This essay was adapted from the newsletter Honey Stay Super.
By Kimberly Harrington
I haven’t seen my friends in two and a half months.
I haven’t gone on a walk with my walking buddy/design partner or had a coffee or a mimosa or a beer with any of my other friends either. I haven’t had a deep conversation, or even just a low-stakes catch-up chat, with anyone outside of my house and in person since early December. I am back to having 100% lost the thread of everyone else’s life other than my own. Although I know this will start to shake loose with the eventual arrival of spring, it’s an odd way to live. I don’t mind being a hermit. I like it a little too much probably, but even pre-pandemic this time of year, late-February through March, has always been emotional and mental low tide. For years I paced myself just to get to the end of February before finally realizing that March should be called “Just more February, only longer”.
When I think about how my kids’ entire high school experience has been shaped by a pandemic I try, often unsuccessfully, not to well up. (I am actually failing at this right now, as I type). I wonder what I would’ve thought, when I was pregnant, if someone had told me my babies would be teenagers during a pandemic. We are so used to this now, I guess. We just keep plodding forward thinking there might be an end, but in reality it’s not a race or even a marathon, it’s just a fucking treadmill. It’s that Nike headline, only not inspiring: There is no finish line.
When I think of the array of experiences that have been off-limits to them over the past 2+ years (some temporarily, others permanently) — going to school five days a week, driving in a car with friends, having an “end of middle school” dance, going to sleepovers, kissing (or just being close to!) someone, going to movies or the mall together, having a middle school graduation in person, going to the DMV to get a driver’s permit — it almost makes me want to laugh then punch something. Because, like, can you even believe this shit? It’s just ridiculous. Ridiculous.
As this school year slowly tiptoes toward spring it means that sooner than we realize it’ll be the end of yet another school year. All I seem to think about lately is how little time my kids have left in high school. When you have a baby you can’t help but think far into the future but it’s also completely unimaginable at the same time. You can’t imagine your baby walking or talking or singing. Then you can’t imagine them going to school, riding a bike, being dropped off at camp coated in sunscreen and bug spray and wearing a hat that they hate. And if your brain really wants to go super galactic, you try to imagine them driving or having deep voices or their first girlfriends or boyfriends. But it’s all so theoretical, your brain cannot grasp any of it. You can’t imagine them moving on, moving away from you. Because when you look at your baby it seems impossible. How can a baby do all that! How can all of those experiences unfold from just a little Butterball who fits right in your lap and smells slightly of milk and too little sleep?
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But all those things have happened or are happening now and I’m just like, huh, it really does come up on you just like that, doesn’t it? All those years of imagining and wondering and trying to do my best (and sometimes being completely aware I was actively not doing my best at all) are almost behind me. All those years of feeling like I had so much time to fix whatever I wasn’t doing right. All those years I had to fix myself, finally. All those years to be better at this are just almost … gone. And two of those years (and counting) were taken. Not entirely, not completely, but yes, quite a bit stolen.
I feel myself running out of runway. I say things inside my own head like, I guess this is just how our family is going to be. I guess this is just who we are. I guess this is just what all of our habits are now and forever. I guess I failed at teaching them to do everything I said I would. I guess we’ll just always be these people in the world. I guess the mold is set. I guess I tried until I didn’t. I guess the world fucked us all over and there’s not much we can do about that either.
I learned a hard lesson about a month ago. I had taken for granted that my kids have coped mostly pretty well with everything that’s been thrown their way these past two years. But what I needed to be shown, very clearly and very directly, is that that doesn’t mean that they don’t know what they’ve been missing. I think that was a fairytale I had been telling myself.
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“What we have all lost is the smug comfort that we can make plans for later and that those plans will happen. ”
I had been applying a pre-pandemic system of reasoning to the decisions that we were making. I needed to be shown that in a world that has taken so much from them, what they want to do doesn’t need to be part of some bigger plan. It doesn’t need to fit neatly within a framework or be a logical next step that leads to the next related thing. It doesn’t need to have anything to do with the future, actually. Never has the future been more now. What we have all lost is the smug comfort that we can make plans for later and that those plans will happen. That was always the case, of course, if you want to get philosophical about it.
So. I am trying to say yes to more things, big and small. And that’s how, on the small-things front, I spent a Saturday night at the state dance finals even though my kids are not on dance teams. You want to support a friend? I will take you to support a friend.
I had never been to a dance competition before but it struck me as similar to the cheerleading competitions I competed in when I was in high school and the newer, updated versions I sat through a few years ago. If you’ve never been to a cheerleading or dance competition, I recommend it, just go once.
