I don't know what the deal is with everyone else who's making bread right now - a need to feel productive, maybe; extra time at home (though that makes less sense with dutch oven-style no-knead bread, which basically seems to just want you to put it in a bowl and leave it alone for hours, then chuck it in the oven). Bread might always have been a part of their lives and now they're baking it even more. For those who are single and without kids, it feels a little like a desperate attempt to show that one is doing something meaningful, but that might just be projection on my part. Maybe people just miss bread. I miss bread.
For me, it's a little of all of those, and also this: I used to be so good at making bread! It's true: in high school, in the interstitial summers between college semesters, and even in Seattle when I worked at the bookstore, I loved to bake bread. I made my grandmother's recipes: her dilly bread (no-knead, before it was cool), her challah. I made so much bread that it went stale before my three roommates and I could finish it.
Since I started teaching 12 year ago, though, I've been a bread failure. Every time I've turned my hand to my grandmother's bread, I've failed: it's been raw, or it hasn't risen, or it's simply, inexplicably, collapsed in itself, rendering itself into a dry (but flavorful!) hockey puck. Even my proximity is a hex: this Thanksgiving, as I watched my mother make it, hawklike, hoping to pick up on what I'm doing wrong, the bread came out small and stodgy, with nothing of its usual buttery, dilly fluffiness. All diners assured us that it was delicious, and all I could think is that they've never had the real version. When my mother returned home and made it herself for a dinner party, it came out perfectly. I laughed and laughed.
So, I think to myself now, maybe this is a time to work through my bread curse. I mentioned the idea of baking in a dutch oven to my mother as a possible solution, and she, in a typical Crawford-y move of both calculation and impulsivity, immediately fell into an internet research hole when she was supposed to be working, found the best quality dutch oven for a price under $60, purchased one, and sent it to me.
My parents have always had a hard time with the idea of care packages. It's not that they're not generous - they obviously are - and it's not that they don't care - they definitely do. It's more that the conventional box filled with homemade cookies and stuffed animals has never been their style; we are a family that forgets en masse about Mother's and Father's Day and lives hundreds of miles apart - at least. But we are also a family that is prone to clumsy, overblown expressions of practical gift giving: when as a college freshman I dropped wistful hints about homesickness and the care packages full of snacks my college roommates received, my parents immediately bought me a subscription to the New Yorker; at the time I was nonplussed, but now I realize they wanted to get me something that would last. They got me a laptop for my 30th birthday when mine was about to die, and came to visit me in China; I used my lavish travel stipend to buy them an all-expenses paid trip to a resort just outside of Yangshuo. My sister regularly forgot my birthday, but when I visited, would give me three suitcases full of designer clothes from her closet. My aunt and I are particularly afflicted with this problem, and though we've tried to tone it down in recent times, we're known to have lapses, as during this year when, after her double hip surgery in San Francisco, I got her a Zabar's bagel brunch and a pair of Eberjay pajamas and she funded my entire summer running wardrobe. If you believe in the five love languages, there it is - for good or for ill, gift giving is one of ours.
As we are trapped in our homes, I in New York, my parents in Ohio, we've begun to communicate more and more. I've always loved my parents desperately; I've had nightmares about my father dying since I was 16 years old and have felt a dangerous need to cling to my mother since before that. Still, we've never been in constant communication; I'll see them twice a year and Facetime with my mother once a month, my father perhaps every two months. We're all busy people.
Now, though, my mother and I text daily. My father sends me regular updates of the creek next to our house: photos so I can see the banks I scrambled down as a child, videos so I can hear the sounds of the water and the birds that were regulars in my life until I went to college at 19. We Facetime every few days, sometimes for just fifteen minutes, sometimes for dinner. They are worried about me, and I am worried about them.
