Let it Be

     As I write this, I'm sitting in Aunt Cindy's apartment in New York City.  I'm here to celebrate her 50th birthday, and also the birthdays of Aunt Pam and Aunt Sandy.  It feels strange to be here, on the banks of the Hudson, seeing friends I've known for so long.  Today is also the 22nd anniversary of my father's death, and my memories of New York as a child are so tied up with my memories of my dad.

    We always drove into New York from Poughkeepsie; we never took the train, so getting here and finding a parking spot was always very stressful.  I think my dad had a love/hate relationship with this city, hating all of the people and the traffic but loving the photo shops we stopped at, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, taking his family on an outing.  When I got older, Pam and Sandy and I sometimes took the Metro North train up to the city- I think we saw a show once?  But mostly, the City for me growing up was both a big, scary place and a place intimately tied to our home, which also looked out over the Hudson River.

So today, I went for a run on the Hudson.  I listened to John Denver, who is probably the only singer my dad and I could agree on (the other singer he liked was Elvis, and I just can't).  But you know John Denver; he sings 'Take me Home,' that song you like to run to.  I was running along the banks of the Hudson, feeling at home in this big city.  Now, I feel like I can take on the city and appreciate all that it has to offer, and I feel so thankful for all of the opportunities my parents gave to me.

Life for my family has not been easy these last 22 years.  I miss having a father, and I wish you could have known your grandfather.  I see him in you- in your smile, even in the shape of your nose, I see him.  When you sleep, I see the way he slept, and I know that he lives in you, in us.  But it's not the same.  Nagyi lost her husband at a very young age, had to sell the house, move to Hungary, and is now trying to figure out what to do.  I know she misses him deeply all of the time.  

That pain, that grief, will never go away. But sometimes it feels like, despite all of it, life will work out.  During my run today, John Denver's version of "Let it Be" came on my playlist, and I thought about the fact that my dad carried around a little statue of the Virgin Mary with him.  I thought about the lyrics of this song, and how much time and anxiety we spend trying to figure out where life will lead us.  Sometimes it just leads us, and there are angels, like your grandfather, who light the way and show us where to go.  Sometimes we just have to trust that things will work out, that God has a plan.  It's easy to forget that when we miss the people we loved, but sometimes, like today, I'm able to be in the moment and just Let it Be.

When I find myself in times of trouble

Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom

Let it be

And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me

Speaking words of wisdom

Let it be

When all the broken-hearted people

Living in the world agree, there will be an answer

Let it be

Although they may be parted

There is still a chance that they will see

There will be an answer

Let it be

Let it be

Let it be

Let it be, yeah

Let it be

And when the night is cloudy

There is still a light that shines on me

Shine until tomorrow

Let it be

I wake up to the sound of music

Mother Mary comes to me

There will be no sorrow

Let it be

Let it be

Let it be

Let it be

Let it be

There will be no sorrow

Let it be

Puck Rogers, 2006-2022

Dear Jules,

When we first decided to get a Corgi, it was because your Godparents Mark and Eliza had corgis and we thought they were good dogs: not too small, not too big, relatively well-behaved.  So we read up on Corgis and decided to get a Cardigan Corgi; these are more rare and, according to the reviews, not as "yippy."  Corgis, we read, were from Wales and were considered fairy dogs; because they are so small and have a distinctive marking on their backs, the story was that fairies used to ride on them (much the way you later tried to ride on Puck)-

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  We were going to name him Oberon, king of the fairies in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and then we saw him and met him, and he was a Puck, the somewhat naughty fairy from the same play.

Dad and I got Puck shortly after we were married; Nagyi remembers going with us to pick him out, and aunt Maggie and uncle Lee were there when we took him home.  There were lots of puppies, and then there was 8-month-old Puck, who had a paralyzed ear.  His parents were in dog shows but, since his ear never came up, they couldn't show him.  He became ours and lived with us in Hillsborough for a year, during which time he met your Godsister Beatrice.

