Today is the first day of summer. My kids finished their online classes yesterday, which means my daughter has officially, without fanfare, graduated from high school. My 13-year-old sons have already grown four inches this spring, their voices cracking and deepening.
What a long, strange spring it’s been for us all.
The papers say it’s been 100 days since the beginning of our COVID-19 lockdown, and it’s true: today marks exactly 100 days since we woke up on Friday, March 13 and learned that the schools had closed.
Like everyone else, we’ve adapted. My husband has taken his therapy practice online. The kids have learned to navigate Microsoft Teams and Zoom and Schoology for their virtual classes. We’re riding emotional waves, from the highs of We can do this! to the deep despairing lows of How can we do this? We’re isolated from the world but on top of each other. We are physically healthy but worn thin with anxiety. We feel helpless in a broken world, stuck in a time loop of terrible news stories of injustice and senseless suffering.
And of course, since I’m a writer, I miss writing.
I miss solitude.
I miss sustained quiet thinking time.
I’m doing my best to continue revision work on my novel, waking up early to chip away at one chapter after another. I wrote about this in a blog post for the QWF’s Chronicling the Days project, which will be published as an anthology next year.
There are still moments when I’m immersed in a scene, happy with the work I’m doing, galvanized about being so close to the end of this novel-writing odyssey… then I close my laptop and my good feelings disappear. Is it crazy to think that I can finish my book under these conditions? Won’t my work be wildly uneven? Why am I pushing myself for a book that nobody’s waiting to read?
There aren’t answers to these questions. I keep writing. I will see this project through, damn it. Even at this pace, I’m hoping my revisions will be finished within another 100 days. Then we’ll see what comes next.
Rebecca Morris 