Chapter 42: The Things i Learned

In the before-times, before the onset of a global pandemic, my schedule was so tight that if one thing went wrong in a day—if a kid was sick and needed to be picked up from school or if my car got a flat and I needed to take it in to get replaced or if a sitter couldn’t make it that afternoon—all the intertwined pieces of the day and week I had planned out so carefully would fall apart like a house of cards. I remember—and even though it was just a year ago, it feels like a decade—I remember thinking that there was no time to do it all. That I could not manage to be both an academic and a mother, a researcher and a wife, a teacher, and a friend. In the before-times, I felt like everything was so delicately balanced and one stray breeze would topple over the whole darn thing.