I love this picture because it illustrates what a great dog Puck always was.  You could pull on his ears or his tail and he would just tolerate it, especially if you were a kid.  When we moved to Charleston, Puck lived with us in the Holy Family parish house for 2 weeks until we could move.  He was there with us in Savannah when Grammy went to SCAD:

When we had settled down in Charleston, we took him to be blessed at Grace Church, which is the church we currently attend.

He was, and will always be, our first baby, and we were a little bit nervous when you were born.  How would he react?  Sometimes Corgis nip at children, but Puck always knew you were his sister.  From the time you came home from the hospital, he was always with you, watching your back.  Sure, sometimes he would get mad that we were paying more attention to you and leave a little bit of poop in your room, but he mostly tolerated you and, more than that, saw you as his sister, a member of our family.

Throughout the years, Puck became a member of our family, including our family of friends.  He really loved Bertie's dog Zoe, and he even dealt with her dog Tucker (both corgis like him).  

With Zoe, waiting for a walk

With Tucker (who is jealous)

He also really loved Nagyi, and she grew to love him, helping him when he was scared of fireworks or thunderstorms.  And, of course, he stayed with Grammy and Poppa and Beasley:.

Thanksgiving 2013 (?)

Christmas 2019

And, of course, he really enjoyed playing with you.  At one time, you decided to play with a pair of dad's boxers, and he joined along.

He always loved playing with the soccer ball as well, and he enjoyed the water.

I think Puck ended up destroying this thing!

He was so great about letting you put tutus on him and dress him up, too.

By the time he was an old dog, he even grew to love your tutus and would choose to sleep in them. 

Although he was never a cuddler (if someone was crying or upset, he would get freaked out and leave them be), he was always a herder, a part of our family.  I have so many memories of him with you, especially during the very rare snowfalls we had here in Charleston.

During the time we went to Seabrook on a vacation and took him with us,

But mostly just around our house, doing the things that families do (including one time when you decided to read to him).

He was with us through multiple hurricane evacuations, multiple illnesses, and, of course, the COVID pandemic.  In some ways, I'm thankful for all of that time with him- it came near the end of his life and we really did get to spend a lot of quality time together.

When I went to the vet's office to pick up his ashes (like I told you, his body is with us now but he is in heaven), they told me he was "coming home," and this is true.  I thought about whether we should bury him somewhere, but where?  He's been with us through so much.  I thought about sprinkling his ashes but, as a herding dog, the thing he loved best was his family.  So now he is home, watching over us forever.  We will probably get another dog someday, but Puck will always have a place in all of our hearts, and I hope you never forget him.

Making the Team

Dear Ms. Yarborough,

Just a week ago, my family was walking on air.  Our daughter Julia, who has Down Syndrome, worked really hard, took private lessons with an amazing coach, and was told she was ready to be on the beginner's swim team at the City of Charleston's Martin Luther King Jr. Pool.  She went from having a barely recognizable stroke to learning crawl stroke, back stroke, and even butterfly.  

Julia has swum before, in aquatic therapy and in Special Olympics, but this was the first time she was deemed "good enough" to be on a team full of neurotypical children.  She was excited for her first practice; she told all of her friends and teachers that she made the "swim team."  And, if I might say so myself, she nailed it.

She joyfully attended two practices, after which we were told that, due to staffing issues, Julia's team would be cut.  

Here's the thing: I know we are in a pandemic, I know there are staffing issues, but the SMRT team (mostly white kids who mostly don't live in the low-income area surrounding the city's Martin Luther King Pool, where all of these kids practice) is not being cut.  Lap swimming, again populated mostly by people who do not live in the low-income neighborhood surrounding the pool, is not being cut.

What is being cut?  A program that actually caters to children who might not have some of these opportunities.  Julia's new (now cancelled) team is racially diverse; there is a diversity of body types, and they were willing to accept Julia even though she might swim more slowly and take a bit to process directions.

Look at these kids--

Can you tell which one my daughter is?  

