Monica Rhor on motherhood today, from counting your blessings to crying in a corner.
Monica Rhor says sometimes you count blessings, and sometimes you find a corner and cry.
On Day 52 of coronavirus quarantine, I locked myself behind my bedroom door, where I had taped a makeshift sign: “Teacher Lounge. No students allowed.”
“That’s it,” I had just scolded my daughters. “School is over for the year.”
I was out of patience. Exhausted. Overwhelmed.
Drained.
Done.
Done trying to make sense of Google Classroom links that never seemed to work. Done cajoling my kids to take seriously a mounting pile of remote “lessons” that came with little teacher instruction. Done begging for space and quiet so I could work.
I’m a working mom. I’m used to endless loads of laundry and a kitchen sink that always seems stacked with dirty dishes. I’m used to being perpetually frazzled and torn between the demands of work and family. I’m used to cursing afternoon traffic on I-59 as I inch desperately along in pursuit of a parentteacher conference.
My world is a crazy jumble of two lively daughters, three barking dogs, countless arts and crafts projects, a rotating cycle of soccer and basketball and volleyball, and a jam-packed schedule that has turned our kitchen calendar into a scrawled muddle of appointments and reminders.
That’s the glorious, chaotic, clamorous life I signed up for.
But parenting in the time of a pandemic brought me to my knees.
I was not prepared for the wallop. I thought I could handle what lockdown and social isolation would throw at us.
After all, I have a job that allowed me to work from home. Five years experience as a teacher. A masters in education. A closet full of instructional materials. All the tools, I thought, that would help me navigate this new abnormal normal.
A week into quarantine, I lugged a bookshelf into my dining room and stowed away the embroidered runner and wooden bowl decorating the table. I dug out my old teaching supplies — the laminated classroom rules, the dry erase boards, the parts of speech tiles, the grammar workbooks.
If the coronavirus outbreak was forcing us into the world of at-home learning, then, by God, I vowed to do it right.
Within a couple of hours, the rarely used room had been transformed into a makeshift home school — and I the standin teacher . My younger daughter dubbed it “Greenhouse Academy” — taken from a Netflix show — and even created a color-coded schedule to hang on the wall.
During that first week of class — an in-between period right after spring break and before their elementary school began sending home assignments — my two fifth-graders were thrilled about playing school with Mommy. I was overjoyed to finally have what I had so often fantasized about: unlimited time with my daughters.
We wore homemade ID badges and followed an agenda posted on the white board. We discussed a question of the day and I handed out tickets for good behavior. They diligently finished worksheets while I tended to Zoom meetings and did my reporting.
That didn’t last long.
Their school assignments started flooding in. Faulty hyperlinks led to deadends. Websites were impenetrable. Online textbooks were locked behind passwords we couldn’t decode. The girls were spending too much time in front of a computer. Glazed eyes, screen fatigue and boredom took hold.
I found myself refereeing sibling squabbles while spending more and more time and energy trying to keep them from falling behind. I scoured the internet and my teacher resources for videos, printables, online curricula. Anything to keep them engaged and to keep their brains churning.
My work was shoved to the side — relegated to late nights and to predawn marathons. And to the moments in-between.
In between lessons on the Westward Expansion, reviewing decimals and coordinating tutoring sessions on Zoom. In between repeated Amazon orders to stock up on Lysol wipes, toilet paper, masks and other supplies needed for lengthy quarantine. In between policing the front door and disinfecting anything — packages, grocery deliveries, dog food — that came through.
The constant vigil of wiping, wiping and wiping again was soon accompanied by another obsessive practice late at night when I couldn’t sleep: doomscrolling through Twitter, poring over the latest medical journal findings on COVID-19, tracking the rising case numbers across the country, fretting about what would happen if my husband or I got sick.
Many mornings, I slide into my daily Zoom conference call with editorial board colleagues in unwashed hair and a T-shirt thrown over my pajama pants. Make-up fell by the wayside early on.
I know I’m not alone. I’ve commiserated with friends buckling under the weight that this coronavirus has added to motherhood. I’ve read countless news stories about the unequal burden falling on women — as it always seems to do. I know that quarantine and social isolation are merely amplifying alreadyexisting inequities — women spend more than double the number of hours a day than men on unpaid work such as grocery shopping, cleaning and child care.
I also realize that many mothers are going through a much harder time. Single moms just holding on paycheck-to-paycheck. Laid-off moms struggling to put food on the table. Essential worker moms who don’t have the option of staying at home with their kids.
Moms who have lost husbands and daughters to this terrible virus. Daughters who have lost mothers.
All of us — especially moms on the front line — need more support, including paid sick leave, affordable childcare and work-from-home options. Now, and after this pandemic passes.
The fantasy-come-true of “unlimited time” with my kids proved a mirage. They are close, but my attention is often divided, my mind sometimes far away. Still, over these two long months of quarantine, I’ve usually been able to focus on my blessings.
I give thanks every day that we are still healthy — and for the many precious moments with my daughters that this tragic pandemic has made possible. Scrawling messages in rainbowcolored chalk in the driveway. Binging on movies and old TV shows. Collapsing in giggles while we play silly board games.
They are never far from my side, clinging to me as if I were a security blanket. And I, too, cling to them. Their beautiful faces keep me going on bad days, when the fear and stress and feelings of inadequacy threaten to engulf me.
Like Day 52. When all I could do was sink into a dark corner and cry.
Then there are days like today, when I took a break from writing this column and caught a peek of my daughters sitting quietly at that dining room table, each embroidering a colorful pattern on a piece of fabric.
I soaked in the scene, but didn’t say a word. They were working on a Mother’s Day surprise.