I understand in theory why they're worried about me. Here I am, in Queens, the epicenter of the epicenter, with over 27,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 as of two days ago: that's more than all but eight countries in the world. (New York City has more cases by itself than any country except for Germany, Spain, and (obviously) the United States.) But I don't live in Elmhurst, Corona, or Jackson Heights. I don't live three blocks from a hospital, like Briallen Hopper and I don't personally know anyone who's died, or anyone who's seriously ill, though I know many who've been "mildly" ill and many who've lost loved ones, both young and old. Like most of us, I'm both in it and detached from it. I know what's happening, less than four miles away from me in Elmhurst: I know that's where the people who make this city run are being forced to work, forced to go home to crowded apartments, forced to be ill, forced to transmit this disease to their roommates and loved ones. I know there's a refrigerator truck there to hold all the bodies.
But I sit here, on my couch, in my apartment, with the cat. I get up at 7 on weekdays, wash my face, make coffee. I do "online teaching," which means that I answer my emails, post the lessons for the day, answer student questions, make comments on student work. I'm excited about leaving them feedback - interaction with students! - and I push them to probe deeper, ask them for their thoughts. The students resolve the comments. Sometimes I will get a "thank you!" in reply to one of my emails answering a question about how to be marked present or whether or not they can have an extension (now, the answer is always "yes"; now, the answer is always "please be careful, please be safe, please be kind to yourself"). It is now 11am, and it is time to tend to IB matters; I do my daily check-ins with teachers and students. I write an email to the IBO asking for support. I check the DP Coordinator Facebook group. I worry about the 12th graders. I worry about the 11th graders. I worry about the 10th graders (I don't really know them, but I'm in the neighborhood anyway). I see and converse with, perhaps, one student. I go to a Zoom faculty meeting, look out at what one friend called "all the lonely faces". The principal asks, as a check-in, how we're all coping with stress, worry, and fear. I don't trust my voice, so I write something in the chat about how I have dinner with my parents over Facetime, but then I remember that I might never see them again and I turn off my camera and sob through the rest of the meeting.
Never has teaching been so humorless, so meaningless, so without energy, and I am unaccustomed to providing these things for myself. Needy as I am, I've relied upon my students for the boost.
I lie on my sofa. On the nice days, I open the window behind me and can feel a fresh breeze; from the window in front of me I have a glimpse of a flowering tree, blossoms white against the blue sky. It's almost like lying in the park. On the lucky days, I can nap. Mostly, I think that this is what every parent of small children must wish for right now: a moment of peace, solitude. The freedom to make bread. They're right, I know that they're right: for those of us who are not ill and not working out there in the world, there is nothing harder right now than to be a parent of small children. And still: all I can feel is a deep, burning envy. As another friend said, parents are surrounded by their loved ones, even if they are exhausted and covered in poop and anxiety. Non-parents, singles, are alone, surrounded by our various mental illnesses.
I am not afraid of catching this disease. Maybe I should be, but I'm not. I am afraid of what this disease will do to my students and their families. I am afraid of what this disease will do to my profession. I am afraid of what this disease will do to the local businesses I love. I am afraid of the strength that this disease will give to our various mental illnesses. I am afraid of who I won't see again when this is over.
We know all the tricks, of course: we Facetime with each other and leave our computers on while we do menial tasks in the background, simulating the spontaneity of hanging out at each other's apartments. We binge watch The Witcher and The Mandalorian together, screencasting on Kosmi so that we can chat as we view. We have evening drinks as a group on Zoom. We know that we are lucky, that there is a whole world of technology out there to connect us. It does help, but it's not enough, and there's no way to explain to an exhausted, strung-out parent the difficulty of not having conversed with another person in person for a month. It's different for each of us, I think - in an earlier draft of this post, I described the feeling of wondering whether or not your body is real, but then I realized that's not actually my problem; I've just heard it from so many other singles. For me, I think it's that my external landscape has so little stimulation that the shifts in my internal landscape have burgeoned into erratic swings. On top of this, I grew up tracking the tiniest shifts in familial mood - the purse of a pair of lips, the quaver in a voice - and therefore, I still need people in front of me, in the flesh, to know how they are reacting to me. The move to almost entirely text-based communication has resulted in the irrational conviction that everyone hates me all of the time - or worse, maybe: that I am simply without consequence to them. I know it's crazy, and that makes me feel crazier. It's different for everyone, though, and I won't belabor the point; we all know that we're all losing track of time and space and a sense of self. It's a thing. I'll leave it there.