That's because they are all friends- a variety of ages, body types, races, abilities, all working together.

I find it very ironic that the Martin Luther King pool, built in a low-income area and named after an icon of racial and social equality, is set to become a homogenous space filled with lap swimmers and SMRT swimmers who, again, do not represent the diversity of the area in which the pool what built...or the social justice attitude of the man after which it was named.

To be very clear, I have been told that this was not the pool manager's decision, but the decision of the City of Charleston.  To that end, I would like to ask Charleston Athletics to reconsider this choice.  One boy on the team comes all the way from Summerville because the coach saw promise in him, took him on for lessons, and invited him to the team.  One young girl has basically made the pool her home-away-from-home, and I've seen her confidence skyrocket.  All of these kids have so much potential, and they all just need an extra push.

We are living through a pandemic, staffing everywhere is low, and sacrifices need to be made, but I don't think asking our families--and only our families--to sacrifice is the answer.  

For Julia and for all of these kids who have embraced her, made her finally feel like a part of something, I beg you to reconsider your decision.

Sincerely,

Kathleen Béres Rogers

Nativity School

 Dear Jules,

I've been wanting to write this post for a long time- for almost a year, in fact.  About a year ago, in the midst of COVID-19, we were told that the special education program at your school was being moved.  Even though we adore and are still close with your special education teacher, this was the kick in the pants we needed for a move we had wanted to make for a long time.  

We have always been fans of inclusion.  You are so social, and you learn best by watching other students and emulating them.  Because of their large class sizes and lack of funding, public schools unfortunately have not been able to have full inclusion.  What I mean by this is that you were either in the general education classroom, with no support, or in the special education classroom.  

At Nativity School, you have had the best of both worlds.  You are in the General Education classroom 90% of the day.  Every day, you come home and talk about your growing list of friends: Scarlett, Rosalie, Hannah, Connor, Liam, and Jaxson, who is, as you say, "very funny."  We are still in a pandemic, so I have never even met most of these kids, but I know about them through you.  Recently, you had a spring break, and you actually wanted to go back to school because you had missed your friends. This, more than anything, makes me so happy.

And then there's the academic side.  Honestly, I don't know why it's taking you so long to learn to read, but your teachers there are graced with so much patience.  They're always proud of you, always looking at your progress, and you soak it up.  You are learning your letters and your numbers, and what I'm most impressed by is that you are also learning geothermal energy and the three branches of our government. You have a wonderful memory, especially if something is put to music, so they find you songs, or they tell me what you're learning and we make songs together.  Here is one of our videos:

Every single teacher at Nativity has embraced you--you might learn differently, it might be more work, but they are all willing to do it, from the science teacher who made sure you also made your own musical instrument in class to the social studies teacher who patiently writes out all of the notes so that I can help you study, to the religion teacher who praises your (not quite in tune) singing in church.  

I may not be a Catholic any more, but anyone can see that God is truly working in this place.  And inclusion is truly working in this place.  You are not one of "those kids" at Nativity- you are just Julia, and that is truly beautiful.

Under Water

*This is an article I'm working on for a collection at MUSC about people's experiences of the COVID epidemic.  I'm sharing it here so that you can always have it, Jules.

My daughter has always loved the water- when other kids were terrified to put their faces in, she would dive down, deep down, and stay down so long that we would become worried.

While I am not a very good swimmer and don't even particularly like to swim, I must admit that there is some beauty to being under water: everything becomes fuzzier, brighter (if it's a sunny day), and sound is muted.  It's just you and whatever, or whoever, is there in the water with you.

Strangely, when we first saw pictures of the COVID-19 virus, water came into my mind.  The bright red spikes reminded me of the coral I saw when I dove in the Great Barrier Reef, alone but surrounded by a feeling of protection and love.  This is how quarantine feels: isolated in our homes, focusing on the quotidian facets of life, it's easy to turn inward and block out the sounds and sights of the world.

