Hitting the Wall
I have been the head of a school for sixteen years. In the stats on headship, I am an anomaly. I have an extraordinary faculty, fantastic students and parents, a wonderful board of trustees, a team of administrative colleagues who rise to every challenge, a supportive family. I have my health, the good health of my family, and pals who check on me. I live in a beautiful house with food that arrives regularly, ordered by our daughter who lives in NYC and has become an Instacart maven.
Yesterday a cloudy Friday at the end of Week 5 of our distance learning framework, I give into being grumpy, feeling sorry for myself. A headache bloomed. I’m tired of the new normal, tired of being in my house instead of at school. May is usually a marathon of celebration; instead, I feel homesick for my girls, worried about how hard our amazing faculty and staff are working. Perhaps it is that all of us leading schools have all attended one too many Webinars, squinted at our tiny square selves during one too many Zoom meetings, considered preposterous questions like: how will we fit children on buses? How will we socially distance young children next fall, who will have to wear masks they will hate? And how, exactly, we will feed lunch to masked children?
Self-care is no joke and feels hard to manage in these long undifferentiated days when there are no easy solutions, no sense that others will figure this out for us and then we will all be fine. When I am not grim, I feel inspired by the pedagogical discoveries we are making that we will carry with us into “in-person” school. We know how flexible our students are, how creative our teachers can be. Our parents, in our school, have been our champions. We can all manage anything for a certain length of time. And there’s the rub. How long will we need to be physically distant from our girls and little boys? How will we pivot from distance learning, which we’ve figured out for all but our smallest learners, to another iteration of how to be in school in safe ways.
My husband says, “You’ll have to stagger the times periods begin and end, so all the kids aren’t in the hall at the same time.” I feel myself getting tense. I hadn’t thought of that.
“We’ll mark the floor with gators, six feet apart,” I parry, proud of my quick-thinking even though it’s an idea I heard another head suggest earlier in the day.
“But it’s not linear, honey. It’s six feet in every direction.”
I hadn’t thought of that either. In fact, there is so much I hadn’t thought of. Each day, it seems we are playing a huge game of Whack-a-Mole. We solve one set of problems and a host of new ones present themselves.
I listen to a number of men heads on webinars confidently preview their plans for the next eighteen months, and I feel inadequate.
“Is this a gender thing?” I wonder to my best friend, Meg.
“It’s a control thing,” she suggests. “You know enough to know you can’t control all the variables.”
“Or any,” I muse.
Letting go of the idea that I can “fix” any of this is a lesson I need to learn over and over again. I worked for a woman who told us that we are presented with opportunities to learn what we need to learn over and over again until we really learn. For me, the sense that I need to “fix” anything broken is deeply ingrained. But I am not Oedipus. I know the limits of my ability. I eschew hubris. I did not cause the pandemic. Nor can I fix it. I cannot fix the way it feels to miss being with our girls in “real” time or how it feels for the girls to miss the prom that was supposed to happen tonight or fix our sense of uncertainty about next fall. All I can do is remember that hope is the antidote to fear, to think about my sheroines, Louisa May Alcott, Maya Angelou, Eleanor Roosevelt, my grandmother, my mother, my sister, my women friends—some heads, some teachers and some unconnected to education. I can model living with not knowing for my girls and remember to breathe, to take breaks, to take it one day at a time. What other choice do I have?
In our garden, the bleeding heart has started to bloom. It is one of my favorite early spring plants; my grandmother had an enormous bleeding heart in her backyard in Montclair, New Jersey. I love the pink heart shaped bloom, the tiny white and pink drop hanging from the heart like a tear that doesn’t fall. It is ephemeral, like feelings. The tear doesn’t fall, only trembles for a few days until the blooms disappear and a green shrub remains. Beyond the forsythia hedge on this sunny Saturday afternoon, I discover four juniors sitting on the tops of their cars, socially distanced in our parking lot. I visit with them for a few moments, happy to see them, delighted by their creative solution to socializing. My mood lifts.
I hit the wall, bounced, and found my feet again. Onward.