Status Update: Covid in Minnesota

Minnesota now has one of the highest covid infection rates in the country.  The thought of two or three or even more months in almost total isolation is overwhelming. Most of all, I‘m terrified for my son’s future--how can he launch into a world that seems to be collapsing?

All I can do is put down my head and cry.

I'm Not Gonna Lie ...

 I’ve stopped blogging because I’m depressed. I‘ve stopped believing that sometime within the next six months covid will be over.

I’ve cherished the hope that the election, with a Biden win, would lift the dark cloud hanging over our country—the cloud that spurned covid, and violence, and chaos, and contempt. But suddenly I realized that, even with Trump out, we will be facing months or years under the threat of a deadly virus.

Worse. I can’t get Max out of his room. He’s tethered to a bank of devices. He takes no initiative to look for a job or sign up for college classes or cook something or … anything except talk to and get together with friends. It drives me crazy. I have to goad and prod and schedule to make anything happen, and for the first time in his life, I resent this role. I’m disappointed in him. I’m afraid for him. I’m angry, I’m conflicted –should I pull back entirely, force him to act or stagnate on his own? Should I create some structure for both of us? Should I just have him check in with me once a week? No shoulds, I guess. What’s working, what’s not?

I can’t do it anymore—there’s just nothing left inside--and F. is just as baffled and confused as I am. I need help and support and relief for myself. I have set up a medication adjustment for Max, I’ve inquired about a vocational counselor for him. I’d like to sign up a driving instructor. Maybe, even, get him a life coach.

But I’m overwhelmed and scared. I’m furious at Trump and those who didn’t take the virus seriously in the beginning--and have put us all in danger, as the virus surges out of control.

I’m just tired. So terribly tired.

The Doe, Myself

I had to get out of the city--away from covid, away from the gaze and innocent demands of my husband and Max.

I drove to the ARC retreat center, just an hour north of the Twin Cities. I checked in with the cook, then headed for the tiny cabin that would be my hermitage. The moment I stepped into the woods, I felt embraced by its dappled light and shade, the scent of pine. I filled my lungs for the first time in months. I sensed time beginning to slow, my needs becoming fewer and simpler.

A few hours later, I was walking through a grove of white pines when a shaft of late-afternoon light lit the rusty flank of a doe. She stopped and turned toward me. I held my breath. It was like coming upon an angel, or a citizen of some secretive tribe.  She gazed at me with both wariness and recognition, one people acknowledging another. For five minutes I watched as she stepped through the woods, lifting each leg high as if to navigate a treacherous patch of ground. She passed into the darkness, then back into the light, appearing and disappearing, like a holy flame.

The isolation was hard at first, and I read madly for hours so as not to face it—a novel from Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series, Swedish crime noir at its best. It seemed an odd choice for what was meant to be a restorative retreat, but I found the clipped male voice soothing: concrete, laser-focused on a single crime, reasoning through a set of clues.

The main character Wallander was full of angst—exhausted, ill, fearing the cognitive declines of aging. He hid his diabetes, ashamed of it, and I understood, wrestling with my own diagnosis of “pre-diabetes.” I thought back over my own history of disordered eating, tracing it to the beginning, when at 14 I began to starve myself. And suddenly I burst into tears.

It was no good, I thought. My mother was not the innocuous “good” parent I’d idealized. She collapsed when I tried to come close, complained of depression and refused to take action, fell to pieces at any criticism. As a teen I had become her confidante, and in return, occupied the role of Golden Child: mature beyond my years, uncannily wise, and needing nothing. Starving. For the first time I saw deeply that I was loved not for myself, but for what I could give her. But I felt lighter.  Some heavy energy I’d been carrying peeled off and fell away, like the sour husk of the green walnuts that had littered our childhood yard.

I felt scarily naked, taking my first steps into the forest, wearing nothing but myself.

On My Own, Somewhere Else

My son is mad and stressed and lashing out at me.  He made a $125 down-payment on a Nintendo Switch to a seller on Make Me An Offer and then realized the seller had purged her account from the website along with any means of contacting her.  When I try to calm him, he gets furious.  He wants me to take over, figure out how to get his money back; when I refuse, he retorts: "Why did I waste my time talking to you?"   

This is not the son I'm used to.  His scorn hurts.  And it makes me damned mad.

Yesterday, I made a reservation for a small cabin at the ARC Retreat Center in central Minnesota.  I feel a visceral need to GET AWAY: from covid, from these four walls, from my teenager and husband and cat.  I need time and space and privacy to care for myself, to be whatever I am without concern for how I affect those around me.  

I also talked to my dearest friend by phone for more than an hour.  We vented our rage at covid and teens and Trump and husbands and mothers, and somehow ended up laughing our heads off.  I needed that, badly.  

I hesitated to set up the retreat, worried that I might be trading one kind of loneliness for another.  But as soon as I confirmed the reservation, I started a list of the food and books and art materials I would bring along--happy to dream of being on my own, somewhere else.

Sick and Tired

I haven't posted in almost three weeks.  I'm mired in depression.  Too many losses all at once.

