The Children

These are trying times, no?

Yes. Yes, they are trying.

The governor of Ohio closed schools for the first time on March 12. The last day the girls were in school was Friday, March 13. They came home with Chromebooks.

That first ‘closing’ was supposed to be for three weeks. The tentative restart date was April 6.

Unless you live under a rock (can I move in with you?) you probably know that that date has been pushed back to May 1 and there are murmurs about it school not resuming at all for the rest of this school year.

We’re all under a ‘shelter in place’ warning. Of course, that doesn’t mean a thing to me, I go to work every single damn day anyway.

And guess what? I’m not a doctor or a nurse. I’m NOT important and yet here I am.

But my family is at home and that television is on all the time. And it’s all news, or rather, it’s nothing new. It’s all about death and destruction and illness and scary shit and Olivia is losing her mind.

I recently got home on a Tuesday and she was drawing at the kitchen table. Which is nice. She was wearing a purple one-shouldered dress. She looked lovely and yet…she’s haunted right now.

By 6:30, she’d worked herself into quite a lather.

She wanted to write her Gram a letter but didn’t know what to write. She is bored and tired and stressed and at 13, she doesn’t know how to handle her emotions.

I fed her some dinner. She cried.

I ran her a bath. She cried.

I washed her hair. She cried.

We called her Gram. She cried.

I gave her some hot tea and a cookie. She felt a little better.

She’s scared. She’s young and fragile and scared. She doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want her mom or her dad or her sister or her Gram to die.

I hugged her and told her we’re doing all we can so that none of us will die.

I finally asked her if she’d like to me to take a couple of days off work to spend with her.

That brightened her up.

We made plans for those days. We planned to go outside and draw on the driveway with chalk, go to the school and pick up pies that had been ordered months ago for the prom that will probably not happen (have I mentioned how glad I am that I didn’t buy a prom dress yet?) After we pick up the pies, we planned to take the ones my mom ordered to her, maintaining our distance, of course.

The, the next day, our big plan was to go through the McD’s drive-through in Montpelier. Mama needs her coke and Olivia needs to get out of the house, away from the house, even if for a little while.

Tough times, indeed.