The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Rachel Kraushaar

Keywords: parenting adults, raising kid w/ learning disability, divorce, teaching, single parenting, higher ed, overcoming adversity

Categories: Parenting and Possibility in Impossible Times; Sick/Disabled Bodyminds during Sick/Disabling Times; Teaching as Carework, Teaching as Dangerous Work; Academic Pressures (or Critiques of Neoliberal Horseshit Productivity Expectations, as suggested by Amy Vidali)

I am standing in the dark, frigid garage, Lysoling the various bottles, produce cartons, and other sundry items I’ve been able to procure in the midst of a quarantine-imposed limit on groceries and toiletries. I have just returned from combating the masked, terrified and hostile co-shoppers as we all ferociously vied for the starkly lined freezer, egg, milk and toilet paper shelves. I feel like a character out of an apocalyptic nightmare as I forge through a meticulous wipe-down of the spoils of my “victory.” I attempt to ignore my throbbing headache, the same one I have pushed down for three nights, but now I notice my legs beginning to give out underneath me, and I become dizzy, as a wave of exhaustion overtakes me. “Wouldn’t it be ironic,” I think to myself in that freezing cold garage, “if it turned out I have COVID as I’m wiping down these bottles and forcing the kids to keep all newly purchased items outside for 48 hours?”

The next 48 hours were spent bedridden, panicked, and frantically attempting to locate a working thermometer and a doctor who would agree to test me for COVID. They all refused because I had no fever and no known contacts with COVID-positive people. I was home with my 16-year-old disabled son and my 19-year-old daughter whom I had just picked up from the NYC bus station on Friday, March 15, 2020, for what was supposed to be her week-long Spring Break during her freshman year of college but turned out to be a nearly year-long hiatus from campus. I was also going through a tumultuous divorce, for which the preparation and paperwork was a full-time enterprise of its own.

As I lay in bed with chills, chest pressure, labored breathing, body aches, a throbbing headache, and overwhelming fatigue, I forced myself to check the barrage of work emails that were flooding my inbox. While the entire state and much of the country were already in emergency lockdown, the college where I work was remaining open, and my supervisors were “encouraging” us to return to campus the following week for in-person classes and a Blackboard training session. My instinct was to cancel my own classes for that Monday, March 18, but I was heading into my tenure year.

I started teaching at the college level when I was only 24 years old; in the almost 30 years that I have taught in higher ed, I have gotten engaged, married, raised two children, facilitated my son’s medical, psychological, and academic care, relocated homes, tended to ill parents, and earned a PhD. Though COVID presented unprecedented challenges as a working mother, I discovered long before the pandemic that higher ed is not conducive to motherhood. Ironically, a field that leads the trends in diversity, inclusivity, and equity, is failing miserably at supporting working mothers. In fact, it seems designed to shut us out, perhaps even persecute us, financially, emotionally, and academically.

It wasn’t as though I hadn’t been warned, though. In my sophomore year of high school, I had proclaimed with pride to my beloved Honors English teacher, Ms. Laverty, that I too planned to become an English teacher. I had expected her to flood me with enthusiastic and encouraging sentiments; instead, I sunk back in horror as she shouted, “NO!!! No! Whatever you do, DO NOT BECOME AN ENGLISH TEACHER!!!”

“Why?” I asked, “Am I not a strong enough student?”

“That’s not it at all! You will have NO LIFE!”

This was in 1985, and Ms. Laverty’s devotion to her students was renowned but taking a toll on her physical and mental health. Clearly, we haven’t progressed much with the lack of balance between personal and working lives for female educators in the past three and a half decades. And COVID served to compound and complicate these preexisting struggles.

Despite a successful 20-plus-years’ teaching career for which I had won awards, I had postponed applying for my doctoral degree until I was 44 years old. When I finally defended my dissertation in April 2019, months before my 50^th birthday, I left that defense room feeling like a Capital Q Queen, ready to take on the world!! Members of my defense committee had encouraged me to immediately publish my work, and one even pointed to a rainbow of Post-It notes on her copy of my diss, claiming, “See these? Those are all of the places where I’m changing my teaching, thanks to you!” This is the moment I now refer to as “B.P.: Before Pandemic.” I had so many scholarly goals B.P.!! I wanted my research to be read; I wanted my discoveries to be discovered by parents and by people in our field; I wanted other teachers to learn what I knew about how we were killing reading for our students, ironically through many of the strategies we had implemented with the goal of inspiring their reading lives.

Instead, I spent my “D.P.-During Pandemic (or, if you prefer, Damn Pandemic)” time transitioning my courses and students to online platforms, overloaded by teaching workshops, technology training sessions and 6-hour “retreats” on how we can support our students and find more downtime for ourselves during the pandemic. I spent my time juggling teaching my own classes from a tiny desk in my bedroom with disruptive pop-ins from my son who was taking his high school classes remotely and failing nearly every class in his junior year. At times his teachers’ voices were interfering with my own teaching from across the hallway. I spent my time doing damage control for my college-aged daughter whose freshman year became homebound just as she had acclimated to the campus environment, and who, despite being a top honors student her entire life, was having trouble with time management, focus and organization. I spent my time feeding “the Hobbits,” as I fondly called the never-ending vesicles that moved about my home during my meetings, whispering to and beckoning me from a crack in my doorway as I tried to stay focused on my on-screen supervisors during three-hour long virtual meetings.

I spent my time trying to walk away my anxiety in the sparse “me time” moments I could steal. As I walked, I recorded voice memos and used the Notes app on my phone to write song lyrics. I even composed my first song “In the Light of Day,” channeling my inner Dumbledore and holding onto the anchor of hope that we have the power to light our and others’ ways in the darkest of times. I wrote scholarly and creative nonfiction articles in my head but never found the time to put them to print.

My publication goals were further waylaid by the additional Zoom conferences at all hours, ones I used to mentor and to support my community college students who were themselves suffering from tragedies, crises, panic attacks, their own caretaker stresses, job losses, health issues, financial woes, technology issues and fears of dropping the ball in their own juggling acts. I offered emotional and academic triage for the student mothers and fathers who were trying to complete their schoolwork while dealing with the same (and often more) stressors that I, decades older than they, was contending with.

So here I am, over two years out from that dissertation defense, and over a year out from what I would find out from a later antibody test, was my initial COVID hardship. The only piece I’ve managed to write and finish is this one. Hopefully this is the spark that will ignite the flame.  

Bio

Dr. Rachel Kraushaar (Golland) is an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Rockland Community College, and prior to that was Instructor of English and Director of Writing at St. Thomas Aquinas College. She has a PhD from Teachers College, Columbia University where her dissertation work focused on the influence of sponsors of literacy on long-term habits of mind, with a particular relationship to reading attitudes and behaviors. She has a forthcoming book chapter on challenging antisemitism in the literacy classroom by incorporating Jewish philosophies of social justice and illustrating the diversity of the Jewish people.