The latest stats for Covid in Minnesota show a daily infection rate higher than it's ever been before. We are now worse off than when we started the lockdown in March. I am furious at our national "leader" who has minimized this crisis, and at those who have followed his lead--young people who are selfish and believe themselves invincible, "mature" people who prefer to believe in their own prejudices rather than scientific facts.  I've never felt so strong an urge to simple leave--go anywhere where covid is not, where people and governments are behaving sanely and humanely.  I feel literally betrayed by our government and the prevailing culture of selfishness, greed, and racism.  

My PTSD is kicking up.  The same sense of betrayal I felt at the hands of my mother, who failed in her primal duty to protect and nurture me, and instead used me to meet her own emotional needs.  This is the ultimate abandonment--what psychologist Peter Walker calls the "abandonment depression," that white fog now swirling at the center of myself.  I sometimes think of it as the"failure to thrive."  I think of those un-nurtured Romanian babies, and those baby monkeys, motherless, who cling desperately to a metal form draped with a towel. Without a mother's attention, her physical touch, the babies grow listless, stop eating, and die. 

I've lost a beloved brother-in-law.  I've lost most of my own mothering role, having finally released Max to the direction of his own inner spirit.  I feel listless, directionless. Without the work of managing his life to anchor me, what is the point of me now?

I can tell myself that my role as a mother is to stand back and cheer him on, to point out his strengths and good choices and successes.  But it feels like so limited a role.  Some great chunk of myself has fallen away, and I'm left naked, weightless, ungrounded. 

I want to foster kittens, but can't, as Skippyjon just wouldn't tolerate having them in the house, and we really have nowhere to keep them separate from him.  I want to help little kids with reading, but how, when schools will be trying to keep kids and staff apart?  

This is hard. This is so hard.  And I'm sick of articles and spiritual gurus telling me what I should be "learning" from this disaster, how I should be "supporting my mental health."  I'm sick of our can-do culture, which offers no support for legitimate grief and fury.  I'm sick of doing it all myself, with a partner struggling with a new job, and little time to empathize with what I'm feeling.  I'm sick and tired, and for once, I'm going to let myself be where I am, for as long as it takes. 

.  

Denial Ain't Just a River in Egypt

6/30/202

Max spends 90% of his time in his bedroom, in the dark, on some kind of media: Nintendo Switch, Google Pixel 3, a giant monitor. F. and I have been panicking over this, in general, but also because now he is truly depressed—lethargic, sad, angry—and we’ve never seen him like this before.

I’ve started making him lunch again; otherwise he just doesn’t eat until dinner time, except for unhealthy snacks like granola bars and pizza. I’m helping him study for the permit test, apply for a store clerk job at our food co-op, register for classes in the fall. My counselor tells me to stop helping, let him fail on his own. But that doesn’t seem right. He’s facing staggering losses. Plus, he recognizes that he is depressed and in need of help.

I had hoped Max would bypass the teenage angst, that he would sail from high school into college, his happy self, eager to do well, excited to try something new, full of dreams. But we humans aren’t built to endure severe and chronic uncertainty and threat. These things wear us down, physically and emotionally.

Just for Today, Too Tired to Care

I’m walking home, just a few blocks away from the Blue Garden. I hear shouting from several blocks away—it sounds rhythmic, like a girl’s jump rope ditty. But there’s also a thumping bass. Then honking—multiple cars—beep beep beep--one after the other. I peer down the street. There’s a hubbub at the intersection of Snelling and Minnehaha, more cars than usual stopped at the traffic light with their headlights on, though it’s four in the afternoon.

I cross Minnehaha and walk a block or so on Albert but now the chants and horns and thumping are growing louder. I turn around and see a stream of cars heading east on Minnehaha. Police on bikes, in fluorescent orange vests, stop to block the adjoining streets and motion the parade of cars forward. A woman with a bullhorn emerges from the open roof of a car. She is white and tattooed all down her arms and shouting. A black teenager hangs out a passenger window with a cardboard sign: Defund Police—so now I know what it’s all about. White women come out of their homes and clap and cheer and the people in the cars raise their fists and I just don’t care about any of it.

I’m no longer young. I don’t believe that raising my fist and shouting a slogan will help. I don’t believe we can simply do away with policing without descending into chaos. I’m not fired up or outraged or upset—just exhausted.

Choice?

I feel like a failure, like there’s something wrong with me for being unable to sustain my energy and excitement for teaching. Like someone who deserves to be kicked out.

But here’s the truth: I choose to vacate a system that relegates part-timers to the “housework” of the English department—the lowest level comp classes, the 2-credit research writing classes with high labor and low financial reward—the courses the full-timers don’t want. The draining emotional labor of trying to carry students in financial, mental health, and academic crisis through to the end of the semester.

I choose to have control over my schedule, to feel appreciated and generously rewarded for my skills and effort, to foster my own creative ambitions and meet my own emotional needs.

That's at least part of the story.  The other part is that it still hurts. 

How I Left Teaching

When I see myself at the front of that classroom eight years ago, I am wearing my favorite skirt—mid-calf, with overlapping splashes of black and magenta and sea-green.  A long silky blouse, bare legs and sandals.  My hair at the time is thick and glossy, dark brown with red and gold highlights.  I’m smiling.  I throw out questions, elicit the students’ answers, cajole them when they’re reticent.  I am so used to this that I come to class with only a vague idea of where we’re at and where we’re going.