By Noriko Nakada
The past Tuesday, I woke up at 2:30 am when my COVID test results came in. I was negative, but I couldn’t fall back asleep. I was thinking about the email from a parent questioning the social justice lens of my instruction. I was thinking about how my first-grader was worried about catching COVID because he’d touched his own poop. I was thinking about the phone call with my college roommate who told me about her colon cancer diagnosis. I stared into the dark, trying to bring back sleep, but I couldn’t stop my mind from spinning around it all. I pulled myself out of bed, got a work out in, and attempted to breathe. Then, I sat at the page and wrote a few lines about teaching, living through a pandemic, and processing grief.
Wednesday morning, I woke up before my alarm. The day sat heavily in my belly, but a full night’s sleep had me like a knife: sharp and ready. I was going to need to be like that blade in order to teach in a pandemic, to coach soccer in a pandemic, to parent in a pandemic, to write in a pandemic. My first grader was home for the week after a someone from his class tested positive. It was our family’s first close contact. A dear friend from college was having surgery, and I was waiting on news. Family memorials for an aunt and cousin who had passed during this year of isolation loomed along the horizon. I made my way from bed and into some yoga, because even inside the chaos, I can choose to breathe. In that breath, I forced myself to see the good: the gubernatorial recall had failed, a school voucher funding scheme had been tabled; the Oregon football team was ranked number four in the nation. Soon, I would be hosting all of my vaccinated siblings.
A week later, I woke up to the full moon shining through the bedroom window. The first grader was still home even though we all tested negative. I was bleeding again after a few months when I believed I had reached menopause. But this pandemic is like waiting for menopause. You think the end has arrived, but then the cramps, bleeding, and discomfort come back. Somehow the pain is worse than you remember, and you wonder how you’ve survived all this time. You wonder how long it will last. You wonder if you will be able to make it. But making it to menopause means surviving, and to making it through a global pandemic, despite close contacts and shifting CDC guidelines, means you keep get up in the morning and keep breathing.
I wake up. I keep going every day, and look for the good: Women Who Submit continues to submit work. We’ve released books, opened art exhibits, and come together on IG live, Zoom, and in-person to celebrate. We continue to support and lift one another up, because that’s how the WWS community makes its way through this pandemic. We seek out brave ways to be in close contact, even when it’s from a distance, and we stay breathing.
Noriko Nakada is a multi-racial Asian American who creates fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art to capture the stories she has been told not to talk about. She is the author of the Through Eyes Like Mine memoir series. Excerpts, essays, and poetry have been published in Hippocampus, Catapult, Linden Ave, and elsewhere.
Lisbeth Coiman is an emerging, bilingual writer wandering the immigration path from Venezuela to Canada to the US. She has performed any available job from maid to college administrator, and adult teacher. Her work has been published in Hip Mama, the Literary Kitchen, YAY LA, Nailed Magazine, Entropy, and RabidOak. She was also featured in the Listen to Your Mother Show in 2015. In her self-published memoir, I Asked the Blue Heron (Nov 2017), Coiman celebrates female friendship while exploring issues of child abuse, mental disorder, and her own journey as an immigrant. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches and dances salsa.