Until, of course, in T.S. Eliot's words, "human voices wake us/ and we drown."  We have to come back up to the surface, back up to clear vision, back to the sounds of news reports and speculative conversations, back to the reality that COVID-19, despite its almost beautiful coral-like appearance, has forced us into being at home.  I've had to teach my college classes online and homeschool my daughter, who has Down Syndrome.  While typically developing students can follow some type of online schedule, we have had to improvise, be creative, and just hope for the best; federal laws for kids with disabilities aren't really being observed at this time.

And yet, there is something about this enforced isolation that feels, sometimes, like being underwater.  I've been forced to focus on the essentials (to use an overused word today): my daughter, my husband, who works at the Medical University, my students.  In this environment, I perhaps have about fifteen minutes to catch up on news, but that means that all of the politics, all of the nastiness around the virus and the way people, especially minorities, are being treated, is muted.  What I hear is our "Good Morning" song, Julia's continual pleas to call her grandparents, who we are now talking to more than we ever have, her need to have safety and continuity in her life.  She doesn't really understand what's going on right now, which is very scary: she doesn't understand why she can't see her friends, why she can't go to school, why we have to be "safe" all the time.  I told her that people are sick, so now she thinks that everyone is sick.

So we retreat into comforting television shows, field trips (to the few places that are open), or even walks to the local pond to feed the turtles and watch the birds. I've been teaching her how to read and we have a nightly workout routine. My classes are now over (it's mid- May and the College, where I teach, would have had graduation today), so I can focus on her, on protecting her from all of the ugliness that is COVID-19 and the politics that unfortunately surround it.

At the beginning of the epidemic, Julia had been in school and had been exposed to Flu Type A. However, because the symptoms were so close to those of COVID-19, and because her father works at the Medical University, we had to go get her tested.

We had seen the pictures of the testing site: dozens of white tents covering the parking lot of a mall.  We had seen the doctors doing the testing, dressed in heavy white hazmat suits, all of their body parts covered.  I thought about Julia's (rational) fear of mascots.  If you couldn't see someone's eyes, how could you possibly trust them?  I thought of her fear of masks.  How, I wondered, would I get her past the tents, the people, the palpable anxiety?  And even if she did not, by some miracle, freak out about the tents and what would look to her like space people, how would she ever endure having one of those space aliens put a long q-tip up her nose?  It felt like something out of a science fiction movie.

So I knew we would have to innovate.  Together, we came up with a plan: we would wear (or, in my case, pretend to wear) costumes.  And guess what costume Julia chose?

She was a mermaid.

Mermaids have been known to be fierce, spunky, and sassy, and Julia is all of these things. With her sparkly tail, she channeled her underwater self and told me, in no uncertain terms, that her costume was better than the doctors'.  She also never even flinched when they put that q-tip up her nose.

But sometimes mermaids need help.  Even though being under the water can be a serene experience, it can often--again like COVID--be murky.  You can't see where you are going or, in my case, when you will hit the wall of the pool (one of the reasons I don't like swimming).  You don't know when it will end, so you keep paddling, hoping against hope that you will touch a wall soon. That fear, the anxiety of having no end, is real, so when she went to get tested for COVID-19, Julia asked me to pretend as well.  She asked me to be a lion.  A protective, ferocious lion.  I played my part; even though we were asked to stay in the car, I knew she might need a little extra help blowing her nose, having someone hold her hand.  I played the "special needs" card and demanded to get out of the car so that I could help my little girl.

And this, to me, exemplifies the COVID epidemic.  We live our mermaid lives and, during the times we are out in the "real world" (which, for my husband, is every day), we are lions, working hard to protect our tribes and allow for us to have our strange, surreal, at-home existence. We anxiously await for--and sometimes, dread--the day that we will emerge from the water.  Will be be able to regain our footing? We will lose the uncertainty, but will we also lose the strange, almost beautiful underwater silence that pervades our lives now? For now, I take a breath, dive down, and try to live in the moment.

