Letter to a future grandchild, mid-pandemic

July 29, 2020

Dear grandchild,

As I write this, my daughter (who I expect will be my only) is not yet five, and still in preschool. Although, even that feels odd to write because she hasn’t actually been in her school since March. We are 6 months into a global pandemic known as COVID-19 (the illness caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2). Neither have I been in my office or a classroom in that time. I don’t know whether I will ever have grandchildren, but my own grandmother lived through the 1918 Flu Pandemic and I now wish I had known to ask her what her experience was like during those two years. I believe she was born in 1911, so her experience at 7 might have had similarity to what my daughter is currently experiencing. Or, maybe I am romanticising a shared experience across a century gap.

I am sure you can find factual & historical accounts of the chaos that is (was for you) 2020, so I won’t try to document the contextual details here, but I will try to explain my experience during this time of crisis. The first word that comes to mind is uncertainty. I am a planner by nature. I’ve developed a habit over the years of thinking through the worst-case scenario at a given moment, convincing myself that that scenario would likely be manageable, and proceeding with some level of comfort that everything will be ok. This, of course, demonstrates the immense privilege I've enjoyed throughout my life - knowing that my worst-case scenarios were rarely catastrophic and almost never came to be. But that strategy has started to fail me during this time. The possible worst-case scenarios I find myself contemplating today (and for the last few months) include deaths of loved ones, job loss, and the collapse of societal structures and institutions I’ve assumed would not change dramatically in my lifetime. These scenarios provide anxiety rather than comfort. So, I’ve tried to pivot from searching for comfort in the worst scenario to attempting to find comfort in hoping and expecting that the worst will not come to be. No longer being able to rely on my rational brain to convince myself that things are fine (because rationally, they are not fine) is unsettling.

And yet, we are fine. I am incredibly lucky and fortunate to be financially, residentially, familially, and professionally stable. No one in my immediate circle has fallen ill. I have had the opportunity to spend more quality time with my young daughter than I ever expected I would as a mother who chose full-time employment. Our “Family Team,” as we call it, feels like a team more often than not. We garden, go on hikes, swim, do puzzles, have dance parties, cook, do art projects, and other things that come to mind as we try to find new ways to combat isolation as a team of three. There have been many unexpected moments of pure joy and lots of snuggles which have truly felt magical. I find myself trying to lock certain moments away in my memory, appreciating them in the moment in a way I never did before. So, for us, it has not been all bad.

Broadly, I find reasons to remain hopeful as well. It seems that the pandemic has been able to bring to the collective forefront issues of social justice and racial equity that have been ignored for far too long. It seems we might be at a tipping point here in the U.S., and I see a possibility for a world even five years in the future that is in some fundamental ways better for more people than it was five years ago. The collision of pandemic, political polarization, impending ecological collapse due to climate change, and glaring social inequity have me feeling at times that the world I know is coming to an end (this perception may or may not be influenced by the post-apocalyptic dystopian science fiction I’ve been reading lately). As I write that, I feel the need to acknowledge that the world I’ve known, that seems to be at a breaking point, has been very comfortable for me and deeply unjust for many others. So, while the uncertainty, ever-present worry, and fear have made this all feel, at times, impossible and unbearable, I do not want things to just go back to “normal” as I keep hearing others hope for. I hope for a new normal to arise from this in which the multiple intersecting crises are acknowledged and action is taken to enact real changes that make life better and more just for millions of people who have suffered systematic oppression for too long, and millions of species currently facing extinction due to climate change and related factors such as pollution and habitat loss.

This is the most momentous point in history that I have lived through in my 38 years. I have never before been aware of collective suffering, anxiety, fear, and anger all around me (again this is evidence of the privilege I have experienced). In communicating directly with family members, friends, neighbors, students, and colleagues, I have yet to engage with someone in my circles who is not facing new challenges and heavier burdens. But, I started this letter with the goal of documenting my personal experience, and I seem to have avoided that so far.

Professionally, The challenge of shifting to teaching online has been surprisingly exciting and fulfilling, although it did not start out that way. At first I felt stifled as an educator, and saddened to miss the daily interactions with my students. These student interactions are typically a source of energy for me. Seeing a student’s enthusiasm build for something I care deeply about is deeply gratifying. Having a student ask a question after class that demonstrates their genuine curiosity, or even better makes me consider something in a new way, are examples of the near daily reminders of the myriad reasons I love my job that I had become accustomed to. With the abrupt shift to online, my daily interactions with students were through email and mostly focused on challenges, hardships, or severe anxiety. It became very clear that many of my students were struggling, and I realized that pushing for deep engagement with the material and academic rigor was no longer in the best interest of my students. As I was suddenly engaged in childcare full time, I was pulled between wanting to do more to support my students, and needing to attend to my own reality of (shared) full time childcare (I can only imagine how exponentially more difficult it is to do this particular job as a single parent). I felt my own limitations in ways I had not previously. I felt guilty for not doing more for my students, guilty for not coming up with more creative activities to keep my daughter entertained and ideally learning, guilty for not being able to better support my parents in their new loneliness, and guilty for being impatient and unavailable with my partner who was going through his own challenges as an educator teaching from home. I’m very good at feeling guilty. And lately I even feel guilty about feeling guilty.

