There have been moments in my life when I have known things with certainty. These moments are a wave of realization that always feels sudden but despite that they are reliable and have never been wrong. When I left California for graduate school in Tennessee, driving East with my dad on a lonely strip of I-40 between Oklahoma City and Little Rock, Arkansas, I suddenly knew that I would never be back to California for good. I felt the same way about Tennessee, a place I loved dearly. Sitting on a rainy runway in Memphis waiting to fly to Nebraska, where I had made a home - temporary, as it turned out - I suddenly knew that I would not live in Tennessee again. In Nebraska, when I got pregnant, I knew that it was the cells of little boy that I carried within me. There was a horrifying moment in May of 2006 when I knew that my family of three was going to be broken beyond repair and that my little boy and I would be required to built a new family of two. Many years later, when that little boy was a young man of 16 and we first visited the campus of Springfield College, I knew that campus would be the place he would attend college.
When the feeling of certainty fills me, I recognize and honor that truth, even if it’s a hard or painful truth to absorb. In that moment, it simply is, and I believe it.
I think of these powerful moments now as we live in the clouded vortex of uncertainty that is life in a pandemic. I search my mind for the power to know what the future will hold. For hours, I sometimes wrack my brain looking for moments of seeming-certainty that blew up into an unexpected outcome. Oddly, they almost always surround politics: the elections of 1984; of 2000; of 2016. Now, in hindsight, I am not sure if it was certainty or hope that I felt on the eve of those elections. I feel certain of Donald Trump’s defeat in November 2020 and I fear it is the triumph of hope over instinct that causes me to feel this way.
One of the hardest parts of life in 2020 has been the terribly certain uncertainty of it all. I don’t just mean those powerful moments of certainty about my life that I have sometimes felt; those are rare and don't come along very often. I mean any kind of certainty at all. I feel like my last day of certainty was March 13, when we took an unexpected day off from classes. I felt a certainty on that day that the rest of the school year would be remote. Though school was not in session on that unseasonably warm and beautiful Friday, I came to work and stayed late into the afternoon, scanning my lessons into digital format so that I could teach from home through the end of the school year.
Yesterday morning, I thought of that Friday the 13th as I drove to school at 7 am for New Student Day, a tradition at my school that I have participated in for each year that I have been here. It was a moment of certainty —— I knew what to do because I had been through those motions so many times. To be sure, it was a different New Student Day than I have ever experienced - masked, socially distant, with an obligation to take the children’s temperature before they could join the activities. But in other ways, in the nervous smiles of new students, in the eager questions from their parents, the day was certainly familiar. In 2020, such a sense of familiar certainty is welcome, so very welcome.
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