The Good and the Bad, Part 2

Late last week, I said the only good thing about the pandemic and stay at home order was snuggling with my children in the morning. Spring Break days didn’t start until 9 or later. Well, they did for me; I got up early to write, and let the kids sleep as long as possible. But when the kids got up I set it aside and we spent long, lazy mornings snuggling in bed: a true luxury. I’m very aware of how blessed I am to have five people to live with; I am not starved for tactile human interaction.

But early this week I realized, on the back side of two hours spent working in the yard, that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent outside. I would have gotten the yard work done regardless, but it would have been the only exercise I did in the day, and it would have felt rushed and guilty, with the knowledge of all the commitments waiting for me dragging down my soul time. Also, we had several days in a row when the wind carried the interstate noise away from the house instead of toward it, so it really was soul food in my own back yard.

Deprived of having to run the kids hither and yon, and with the publishing industry at a near-standstill, my own work feels less pressured, my time feels my own. I’ve doubled and tripled my physical activity in the past few days. Not that it’s all high intensity. But I’ll do Jazzercise On Demand with Julianna and then hike with the family for an hour later in the day and do some light housework or take a walk or bike ride with Alex.

When a friend first posted a meme that suggested viewing this enforced isolation as a Sabbath, I saw the wisdom of it but I hated it. I still hate it, but mostly because I don’t see an end point. And it hurts me to see my children’s childhood formed by this, a quarter of their schoolyear spent in isolation from the social growth that I lacked as a child, and which I’ve worked so hard to facilitate for them.

But two days into online schooling, when we’d established a routine at last, I saw my children respond with love instead of the bickering that has characterized so much of the last several years. There was laughter at our dinner table–all the way around–an easing of the tension and angst and negativity. It was such a balm to this weary, sleepless soul, I had to get up fro the table and grab the first “flower” from our stash of them to put on the Easter Tree (something we do from my Lent book)–the first thank you that has gone on our tree this year.

I told my teenager that this will be THE formative memory/event for his generation. And I realized that for most of us, the things we consider formative really didn’t impact us directly. 9/11 was crushing, but it’s a totally different thing to have experienced it from the heartland, far away from the carnage. The people who really suffered were my pastoral music friends who did weeks’ worth of multiple funerals every single day. The people who were in the buildings. The people who had loved ones they didn’t know if they were alive or dead.

I was on the outside of all that, and probably most of you were, too. I never really processed how different it is to be in the middle of a nightmare I can’t wake up from, faced with holding not only my own mental health together, but that of my kids. Kids who’ve been ripped away from their friends, their beloved teachers, their favorite activities. They’re suffering a hardship in childhood that the vast majority of us never did.

The good and the bad, part 1: Distance Learning

I’m processing my life right now by writing through it, and the thing that’s striking me is, once again, how close together the good and bad things in life are. So I figured I’d share some of those good-and-bad things. It’s turned into far too long a post… you know, every time you process one reality, it shifts… so I’ll do this in two parts and pray it doesn’t require a third!

My daffodils are actually coming out the advertised colors this year!

1. Distance learning: bad. When this started, all those online resources insisted you create a dedicated space for learning to get you in the right mindframe. It sounds totally reasonable, but I’m telling you–this is not reality. Reality is that if you have four kids, there is no dedicated learning space. You can’t turn your kitchen table into a school. One of them is watching a video, another one’s watching a different video, the third one is trying to concentrate on reading and won’t be able to, and the fourth went downstairs because he couldn’t take it, and comes upstairs yelling every five minutes about who’s hogging the wifi bandwidth. (Item: it turned out to be a problem with his computer, not the wifi.)

2. Distance learning, addendum: If you’re thinking of recommending earbuds: we don’t have them because I think they’re bad for our hearing, but also, when you have a kid with Down syndrome, a parental unit has to watch the video too. So there is no ideal here. There’s only dealing with reality as best we can. We work at the kitchen table (with paper flowers and candles and napkins and centerpiece candles in place); we work on the couch; we work in Mom and Dad’s bedroom; and whenever possible, we work on the deck.

