Sickness or health? Grief or joy? Emerging, or hiding away for longer?
I don't know. But I guess I have decided to bet that I'll prefer being stronger, whenever we get there, whatever "there" is.
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