Blurred Boundaries, Micro-Rituals and Whack-a-Mole

When Covid19 forced us home right before our school’s spring break was to begin, I remember thinking my faculty and staff had never worked harder to pivot to a brand new distance learning platform that we called School@Home.  It was not uncommon to find me on the phone at 11:00 p.m. with a division director or with my Associate Head working out one more logistical challenge and then on a call with other local independent school heads at 7:30 a.m. the next morning. Adrenalin fueled us.  We were fighting a pandemic. My school rose, majestic, to the challenge, and delivered superb distance-learning for our girls. 

The school landscape, as we understood it, had shifted irrevocably, and we were continuously trying to jog up the down escalator in a crowded department stores.  Sisephyean, we thought, shaking our heads, but how long could it last?  Turns out, it’s still with us.  I thought, once we made the decision to open our school in person—PrePrimary through Eighth Grade on campus with the Upper School online--that we would feel a sense of relief.  Instead, now it feels as if we are engaged in a prolonged game of Whack-a-Mole.  We solve one problem—outdoor classrooms—and begin to worry about something else:  what time should families finish the temperature app?  We open a third section of Kindergarten and fret about sinks that need to be touched to be turned on.

For me, school life has always been punctuated by predictable rituals and the rhythm of the calendar.  As a career schoolteacher, I can, like a blind mole heading for light, move through the school calendar with certainty:  Opening Day, Convocation, a Thanksgiving all-school assembly, the Junior Chapel, the Snowflake Ballet, Song Contest, MLK, Jr. Day as a day on for service and reflection, rather than a day off, the Flower Assembly, moving up ceremonies, Last Chapels, Commencement, our closing meetings.  And yet.  Once going to school stopped being what we did, we had to reimagine so many of the rituals that marked of the passage of time.  We did the Flower Assembly in which the Kindergarten girls give each Senior a Gerbera Daisy online, and we only invited the Kindergarten and the Seniors.  Each K girl had colored in the outline of a daisy and we had sent an envelope to each senior with the carefully colored in daisy within. “You can pin the daisy to your bulletin boards in college,” I explained to the girls, an enhancement we had never considered when we used cut flowers. I asked the girls questions about the year, about School@Home; on the camera, lots of Kindergarten girls, old pros now at managing online, answered questions, shared memories.  And the Seniors did, too.  It was different, but it was lovely. 

At home, I found myself craving new routines, creating what I think of as micro-rituals.  Each night, I ground the beans for coffee.  When school is physically in session, sometimes I grind the beans and sometimes I don’t.  I can have a lovely cup of coffee with our Keurig in the office. Eating out or ordering out stopped completely.  Our oldest daughter, living in Manhattan, took on ordering groceries, which we dutifully wiped down outside before bringing them into the kitchen.  One day, four bags of lemons arrived.  She had ordered four lemons.  Ah, the surprises of Instacart!  My son and I began to cook together:  lasagna, chicken tikka masala, various bowls full of ingredients over rice.  Early in our quarantine, that same son suggested watching the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe.  We did not watch a different movie every night; sometimes, we were too tired, but by late May, we had seen them all, and I was hooked.  I liked washing the dinner dishes all together and settling down into our spots in the family room—my son on the couch, my husband and I in armchairs, mine with the light shining over my left shoulder so I could do needlepoint while I watched.  My husband would struggle with the remote until my son liberated it, and together, we would enter a world of heroes and villains, strong women, great special effects.  That ritual felt like something we could count on, but after we had watched all the movies, I felt sad that we could not find another series as riveting. 

At the end of June, we gathered at my family’s summer house.  Each day found us plugged into our laptops:  me, my oldest daughter, her fiancée, my younger daughter, her beau, my son and my husband.  By day, a house built for leisure masqueraded as a We-Work.  But in the late afternoons, the kids began to play tennis almost every day.  We played a lot of backgammon.  Whoever cooked—we rotated that nightly obligation—did not clean up.  We grew proficient at corralling four of the dogs on the front porch, so that Artie, the timid and unpredictable rescue dog, could leave the house without running into any of her canine cousins.  I baked scones several times a week.  We ordered more citronella candles—since we were serious about quarantine, we relied on having items delivered.  We found our rhythm. 

But here’s what didn’t change:  the huge amount of work so many in the school I lead needed to do to prepare to open school.  We migrated from Google Hangout to Zoom, hired more teachers, erected outdoor classroom spaces, talked with the County Board of Health.  We consulted with our Medical Advisory Panel, wrote letters to families, hosted calls with our Upper School girls, hired more teachers, thought about racism and how to be an anti-racist school. We acquired PPE, an acronym I’d never heard of before March. We followed the number of cases in our county and in our state with the fascination of children at a slumber party gathered around at Ouija Board.  I conferred with my head pals around the country, by phone, by text, by email.  We fussed about buses and how to keep children safe on them.  We invested in thermometers and worked out who would scan the foreheads of every child.  We waited for the app we ordered that records temperatures.  We designed new schedules, built yurts, reorganized grade-level teams, listened to people’s real fear and tried to address it.  The boundaries between work and home eroded; sometimes, we worked until 11 p.m.  I learned my new division director in the Upper School was an early riser just as I am; we spoke frequently before 7 a.m.

This bleeding of boundaries, no ending of the workday or the work week—one day resembled the next as July flipped by—is not normal.  “Take a break,” I urged my leadership team until one of them kindly responded, “Ann, I appreciate the sentiment, but there is too much work to do.  , there is no break to be taken.  ”

There is no break to be taken.  I paused, embarrassed to have suggested something that could not even be an option. They were right. In quarantine with my own family, my son fussed at me almost every day for still being on my computer, for still being on the phone. I did endless loads of laundry, searched for missing socks, loaded and unloaded the dishwasher. Work life and family life began to resemble one another.  There are no breaks to be taken, but the pace, the intensity, feels hard to sustain.

And maybe this is why the micro-rituals have become all the more essential.  When the mountain of obligations rises too high, there is no scaling the peak.  But jumping in the lake for ten minutes with my children will not further delay my solving of insoluble problems.  It is okay after 9:00 p.m. to remind myself, as I have often reminded young administrators, that all the work will be there tomorrow.  The laundry will be there, too. This is the song that never ends… And a game of Whack-a-Mole has no expiration date.  We will be playing for a long, long time.