3. Distance learning: good. My husband took two days off work to help us get started, which was a godsend. (For him as well. It’s wearing on a person to be “on” as long as he has, communicating the university through the onset of the coronavirus era.) Something amazing happened on Day Two. We were all sitting at the table at dinner laughing together. No fighting. The morning was stressful, but we found our rhythm and the structure served everyone well. We even planned out Xbox time!

4. Distance learning: bad. I am reeeeallly ready to be off this emotional roller coaster. The hits just keep coming, and I’m not even watching the news. I reel, I cry, I freak out, I pull myself out of it (usually with help i.e. a serious scolding from my husband), and I think, Got it. But every time I adjust to the new reality, the next day brings another whammy. On Days one and two of distance learning, I got my freak-out out of the way and wrapped my brain around it. I went to bed with hope that the first good day we’d had as a family could, in fact, become the norm… only to be told, midway through the morning of my first day doing it solo, that they decided it was too much work and we were taking a complete pause in learning for three days.

I feel like the entire world is going to need PTSD counseling when this is over.

5. Distance learning: good. The Catholic school did not cancel, and my second grader lost his mind midafternoon, which required me to snuggle with him and help him plan out his “choice” activities. One of those ended up being sidewalk chalk, which turned into a family event.

6. Distance learning: good. I have learned this week that although I can’t help with geometry, I do, in fact, still find fractions relatively simple work; ergo, I *can* do fifth grade math!

7. Distance learning: mixed. The Met is streaming operas. (Good!) But no one who has kids on any kind of schedule can watch an entire opera that begins at 7p.m. and lasts nearly three hours. (Bad.) However, we did get to see the first forty-five minutes of the Barber of Seville.

More thoughts to come.

Bonus: the Liturgical Composers’ Forum, of which I am a member, is launching an initiative to support the composers who have lost their jobs in this economic mess. They give so much to us by facilitating our sung worship; I hope those of us who still have income can give something back.

(Part two continues here…)

(Linking up with 7 Quick Takes at This Ain’t the Lyceum…)

Adulting Is Kicking My Butt

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Normally, I’d say I do pretty well at “adulting.” Let’s be honest, I was probably more adult at twelve than some people are at twenty.

But adulting is really kicking my butt right now. Last week, midweek, I had a really black moment. My oldest was mad at me–mad in a way every parent is conditioned to expect in adolescence, but which I’d never experienced. I wasn’t sleeping for profound anxiety, some of it connected with said teen. I’m crazy worried about my kids’ mental health, and my own ability to be the rock.

The trouble with adulting is that you have be the adult when it makes you the Bad Guy. And in the coronavirus era, parents have a lot of bad guy rules to enforce.

In my house, there’s been a lot of “guys! We are stuck with each other for AT LEAST a month. This is our opportunity to learn to love each other better.”

(Reality check: so far that message doesn’t seem to be sinking in.)

Then there was one particular email. I won’t go into except to say that it hit on my most tender spot–my relationship with my children–and I discovered the bottom of my well.

The kids were downstairs screaming at each other about Xbox time, but I was up in my bedroom, crisscross applesauce, bent over my legs and thinking simultaneously: “I’m going to get this cry out of the way” and “I didn’t know my body still bent like this.”

But I only got about three tears out of my eyes.

When Kate Basi can’t cry, it’s got to be bad.

I felt absolutely…AWFUL. I don’t remember EVER feeling that hopeless.

I said a whole lot of prayers that consisted of nothing but “Holy Spirit… please… please… please…”

I think I dozed off, staring at this raw, empty hopelessness that seems to have no expiration date. And when the next diatribe from downstairs roused me, I thought, “I need to go down and be with them. O God, I can’t do it. I don’t have it in me. I’m going to make everything worse.”

And the response came back clear and impassive:

FOLD LAUNDRY.