Even if you dropped in on a competition in another state, with no knowledge of the schools, trust me when I say you’ll be able to pick out the well-resourced schools from a mile away. You will be able to tell who has the deepest coaching staff, the most financial resources, the parents who have the time and flexibility to volunteer. You will see the big schools make big impressions with their big teams. You will watch the small teams from more rural schools, some with just four or five members, come out on this big stage and try and you might think they are braver than all the other teams combined.
In moments like these, it strikes me as extraordinarily odd how adults continue to dismiss the experience and vulnerability of teenagers, even to dismiss the experiences and vulnerabilities we had when we were teenagers. To wave it off as embarrassing or silly when, as we all know, that handful of years sets the stage for the rest of our emotional lives. It’s when we’re the most open and vulnerable, while simultaneously caring the most what other people think.
I started to view almost every routine as a metaphor for the culture we’re living in (I’m fun at parties). I started to think back to when I was that age and how I believed if I worked hard enough and did everything right, I would succeed. It was just inevitable, really. I thought back to my twenties and how I believed that talent just rose naturally to the top, that the world unfolded in a way that allowed the best of the best (not me, just in general) to always find their way regardless of their circumstances. I thought about myself back then and my kids now and how all the decisions I used to believe were based on merit and one’s degree of can-do-ness — college admissions, job promotions, creative success — are all rigged to varying degrees. Through money and connections, race and class, invisible systems and impenetrable networks, and who gets to fail and get second and third and fourth chances and who doesn’t.
To be sure, what I used to believe feels squarely like a white middle class belief system. Because you have to be unfamiliar with what the lens of poverty would reveal to you, how it would have you see a very different truth about how things actually work. And if you’re rich you would hold a different truth entirely, you might believe you actually deserve everything you have, that you got it all fair and square. And if you’re white in America you are, as the saying goes, born on third base and always thinking you hit a triple.
Anyway, I watched routine after routine. I got deeper and deeper into my thoughts, which was not hard because I was sitting alone (no one wants to cheer on their friends with their mom, please be serious). Another team walked out to begin their performance. Competitions are sequins and sparkles, short skirts and school colors. The girls on this team all wore various shades of nude, classic scoop neck leotards and light, long flowing skirts with some subtle sparkle at the hip, if I’m remembering correctly. I believe they all had their hair pulled back, away from their faces. The boys on the team had their own appropriately balanced outfits, not a version of what the girls wore but something they could own and move in in their own way — loose-fit pants and suit jackets with neutral tees underneath. Every outfit suited every different body. Everyone stood out while still fitting in equally. Every part, integral to the whole.
They performed their routine to a slow cover of “Eleanor Rigby”. I wish I could track it down, but do you know how many “Eleanor Rigby” covers there are? Their routine ebbed and flowed. Instead of militaristic, sharp moves, they moved like dancers on a bigger stage, dancers outside of our state and that gym, that competition and moment. They collapsed against each other in a chain reaction and as I tried to absorb what I was seeing, how beautiful and heartbreaking it felt, I finally keyed into the lyrics as the music echoed off of the bleachers and polished wooden floor, the concrete walls and basketball hoops:
All the lonely people/Where do they all come from?/All the lonely people/Where do they all belong?
They wrapped their arms around themselves at “lonely people”, they collapsed in together as a group and expanded back out. I looked around at the enormous, echoing gym and all of these teenagers who were finally able to dance with and against one another for the first time in two years. I looked around to each section of parents and their signs and flowers and hope and emotions and sweatshirts that read DANCE DAD. I thought about how I was sitting there alone. I thought about how these last couple of years have been such a pile of dog shit that we just keep trying to plow through. Tears sprung up in my eyes, instantly overflowing my ability to blink them back, and dripped down, under, and around my mask. I thought, How many people here are lonely?
That team did not win (although did come in 2nd), certainly not because they failed but, I believe, because they did something beyond the scope of the world we were in at that moment. I don’t know anything about dance, really, and I know just enough about cheerleading and competition to have incorrect opinions.
I spent almost the entire car ride home delivering an unasked-for monologue about how creativity and the judgment of it is incredibly subjective, that you can design your work to “win” or you can design your work to move people, and of course sometimes you’re lucky and do both but it’s rare. That approaching your work to stand apart from everything else, especially when it’s unexpected, is something to be celebrated.
I went on and on about the invisible scaffolding of being well-resourced, well-supported, big and favored, and how it should be recognized, how that should be a transparent category in judging these things (I include our own high school in this!) because it’s never only about innate talent. It is never, ever only about talent. Ever.
I talked for at least 15 minutes straight, almost without taking a breath and while driving through a wild snow squall that had earlier set off every phone in that gym like a swarm of tiny tornado sirens. After a brief pause my kid responded, “So, you’re happy you went?”
And that’s what I said yes to last week.
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