A friend checks in to say “how’s it going?”

My mind goes blank.

How’s it going? How’s it GOING? What the fuck, Miranda? Can anyone answer that question right now?

The inside of my head sounds like a classroom where the teacher’s just asked who wants to read aloud. The inside of my head sounds like a middle school computer lab at 7:30 am, both silent and humming.

Friends from across the US text each other to find out where we all are on the pandemic lockdown timeline, which has “Regular use of a shopping cart, sometimes I’ll get a wipe if I’m feeling virtuous” on the left end, and “Needs official papers to go to the store” on the right.

“They just closed all the restaurants and bars.”

“Yeah, we did that too. School’s out for 4 weeks.”

“6 for us.”

“Are you stocking up on food?”

“Kind of... Not like hoarding, but grabbing a few extra things. You?”

“I don’t know.”

Text subtext: is this really happening?

Surprisingly, I do have a little experience with this kind of disruption.

No, I’m not a vampire who lived through the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. If I was, you bet your bottom dollar that my skin would look a lot better than it does right now. My undead shit would be pore.less. Nicole Kidman would wish she had my baby-smooth vampire forehead. But sadly, I’ve got bona-fide alive skin right now, and I’m sorry to report that it is communicating with me the only way it can about my all-pie diet of late.

I arrived in New Orleans for senior fall semester, unpacked my suitcase, and called a couple of friends. A couple of days later was the first time I’d hear the name “Hurricane Katrina.”

I didn’t take it seriously for a few reasons:

First, I was a college senior and the only thing I thought could kill me was if someone forgot to prop me up on my side after a night out and I choked on my own barf (or “borf” as my 5yo spells it, which is, I think, onomatopoetic perfection.)

Second, this wasn’t my first rodeo. After three years at Tulane, we’d had to evacuate ahead of “The Big One” so many times. Without fail, the fateful day of landfall would come and go with a light shower at MOST. Hurricanes dissipate. Hurricanes turn. Even if I knew it wasn’t “technically true” or “supported by facts”, my life experience led me to believe that hurricanes never barrel down on the city of New Orleans like Cruella DeVil on a truckload of puppies. They always blink.

As Katrina maintained her course and fury, I started to field phone calls from relatives, asking me what my evacuation plan was. “I think we’re just going to hunker down,” I said. “Order a couple of pizzas, light some candles, play some Scrabble.” Of course my idea of weathering a hurricane sounded like an episode of Dawson’s Creek. Of course my idea of a hurricane did not impact my ability to order a pizza.

Friends already in New Orleans started touching base to find out where we all were on the hurricane evacuation timeline, which had “Get drive-thru daiquiris on the way to the levee” on one the left end, and “Drive like hell to Texas” on the right.

“Are you evacuating?”

“I don’t know, my parents want me to.”

“Me, too. It’s not turning yet.”

“Are you, like, stocking up on anything?”

“I went to Blockbuster. :)”

It’s true. Four days before Hurricane Katrina hit, I went to Blockbuster on Claiborne and I rented Immortal Beloved, Requiem for a Dream, and Pulp Fiction. I still have all three.

Phone calls from home got more urgent. My aunt in Houston straight-up tore me a new asshole. “If we have to steal a boat to come in there with shotguns and get you, we will do it, but we will be pissed.”

My roommates and I talked to our downstairs neighbors. They were a young family with two little kids. We asked if they were evacuating. They said, “Probably not.” They smiled condescendingly at our growing anxiety, which might have pissed me off under other circumstances, but actually comforted me that day. I needed that condescending mom energy, the sure hand on the wheel, the irritated voice saying, “Do you think I don’t know how to get home from the grocery store, young lady?” when I called up, “We missed our turn.” I didn’t know this route. Where were we going? What was happening? The routine had been derailed and I wanted a mom to tell me to pipe down. I wanted someone to tell me they had it.

We asked them to just let us know if they did decide to evacuate.

“Of course!”

They were gone the next morning.

I weathered Hurricane Katrina with breathtaking privilege: It wasn’t my HOME-home in the crosshairs. It was my college apartment. I had a place to run to--multiple places, in fact. I got in my car the day before the storm hit and had the audacity to try to swing by Starbucks on my way out of town. Of course it was closed, and I had the gall to be surprised.

Was this really happening?

I drove to Texas with my boyfriend, crawling out of New Orleans with millions of other people, even though contra flow was in effect and every lane of every road led out of the city. In Houston, we arrived at my aunt and uncle’s comfortable home, where they served us spaghetti and salad and red wine and put us upstairs in soft beds. Early the next morning, my uncle popped his head into the dark bedroom and said, “The first levee just broke.”

Was this really happening?

Many parents are mourning with their school-aged children, especially parents with high school and college kids. They’re grieving big losses--senior soccer season, the internship at the theatre company of their dreams--and smaller but equally dear fixtures in their young adult lives: time with friends, prom, normalcy.

I remember grieving those things: the college plays I didn’t get to do, my last French Quarter Halloween, the new roommates I wanted to meet in the kitchen at two am, spoons poised to eat ice cream out of the carton.

Now I’m grieving with my kids, too. My 5-year-old is in the greatest preschool. He walks out of school every day having learned not just ASL letters and dinosaur facts, but that he is a kind friend who is important to his community. He loves school. He also loves soccer and gymnastics and swimming lessons. My 7-year-old is in the greatest elementary school. And swim, gymnastics, rock climbing. He was so excited to try flag football in April.