In my teaching, I've noticed that many of my students who come from deeply traumatic backgrounds have an attitude of relentless positivity. "Don't let the bad stuff get you down," they chirp, "gotta stay positive!" And I, with my umpteen years of therapy, have cautioned them: "it's great to be positive, but you also have to let yourself feel what you feel. It's okay not to be okay, especially when things are not okay." As I listened to Curt and Diva Smith's excellent quarantine version of "Mad World"(cheesy, but nonetheless always a trigger song for me), I wondered how condescending I must have sounded, because all of a sudden I was feeling everything, and I reeled. How could anyone live like this? I felt the need to backpedal violently into chirpiness and another, darker, need to pitch forward into the truth of this grief-kaleidoscope.
I tried to explain it to my therapist, that I wasn't feeling "fear," exactly, and that "worry" also seemed to be the wrong word. Even "grief" was wrong. I told her I felt a bright, hot terror for my friends and family, and a sort of a low, rumbling sense of inevitability and dread for everything else. "Despair," she told me, and I said, "Yes. It's despair." And then I said, "Despair is the dark version of acceptance, isn't it?" And she nodded, and said "Yes."
During a particularly difficult day two weeks ago, my parents watched helplessly on Facetime as I unravelled, frustrated with school and the IBO and the futility of it all. "Is there...anything...we?...can do?" one of them asked. I can't remember which; they were definitely both thinking it. I nearly sobbed at the kindness, but I kept it in. "Just keep being here," I said, "Just keep listening to me."
Anyway, all of which is to say, I'm pretty sure this is why my mom got me a dutch oven. She didn't need to - the listening, and the texts, and the warnings, and the creek photos - they are as enough as anything can be right now. But I get it, because yesterday, I felt the same urge that she must have felt, when she told me in a text message that an old and dear friend of my parents is in his last days of palliative care for Covid-19, unable to be visited by his husband.
When I got the text from my mother and felt her disbelief, I felt a twinge in my gut. When I saw my father's Facebook post about it - "pain is to be shared," he said, and "it hurts like hell" - I started to cry. I wanted to do something - I still want to do something. I want to do anything, if only it would keep my parents from feeling pain. I would buy them the moon, if I could only alleviate their sadness.
Maybe that's why we are compulsive gift givers. What we want, in my family - beyond all reason and possibility - is for each other to be happy, to feel no pain. We know that pain is necessary in life, and we know that it needs to be felt, but still: when my mother buys me a dutch oven, it's because she has a need to see me happy and she's not here to give me a hug and hold me while I cry.
It hurts them to see me unhappy and desperate and despairing, and perversely, it hurts me in turn to know that my despair provokes their own worry and fear. But pain is to be shared, and sadness is to be felt, vicarious or no. They need to feel grief, and I need to feel despair, and my friends who are parents need to feel ragged with exhaustion and inadequacy, and my friends without children need to feel their own versions of loneliness and madness. We need to somehow balance a dogged and relentless mindfulness - the flowering tree, white against the blue sky; the rush of water in the creek; the tang of lemon, garlic and salt in our food - with the richness and darkness of our emotional truth.
I do not find a greater meaning in this pandemic about the shining resilience of humankind. I refuse. I just won't. But I do find smaller meanings, and one of them is this: We are all helpless in the face of each other's feelings and we all wish we could help anyway. We don't need dutch ovens (though mine is glorious). We just need to keep being there, and to keep listening.
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