As the semester ended and I transitioned into summer planning for the Fall semester, this has become a time for me to reevaluate my teaching and my curriculum. I'm asking myself questions about why I teach the way I do, how I could do it better, what the most important aspects of my course are, and what should be stripped away to emphasize and make that essential core more impactful and beneficial for my students. I am simultaneously saddened and excited by the prospect of teaching a large introductory course in a new format - fully online and mostly asynchronous. I will deeply miss the face-to-face connection with students, but I believe that whenever I teach this course again in person, it will be changed for the better and that is exciting. It makes the work I am currently doing to prepare feel meaningful. I am starting to find again that energy I’d been missing through creative planning. Recording myself lecturing is not at all energizing. Making videos for my students outside in some of my favorite nature settings and teaching myself basic video editing feels like dusting off myself as an educator - new and improved. Moments of tingly excitement remind me of the forgotten feeling of walking out of a successful class.

These moments of fulfilled excitement have been welcome relief from the far more frequent moments of overwhelming anxiety. Triggered by scrolling through the news, or email after email about something out of my control, or weighing conflicting articles or bits of advice related to how and whether to visit with family and friends, or the daunting task of planning simultaneously for multiple versions of multiple courses, or even something as trivial as a dirty kitchen, I have become accustomed to a previously-unfamiliar feeling of tightness in my chest accompanied by an inability to make decisions, sadness, and feeling like I just can’t handle it all. Luckily these feelings don’t last long. Some solitude and a quick “dose” of tech-free nature generally bring me back to feeling more like myself.

Over the last few months, I have been in a continual process of trying to decide and reevaluate what really matters and what matters most. Asking myself if I am choosing to spend my time addressing those things, or allowing myself to get distracted by things that matter less. For example, right now should I play with my daughter, clean the kitchen, follow up on some email, or go for a walk? At first this seems obvious - my daughter should be the priority as she is the most meaningful thing on that list. However, if the kitchen stays dirty or I skip my walk (one of the rare occasions where I experience solitude), I know I am more likely to snap at my daughter when I inevitably grow tired later this afternoon. And, if I ignore my email for another day, I may miss an opportunity to support a student through a struggle, or I could miss some important information about preparations or changes regarding the upcoming semester. Balancing all the things has never been easy, but the physical distance between home and work (and even the transition period provided by my previously-dreaded long commute) used to enable me to focus on certain things in particular spaces. Now I am trying to enact that compartmentalization mentally, through daily attempts at hour-by-hour scheduling or by doing different things in specific rooms in my home.

In a sort of personal-professional intersection (that dichotomy has always felt false, albeit useful) all of this has led me to decide that my research has to be deprioritized at this time. Rather than write the two papers (one long, long overdue) I hoped to complete this summer, I have done other things that feel more urgent and in some ways more important, despite the fact that publishing papers is fundamental to my success and even my identity as a scientist. Instead, I have done a lot of reading and reflecting to better understand my whiteness, white supremacy, and the implications of both. Instead I have spent hours researching child psychology and searching for better strategies to better help four-year-olds deal with their overwhelming emotions. Instead, I have spent many hours trying to prepare for the upcoming semester: making pedagogical and content changes to (hopefully) more effectively support student learning during this time that is incredibly challenging for my students in myriad ways that are both similar to and completely different from the challenges I am working through. Instead, I have realized I have to make time for myself to walk in solitude away from all others’ voices and ideas, to read things that draw me in and distract me (like the stories of Octavia Butler), and to (attempt to) stay connected with the handful of people who feel, currently, like my team beyond my immediate family.

I don’t know how I will remember this time. Perhaps I will remember feeling like I was living in a mass of contradiction. Simultaneously being joyful and despondent, newly fearful and newly hopeful, feeling secure while bracing for worse to come, worrying about the long-term impacts of all this on my daughter and knowing that children are resilient and she will be fine, being comforted by my privilege and also keenly aware of how unfair it is that I have that comfort while so many others do not. And so, dear grandchild, I’ll end with my hope that you have learned about 2020 as a turning point - the time when we as a global society and as individuals were challenged to examine our values, and chose to do better and to be better.

With love, hope, and determination,

Heather Olins