I looked at the mountain of laundry piled in front of my bed. It had been put off four days already; it definitely needed to be done. Even so, I said, “You’re kidding, right? Do you hear those kids? I need to be downstairs being a mom.”

NO. FOLD LAUNDRY.

Now, I’ve made it my goal in life to pay attention when the Spirit speaks, and this was the clearest directive I’ve gotten in a long time.

So I sighed and threw up my hands and said, “Okay, your funeral.” And I turned on “In Want of a Wife,” a podcast on Pride & Prejudice, and folded laundry for forty minutes.

And then I went downstairs and out the door, because the Xbox wars had burned themselves out (you like my coronavirus reference? Yeah, me either) and the sun was out and it was warm outside. And there I dug up grass from around the willow tree, which needs more mulch and less grass, and transplanted plugs to other places in the yard that had no grass at all, only chickweed and henbit and crabgrass seeds salivating over the open space to wreak havoc.

And then I came in and made dinner, and I felt… better.

So what did I learn? Well, here’s what I did NOT learn. I did NOT learn how to make it less painful (on me!) to be the Bad Guy. I did NOT learn the magic words to make the child who resents the bleepety-bleep out of this whole situation to feel better and revert to his less-surly self. I did NOT learn how not to feel overwhelmed when contemplating the lack of expiration date for what we’re facing.

What I DID learn was that doing is next to godliness. And now that I know that, DOING is the focus of my next four weeks.

(Also: hiking. Whenever possible.) hike 1_opt

hike 2_opt

Random Observations of a Writer On the Reality of Living Through the Coronavirus Shutdown

It’s been a week since the kids came home from school for the foreseeable future, and today is day 2 of an official “stay at home order” where I live–though we can still go hiking (and we intend to continue doing so as long as we’re permitted, weather permitting—which it hasn’t done much of lately).

Bear Creek 5_opt

Mental health is my primary concern—both for me (anxiety came home to roost again in the past week) and for my kids. It’s spring break right now, but the first three days of our Coronavirus Break were school days and I doubt it’s a coincidence that the anxiety hit at the same time. I am staring down the barrel of at least a month of trying to educate my developmentally disabled daughter on my own—a child who needs adult help for a significant part of her school day. And in the midst of all this, I am drafting a new novel. I’d *like* to be writing music, too, but I haven’t figured that one out yet.

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I thought I’d use my blog to share a few things about this historic (blech, spare me from ever experiencing history again!) time, as they strike me. So here are some thoughts, in no particular order:

1. I’m struggling to keep coronavirus from entering the book I’m drafting. The characters keep wanting to touch each other—touch elbows, give hugs, you know, normal human contact things. And every time they do I feel like I’m committing a sin.

2. Also, I just wrote the line, “December passed into January; school restarted, and with it the normal routine…” Which opened up a big, queasy pit in my gut, because it reminded me how NOT normal the routine is now. The best times of my life right now are the ones when I forget this is all happening. But when it comes back to mind, it’s almost worse than never having forgotten at all.

3. Everyone says STAY AT HOME, and those who are shouting loudest never acknowledge that such admonitions don’t leave room for the “get outside, the park trails are open even if the playgrounds are not” (in many places, at least). So when I back my van out at 4:00 on a Tuesday afternoon to take the kids to the Bear Creek Trail for a walk around the wetlands to hear the peep frogs and throw rocks in the creek, my scrupulous self cringes.

4. Facebook is a welcome venue for ordinary human interactions—except no one is talking about anything except shutdowns and the virus. That’s not a criticism; it’s what’s on our minds. But it does mean if you need a break for human interaction, you likely aren’t going to get what you went looking for. The place you go for relief becomes a further source of anxiety. It’s a conundrum.

5. I resisted the idea of structure, because a) the earlier the kids get up, the more hours of the day I have to figure out how to keep them from killing each other, and b) structure is only structure if you follow it, and when the weather is crap 90% of the time, you have to throw the structure out and go outside whenever the weather decides to let you go outside.