Relaxing

Is it me, or is it really difficult to relax in this environment?  This last week was our spring break at the College, but I have spent every single day working (I'm taking the weekend off to spend with Daddy and you, Jules).  I've been either homeschooling you--which has felt alternately really cool and really overwhelming--and doing my own work...to the point that Daddy asked why I'm working all the time.

I'm working because I'm anxious.  I'm working because I have this horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, and trying to relax feels really pointless.  You've been sick, we are homeschooling, my students at the College are coming back, only to have to move out in a day, everything has been cancelled, Nagyi is isolated in her home and cannot travel anywhere, and everyone I know has been affected by COVID.  So I do what I always do when I get anxious- I do my work, I do the thing that's natural, that I would do every day, the thing that makes it feel like I have some sort of consistency in my life.

I do my running for the same reason (and because my doctor isn't open and I can't get more antidepressants).  Tomorrow we will do a run for 3.21, World Down Syndrome Day; you and Daddy will do 3.21 (in a stroller, not touching anyone) and then I will do the other 10.  And then we will have a picnic, by ourselves, isolated from others.  But at least it will feel "normal." 

Right now, I hear kids playing in the neighborhood, laughing, enjoying the sunshine.  Perhaps when you feel better you can join them and life will not feel so isolated.  For now, though, I have you and my germ-free work. 

Life in a Pandemic or, White Lies and Perspective

Dear Jules,

We live in unprecedented times- you keep asking me why we can't go outside and play, and I keep telling you it's because everyone is sick.  That's not 100% true; the truth is that everyone could get sick and some elderly people could get very sick. 

Today is day 4 of homeschooling, day 4 of my "spring break," day 4 of you being very sick with something.  The doctor thought it might be the flu, but we don't know for sure because we went to the doctor on the computer...like we talk to Grammy or Nagyi.  So the doctor said you were sick but, because you had a fever and a bad cough, we had to take you to get tested for COVID.

So here's the second white lie I told you (why are they "white" lies anyway?  Would a bad lie be a "black" lie?): I told you we were going to a costume event, and that the doctors would be dressed like astronauts.  You wore a mermaid shirt and a mermaid tail, and I pretended to be a scary lion.  We picked up some food from the drive through, since you cannot go into restaurants any more, and had a picnic on the grass right in front of the tent city where MUSC is doing their testing for COVID, a new virus they do not have a cure for. 

Then, we got in our car, and we approached the first stop sign, where they asked for our name and gave us a bag for your "personal belongings," which they put on our window (you can see it to the side of the picture).  We went through about three more stop signs, going through a maze of cones like this:

Finally, we got to the swabbing station.  I think the consensus was that you won the costume competition, but they came pretty close.  They looked like this:

So yeah...that was a little scary, but you were amazing, a trooper.  You didn't even flinch and kept on grooving with your mermaid-y self.  

So far, day 4 has been the worst: you're now nauseous and tired and have diarrhea, and you've been begging to rest.  We are all praying that you get better soon, Jules, and then I can start teaching you from home, which should be interesting.  I will be teaching my students from home as well, so you might see them on the computer...this is the world we are living in today. 

It's a scary world, sometimes (like in CVS when people yelled at us for being in the way) an inhumane world, but these things also bring people together.  Just now, a friend dropped off gluten-free brownies and some toys for you; people have brought me coffee (thank God); and your teacher even physically dropped off your materials for school.  People are checking on the elderly, making sure they are okay, and I think everyone just wants to get through this thing and get back to some semblance of normalcy.  It's funny how little things--political views, personal annoyances--matter so little in this climate of survival.  It's funny how survival brings out the worst but, paradoxically, also the best in us.  

One thing is for sure: this incident has reminded me that you and our family are the most important things in the world to me.  I'm worried about my students, too, but somehow the annoyances of the semester have receded into the distance.  Again, it's all about perspective.  For possibly the first time ever, I agree with President Trump that this feels like war.  It's a scary war against an enemy we can't see, but that's why we need now, more than ever, to acknowledge one another's humanity.