Today was not my best day ever. Possibly one of the more challenging days I've faced. It started with trying to set up my children's iPads with Google classroom and the various other online teaching platforms that are a necessity for schooling in the time of COVID. This should have taken me a few minutes, according to various messages on the class WhatsApp groups. And yet, an hour and a half later I found myself still trying to register. I jumped from passwords with too few characters to unrecognisable codes to confirmation emails that I didn't receive. Over and over again. It was like some vicious, horrible tape caught on repeat. Eventually I gave up and asked the kids to set the platforms up themselves, which they did in about 3 minutes. The most obvious reason is that there is some abnormality or anomaly in my personal elecro-magnetic field that interferes with electronics rendering them ineffectual.
I left for work confident that by the time I got home, both boys would have completed their schoolwork on the numerous online education platforms that they had installed on their iPads. I was also hopeful for a clean house, since I had loosely promised (bribed...call it what you will) my sons a treat on my return if they had done their chores by the time I got home from work. Boy, was I disillusioned. Quite obviously the messing with my electro-magnetic field had triggered a profoundly delusional state.
I have promised full disclosure here, so I will admit that it was wonderful arriving at work. The quiet! The absence of children! The lack of dirty laundry scattered over the floor! The beautiful, clean scent of disinfectant! No one grabbing my phone from my hands as I try to watch a funny video! Pure bliss. I wonder when my husband is going to get suspicious about the amount of time I am spending at work considering how little I am earning? It does seem sensible though to space my patients out really far apart to reduce their risk of contact, right?
I floated home from work, stopping at the garage on the way home to fill up my car and pop in to the shop to buy my angelic children their rewards for completing their school work and household chores. The scene that greeted me when I walked in from the garage (in my underwear, because, decontamination) was idyllic: both boys happily getting on with their work in a spotless house. Or not. It was about as far from that as it could possibly be and I couldn't even lose my shit about it until I'd gone and showered. It appears that my children have electro-magnetic fields that make it impossible for them to work online when I am not staring over their shoulders or shouting at them. It doesn't seem to interfere with their ability to play Minecraft though. Or almost kill each other. They had done a sum total of zero work. And the house looked as though I'd rented it out for matric rage: basically dirty plates on all the counters and dirty cloths on every other available surface and lots of empty wine bottles (which I can't blame on the kids).
I screamed, shouted and threw a couple of things around while the boys ignored me. We are on wine rations so I made myself a cup of tea and took a couple of deep breaths then attempted to make some sense of grade 5 and 7 work. Luckily Malcolm took over the Afrikaans teaching. After 3 hours of explaining, shouting, pulling my hair out and crying, I was left with the following existential questions:
1) Why would you spend half an hour and x amount of energy on avoiding doing something that would literally take you 5 minutes and 1/8 of the energy just to do immediately?
2) How is it possible to be hungry every half an hour?
3) On the same note, how is it possible to need to poo every half an hour?
4) Why is it necessary to throw every item of stationery in your pencil case at your brother?
5) How do teachers not commit murder on a daily basis?
Which brings me to the title of this piece...surely teachers deserve to be canonized? They are literally preventing daily murders by teaching our children in person. Serious respect to every teacher who has ever had to teach one of my boys. If only I'd known sooner, I'd have been way more generous with my end of year gifts! Also, sorry William, home schooling ain't gonna happen in this house...
I did a cursory clean of the house with the aim of doing some training before dinner, but naturally, as soon as I changed into my training kit, it started pouring with rain. Thunder and lightening soon followed and yet I was not to be deterred. I needed to exercise. My family really needed me to exercise. I found a small patch of decking between two glass sliding doors that was sheltered from the storm: just enough space to skip. I closed the sliding doors, forbade anyone to come outside and turned my music up high.
I've been skipping almost every day of the two-and-a-half weeks of lockdown. In my mind, I look like a slightly older version of Jennifer Lopez in 'Enough'. I'm a lean, mean skipping machine. Until I faced my reflection in those glass sliding doors nothing had thus far shattered that illusion. But sliding glass doors in the evening light do not lie.
There are a few intrinsic problems with skipping. The first is that there is a lot of momentum on a vertical plane, which basically translates into lots of fat jiggling up and down with each rotation of the rope. Not a pretty sight. The second problem is that I cant skip very long on both feet- the result of being pregnant twice (should have done those Kegel's exercises at the traffic lights) so most of my skipping is on alternating legs. Which would be fine except that my right leg does this weird kicking out thing. The realisation hit me that when my son asked me how I did that, his tone of voice was not one full of admiration. He was really asking how I physically managed to do that. On top of this, due to a recent fall that left splinters in my right palm, it was increasingly difficult as my skipping progressed to hold the rope in my painful, swollen hand. The result was that the plastic rope kept slipping from my hand mid-skip and whipping me, transforming my skipping session into one of self-flagellation. Perhaps punishment for all the times I didn't donate enough for my children's teachers gifts.
The horror of my reflection skipping was to be replaced, as the darkness of evening settled in, with something even worse. Suddenly I could see what was going on inside the house. The dining room table was hidden beneath a mountain of school books. Dirty dishes had magically reappeared on the kitchen island along with, for some reason, two blankets. Against all logic, all of the cushions had been moved from the couches to the floor. And in the center of it all, Matt and Will were wrestling with each other in what appeared to be a scene from 'Hunger Games'. I stepped back from my sheltered corner onto the exposed patio and prayed that my skipping rope would act as a lightening conductor.
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