6. I intended to spend the next weeks rehabbing my back yard: tearing up weed patches and sowing grass seed. But now it’s the only outdoor space my kids have for most of the time. I’m trying to find a solution, but I’m afraid there isn’t one. I may have to accept that the best laid plans for reclaiming the lawn from the weeds are just toast.

7. One good thing, I’m almost embarrassed to admit. I’ve said for years that things like toilet training are less about kids’ readiness than about “when the parents are ready to put in the effort.” I’m kind of an artsy, spacey person who remembers her own habits of cleanliness but have not necessarily been great about policing those of my kids. Thanks to coronavirus, our kids are currently learning all the habits of handwashing that I never remembered to enforce before. Surely this will be good in the long run.

8. On the other hand, the reason I’m so great at policing is because I feel constantly dirty these days. Constantly creepy-crawly, afraid to touch anything. For now, it’s not a bad paranoia to have, but the trouble is that such paranoias don’t follow logic. Once this is all over, I foresee a really big mental/emotional struggle to reclaim my independence from anxiety. Imagine how bad this time must be for people who *actually* struggle with OCD.

Enough for today.

Disability and Friendship

So here’s a thing you might not consider about having a kid with a disability:

It is REALLY HARD to make friends.

Think about it. How do little kids make friends?

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STEP ONE: They find kids at school with like interests and personalities. They come home and tell you about it.

STEP TWO:
A) If you’re at Catholic school, you probably have a family directory and you can go look them up and reach out to the parents, and voila! Playdates can happen.

B) If you’re in a public school without a directory (I’m told it would have to be the PTAs that undertook that task, because no one on staff has time), your kid writes your phone number on a piece of paper that his or her friend takes home to his mom. The kids pester their parents until the parents make contact. Voila! Playdates can happen.

Now imagine your kid doesn’t do “conceptual.” She’s got a heck of a gift for empathy and emotional intelligence, but she’s missing the neural connections that make some of the most obvious social norms, well, obvious. In other words, it doesn’t occur to her to give her phone number to a friend, nor to ask for that friend’s number.

Also, for seven years she’s told you pretty much nothing about school besides “we had a fire drill,” even when they didn’t, and “we’re having a fire drill,” when they aren’t. You don’t actually know the names of her classmates, because along about second grade she stopped getting birthday invitations, and you don’t know the parents because you’re spread too thin with four kids in three schools and you really don’t know very many people at any of the schools.

Now imagine that your daughter, who is turning thirteen in ten days, has achieved her “adaptive skills” goals already and the IEP team calls you in to set some new ones. Yay!

“Oh, by the way,” they say, three quarters of an hour into the meeting, “you should know she’s inviting everyone in the school to her birthday party.”

This is the point at which you and your husband look at each other and say, “Uh…”

Because she hasn’t said anything to you about a party. And she sure hasn’t told you the name of a single person she wants to invite—aside from the trio of girls with Down syndrome that you managed, by the grace of God and a dash of sheer dumb luck, to cross paths with over the years.

This is the moment where two things happen simultaneously: a great, glorious, internal fist pump that all the battles you’ve undertaken on behalf of inclusion have paid off, and she has friends at school.

And, in equal measure, a gut-hollowing doubt that those friends actually consider her their friend. Because if they really did, why haven’t there been any overtures from them?

Then comes the moment where the teachers realize you don’t even know she has friends at school, and the magnitude of the barrier becomes clear.

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Because privacy regulations are so tight in health and education that they can’t even tell you the first names of these friends she’s invited to her nonexistent birthday party. How can you facilitate a birthday party when you don’t even know who to invite?

Over a 4-day weekend, the team consults (because they’re awesome that way) and comes up with a list of the kids your kid has invited. They can’t give it to you, but they can tell you how many invitations to send to school, and they can hand them out. Then you just have to hope someone responds, thus proving that your kid actually is viewed, in that mysterious world known as middle school, as someone worth being friends with.

So there you have it: today’s lesson in “things you never thought about when considering disability.”

