Week Three

Today we are supposed to be flying to Paris. We would arrive and take a train south to meet Josh, Geraldine and the boys for a week-long visit in the country, before returning to Paris for three days of exploring the city on our own. Instead we are on our own at home, and millions of people around the globe are also at home. 

In the past three weeks, the realizations have continued to set in as exponentially more people, on every continent except Antarctica, have been infected. When we sent students home just over three weeks ago, the number of confirmed cases in the US was under 300, and in Vermont less than 5. Today there will be over 350,000 people in this country alone, and over 1.2 million worldwide. This morning there are 512 confirmed cases in Vermont, 22 cases in Washington County. It’s no longer just the elderly who are dying. Worldwide over 70,000 people have died; today we will hit the 10,000 mark in our country alone.

On March 19th we taught our first remote classes, hopeful (but not confident) they would last only until our scheduled April break. One week later, on the evening of March 26th, the governor announced that all Vermont schools would remain closed for the rest of the school year. We didn’t tell Quinn until the next day.

Our days of working remotely, are also Quinn’s days of remote learning. A few days after her school closed, she was able to go to pick up materials from her teacher. She brought home a yellow folder full of work packets and a Chrome book. Our dining room table became ground zero, with everyone’s work piles blending together. Sam and I have been so flustered trying to get ourselves prepared, that we have given Quinn little help. I counted on her love of reading to get her through, but she worries too much—about “not doing it right,” about falling behind her peers, about disappointing her teacher, about being embarrassed. 

Quinn has been working hard all year at learning to control her emotions and express her needs without angry outbursts. They’ve continued to happen, but less and less frequently and always with quick and genuine apologies. Better than most people I know, Quinn can offer articulate and mature explanations of what is bothering her, once she reigns in the rage. In the past couple of weeks, as she’s worried silently about what’s going on, the rage has started flaring up again. We are trying to help her. Sam will sit and draw with her, as if she is in art class. 

My contribution, predictably, has been to help her establish some order for her work: a different folder for each subject and a chart that she could use to track her progress and structure her structureless days. Quinn, like her mother, likes to check boxes.

One evening as she was headed to bed, she stopped at her whiteboard, which hangs above her desk, to put a checkmark on the calendar as she does each day to mark its completion. She paused. She stared at March and then said, to no one in particular, “I don’t know why I even bother anymore; the days are all the same.” The next day the calendar was erased and this was in its place:

From the very beginning of this I have been thinking it’s a tough time to be an only child. And, recalling our original promise, that she would always have a dog, and realizing that we are looking at five more months of being at home, it became a Coronavirus mission of mine, from the outset, to find her a puppy as soon as possible. We brought Buddy home from Bethel, Maine, at the end of week one.