Mom’s Piddly-Diddle Homeschool is a poor substitute for all those kickass classrooms and teams. We’re gonna have to bake a lot of brownie mixes to make up for lost gymnastics time.

Not sure my “Adventure Walk to the Post Office” is gonna cut the mustard here.

“No, sorry, you don’t have coding class today…. But guuuuuesss whaaaaaat? It’s reeecycling day!!!”

Yikes. I don’t actually feel bad about it personally. I slapped my shit together in 24 hours and I’m flying by the seat of my pants, on gossamer wings woven from free kindergarten printables. I’m doing the best I can, and I don’t feel bad about it.

I just wish this wasn’t happening. I still can’t really believe it is.

Beneath all these feelings—the grief, the laughable absurdity, the crushing resentment toward (gestures at world) that so much of my life has been conscripted into daily service to my children, and humming dread that keeps waking me up at midnight ready to dig a moat or raid an abandoned grocery store mid-zombie-apocalypse—is the same question I kept asking myself so many years ago in New Orleans. Is this really happening?

Short answer: Yes, it is.

Long answer: Yes, it is, and you’re here, now, happening with it.

As someone who has a little bit of experience with disruptions like this one—cataclysmic interruptions that are unprecedented, uncontrollable, both inconvenient to some and deadly to others—please let me offer you a few pieces of advice on weathering the storm.

1. There are two true things you have to remember at the same time.

   Chances are, you still have much to be grateful for. I watched New Orleans flood from my aunt and uncle’s couch in Houston, and then I went back to my parents’ house where I continued my education. Today, I’m homeschooling my children to protect our community from this virus, and I’m doing it in a safe, comfy home that is fully stocked with markers, fruit snacks, popcorn, and the blessed internet. Never forget your responsibility to your community right now. If you have extra, share it. Others don’t.

   You also have much to grieve. Or resent. Or be pissed about. Or keep you up at night. Ignoring those feelings or shaming yourself about them isn’t gonna help you process them. Just because you didn’t pull the shortest straw doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to feel your feelings and worry your worries and need some comfort in uncomfortable times.

   Never mistake your inconveniences for tragedies, but it’s also not fair to pretend your inconveniences don’t exist.

   Both those things are true. I’m spinning and I’m still upright. I’m destabilized, and I’m still stable. I feel empty, but I’m full enough to share.

2. This balance is important to remember not just in our conversations with ourselves, but in our conversations with our children.

   The other day, Chicken sighed and said “Coronavirus makes everything harder.”

   I pulled that car over and said, “Woah woah woah, young man. Do you think I don’t know how to navigate a pandemic?”

   JK.

   He said something true. I could have said something true back. But hell, he was right and I told him so. Coronavirus does make everything harder. Just because it doesn’t make his life the hardest doesn’t mean he’s not spinning, too.

   Shit, if I’m spinning, my kids are pulling G’s.

   As we all move through this period together, I wanted to remind you that both things are true for you and everyone you love, and especially your kids.

3. We will be okay, but we will be different.

   I’m speaking to you as a grown-up version of the college student who is losing precious months of what so many people have told them is the best time of their life. It sucked. I grieved. I also picked up and kept going.

   Every year when hurricane season rolls around, I reach out to friends from college to see how they’re doing, and I can practically hear them thinking, “How am I doing? What the fuck, Katie. Can anyone answer that question?” None of us lost irreplaceable things in the storm. Well, that’s not entirely true. We lost time. We’re still sad. Sad in a different way from losing people, homes, small businesses, entire communities. Objectively, we experienced a more privileged loss. But a loss nevertheless.

   Perhaps we will feel the same way about flu season every year. Perhaps when we ask our kids if they’re okay, they’ll get that quiet space in their heads, blank as the long days they filled with… things… screens… not going places, not seeing friends, their moms’ snappy four o’clock voices.

   And if they do, well, that’s sad, too. It’s also part of growing up, growing around obstacles, and getting big and tough enough to survive in the world.

   Our kids are learning just how much is beyond our control, how small we are and how powerless sometimes. Maybe a lot of us grown-ups are getting a brush-up on the same lessons, which are terrifying.

   They’re also learning how much remains in our control, how many choices we can make every day to help or hurt, how powerful we can be. Maybe us big kids are just now remembering our personal responsibility, too, which is humbling and, honestly, crushing at times.

4. Do keep a journal of some kind. A blog, a notebook, a YouTube channel, whatever. You’ll want to remember these days, and you’ll need a space where you can digest whatever the hell is going on in your head, particularly since this kind of crisis creates new, bizarre paradoxes that require a bit of untangling before they make emotional or intellectual sense:

Grateful and grieving.

Connect, but at a distance.

Destabilized, but still stable.

Afraid, but safe.

Trapped, desperate, in a home you love.

The storm’s coming, but it’s going to turn.

We’re safe, but stay inside.

The two tushies on either end of the teeter-totter are evenly matched, people. We’re all hovering in mid-air, swinging our legs, looking for the ground we were certain was right there a second ago.

Hang on.

Thanks for reading! This blog is ad-free because I like being accountable to readers, not advertisers. And if you like this blog, please remember that your contributions to my Paypal and Patreon help it remain ad-free, and help this community remain intact.

HOWEVER, if you only have $5 to give this month, please give it to your local food bank, or my local food bank, instead of me. Take care of yourselves and the most vulnerable among us, loves.

xoxo