The Sheer Terror of the Blank Page

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It’s been a long time since I started a new novel.

Well, maybe not as long as it seems. I had an aborted attempt around a year ago. But I’m really zeroing in on novel writing now, and I’m discovering something I probably knew, on some level, but didn’t really, y’know… KNOW. Namely, that when life with a two teens, a tween, and an eight-year-old just entering serious activities smacks into writing, everything suffers.

(But writing suffers more than the kids. I’ll never apologize for putting them first.)

2019 has been an intense year–much of it the best possible tension–a cavalcade of good things raining down on me! And I am so very grateful for it.

But nonetheless… intense.

I’ve always been a burn-the-candle-at-both-ends person, but lately I’m really feeling how little is left at either end. I’m dropping balls all over the place. I forgot a piano lesson, people. And a doctor’s appointment that I scheduled on a day off school to make my life less complicated.

I’ve been struggling to get momentum going on a new novel. I’ve been working on that this week, as best I can, and I’m coming to some new insights. I’ve known for a long time that for me, starting a major fiction project is like getting a huge machine in motion. It’s agony at the start, and as I slowly grind into action, the motion itself clarifies things, which clarify more things, and so on, until I’m writing as fast as I can and making notes to myself for things that will happen a dozen scenes down the line.

But first, I have to invest the time to get that motion going. And it is an intense effort that really does require big blocks of uninterrupted time.

2019 has been a year of interruptions. Some were cause for celebration, others for tearing my hair out. There was a period of 3 weeks this fall, for instance, when 2/3 of the weekdays I had one half or the other of my kids home, because the public & parochial schools don’t overlap their teacher PD days. Ever. It’s like the school systems put their heads together and went out of their way to make PD days consecutive rather than concurrent.

I have been philosophical. Well aware that I only have 3 1/2 years left with my oldest, I am trying to be present in the moments of my life.

But that means ignoring not just writing, but also the Mount Everest of laundry in need of folding. Yes, yes, the kids should do it themselves, but they only get half of it and they mismatch and do it wrong and it’s harder to fix it than to do it myself in the first place!

Ahem. Back to the point at hand…

There’s a conventional wisdom among writers that you have to get the story down, no matter how bad it is–you have to turn off the internal editor and allow yourself to write a crap first draft. I’ve never bought into that. Crap drafts are harder to fix than good ones.

Unless, of course, you have no draft at all because you can’t get the momentum going. And then yes, maybe it’s time to exile the internal editor and get the story on the page.

I also realized that what makes a first draft is so terrifying to me is that literally everything is up for grabs. The major backstory event that kick starts my protagonist’s journey could be caused by something she did, or by something another character did. There are positives and negatives to both ideas, and which one I choose impacts how her present story unfolds. What time of year did event A happen? Because I have to count X number of months/years forward from that in order to figure out when Event B in the present will take place. What, precisely, did Character C do to cause my protagonist’s problem? I need to know, because her story is all about fixing it.

And every time I set out to answer one question, I discover a dozen more that need answering in order to settle the one I thought I was working on.

So for right now, my job is to decide on anything–this little thing, that little thing. Create some little anchors. Because the more anchors I put down, the more solid the framework becomes. And the more solid the framework, the clearer the picture. And the clearer the picture, the more possible it becomes to write.

(Who said there’s no world building in contemporary fiction?)

Enough

My word for 2019 is “enough”: I am enough, I am doing enough, I am good enough, this moment is enough.

It’s a combination of learning to recognize the goodness in saying “no” and of living in the moment, being present in my own life instead of always feeling dissatisfied.

I’m working on it.

But I don’t often feel it. Which is why I want to mark this moment. I just finished revising a particularly difficult and climactic scene for my novel. It’s a scene that marks the culmination of a particularly sensitive plotline. It was good before, but it was a leee-ttle bit melodramatic. And now, after today’s work… it’s really good.

When I finished, I said, “Now I’ve done enough today.” And I meant it.

Kathleen M. Basi

Author/Composer