Early one afternoon last December, as I stitched the outline of a cheery yellow flowerpot onto cheap white fabric pulled taut inside a flimsy wooden hoop, a childhood memory invaded my adult psyche with unexpected force, fueled by emotion and aided by the element of surprise.
It had been a dark time in Los Angeles County: the numbers of reported daily COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths were skyrocketing. Shorter winter days had reduced available hours of sunlight for hikes and socially distanced picnics in Griffith Park. Physically, I was safe inside my one-bedroom apartment. But mentally, I needed a new hobby to distract myself from the pandemic’s grim reality. I ordered some embroidery starter kits and set to work sewing tiny fuchsia flower petals and smooth hunter-green succulent leaves.
So there I was, 37 years old, sitting in my living room in Los Angeles in the threadbare gray sweatpants I’d worn like a second skin for months, stitching flowers, when suddenly I was 7, sitting in my living room in Erwin, Tennessee, in an oversize threadbare T-shirt that doubled as pajamas, doing needlework because I was a homeschooler and my mom had assigned the task.
Despite the passage of three decades, and having moved more than 2,000 miles away, shed the religion of my youth, and reinvented myself multiple times, here I was in the exact same situation I had run from: I was stuck in my house when I didn’t want to be, doing needlework in the middle of a weekday like a Little House on the Prairie cosplayer.
In the spring of 2020, with public and private schools shuttered owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, some 55 million U.S. schoolchildren participated in some version of at-home learning. Globally, nearly 1.4 billion children—those under the age of 18—were confined to their homes, unable to
