In like a lion, out like a lamb.  The beginning of the month was the usual crazy.  Rehearsals, judging, an advocacy trip to the capitol, starting quarter grades and impatiently waiting for spring break to begin.  Fast forward to March 31 where I have sat in a chair most of the day today looking at a computer screen.  I feel like I’ve worked all day but  I’m not really sure how much I’ve actually accomplished.  Before I would teach or watch my student teacher teach and I could SEE that things were happening.  My poor student teacher was all of a sudden just done, but fortunately the state and the university have worked it out where she can be certified.

In the meantime I sit and look at a screen.  At the dining table when I can’t use the office.  Because my husband is also working from home and seems to be doing a lot of recording lately so I’ve been relegated to the dining room. I have discovered that the new dining room chairs are VERY comfy for long periods of time.  Good to know.  I guess.

I’ll be honest and say I haven’t been out.  Well, I have been out in the car a couple of times but that’s it.  It’s easy for me to just sit and hard for me to get motivated to do those healthy things like walking.  It has been beautiful outside the last few days and the doors  and windows have been wide open.  The sun has been shining, the birds have been singing, the trees are budding and I feel like I can’t leave the apartment.  My husband on the other hand is always looking for reasons to go out.  I’m not crazy about it but he is the  social person and he’s loosing his mind.  I may also be losing it but it’s by retreating into myself.  I’m pretty sure that zoom meetings are saving my life right now because I have to interact with others.

I ponder about a lot of diverse things right now.  I feel like there has been a lot of death in the last several months, and not by way of the virus.  Maybe it’s just my age but I sometimes wonder if they didn’t pass away when they did to miss this craziness.  Silly, right?  Maybe a blessing if they did?  I think about how this year is not ending the way my friends who are retiring thought it would.  I think about not being able to say a proper goodbye to my kids, how I have boxes of things from my classroom stacked in storage and in our home office.  Change is hard enough but without a proper transition and closure it just makes it worse.

Tomorrow begins another month.  We just found out that we’re out until at least May 6.  March has gone out like a lamb in terms of the quiet forced upon our classrooms, but we’re going to have to be lions to survive this.  We need to keep fighting through the isolation, the depression, the loss of so many things.  We need to all remember that a lot of us have probably gone through worse and that while there are many uncertainties right now, this will eventually end and give us a chance to rebuild, perhaps in a way we’ve never built before.  As teachers who expect our students to follow directions, now it’s time for all of us to do the same.  Then perhaps the end of April we’l be able to go out, not like a lamb, but with the lamb.