I woke up after dreaming about the portfolio due in a month for a class I’m in. I was organizing it and revising it, and then the phone rang for work (church phone calls are being forwarded to a cell phone at my house) and all of my portfolio dissolved. All of it. The whole website melted away.

And now it’s been an hour and I’ve been thinking hard about the tension of doing all of life in a single space. I spent the entire day with my computer and phone set up in the yard. I moved my “classroom” office outside for 10 hours of the day, up until it was dark and raining. I Zoomed from under the tree. It was a change of space, and it didnt involve competing sounds from Chris’ conference calls or the computer set up for the kids to do their own few hours of Khan Academy and Prodigy Math and Scholastic Home Learning. Its spring break, but being out of a routine, we’re still keeping up with those activities to maintain some structure. I was outside because inside you can hear every time someone shifts in their chair. The wood floors echo every trip to get a glass of water and sound travels throughout the house so one of us can be muttering under our breath and the other can hear it perfectly three rooms away.

I need a day off but how do you take one during a time when you’re lucky to still be employed? How do you take one when you’re already home? What would I do with it other than more homework or cleaning or helping my kids with their homework and cleaning? A day off in a space that is a round-the-clock productivity zone is impossible.

I look at the work Chris is now having to do from home. Complex data crunching essential to the health of the county has been taking place in our living room and office. He has two monitors without stands at his desk, propped up by bricks because they dont have stands that could be removed from his office. But his work requires more than a small laptop screen, so he’s improvised. Bricks, y’all.

My own desk is piled about 2 feet high with everything I’m toggling between. My first task tomorrow will be to sort through the pile and hide my seminary work and pull the binder with my work-work to the top. The sermon prep pile is on the couch because I dont know where else to put it. I won’t get to it until Saturday. I’m doing less driving, working fewer hours, and yet my time hasn’t expanded in the magical way it naturally should have.

And somewhere in all of this, I’m getting messaging that I should have at least binge-watched 3-10 shows, had time for self-care, learned a new skill, finished a crafting project, organized the garage, and recreated Disneyland with cereal boxes to give my children a magical experience. I should have uttered the words “I’m bored” or come up with a new quarantine hack for passing time. I should, at bare minimum, be day drinking by now, but I’m barely even night drinking.

I hope that as many of us are nearing a month in radically different conditions, we continue to give each other grace for things that aren’t getting any easier. As this strange time draws out longer, the sense of settling into a new routine is evading me. And that’s okay, I suppose. I just wish I could stop dreaming about all the things I should be doing right now.

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This was originally posted to my Facebook in conjunction with this article from the Fresno Bee about Coronavirus Dreams.