Your Kids Are Back in School! But Is That Heaven or Hell?
It feels so familiar. And yet....
Back when I was actively Momming, summer months never seemed to end. Trips to the beach were fun, and we were lucky enough to have access to a pool, but life was a whirring subway turnstile of bee stings, scraped knees, pink eye, poison ivy, sibling rivalry, and carpet stains. Only infrequently was I able to sit down, enjoy the privilege of having a complete and uninterrupted thought, and write. On Thanksgiving, knowing my kids were safely at the table, I was known to lock myself in the car in order to meet deadlines.
Secretly, I pined for fall to come because fall meant my little savages would go to school. But when the first day of school finally arrived, I usually spent it in tears. I couldn’t wait for my kids to grow up, and yet I hated that they were growing up so quickly. Try getting that to make sense.
What I actually yearned for was a break, although in my life, breaks were rarely forthcoming. If I could just have a little time to myself (or so my deluded thinking went), I could finish that chapter/novel/short story. It’s REALLY HARD being a creative and a single mother. Harder still to be a creative when you’re with somebody who is actively contemptuous of your work.
Creatives should not have kids with non-creatives. No one’s happy.
And then school. I could practically feel my son and daughter’s existential dread. I’d hated school, too, and here I was carting off my children to the same hideous abattoir of half-feral children and fire-breathing school administrators where they, too, would be tortured by classmates, made to feel ugly, and then locked inside a detention room. Were those ever the “good old days!”
Now, mid-Covid, parents are bringing their kids back to an alien moonscape called school, only no one knows what’s actually going to happen. Some kids are vaccinated, but not all. There may be mask rules, but in a school with hundreds, perhaps thousands of students, how enforceable are they? Even the vaccinated can asymptomatically contract the virus and transmit it to others.
In what way is in-person education not a protein-spiked Hindenburg mere seconds away from bursting into flames?
And yet, for most students, it’s been a year-and-a-half of staring, vacant-eyed, at a screen. It’s been a cheerless, terrifying, boring, polarizing, and yes, damaging time characterized by parents stressed to their limits, face-masked or online birthday parties, and despair. Your more introverted kids may have continued to quietly thrive, but most children suffered. And they suffered for us, to keep us from contracting Covid-19 and dying. They weren’t going to die—not most of them, anyway. At their most energetic and active, these children were locked away and forbidden to interact. That deserves at least a thank you.
What kind of environment are we returning them to? Are they the same kids that went into quarantine nineteen months ago? Is school the same place they left? What happens when you hermetically seal a child and then release it back into the wild? Because we’re about to find out.
And what about you? A part of you must be relieved to return to whatever relativist normal you can call your own at this point. But another part of you is surely worried. Our collective future seems very uncertain right now. Things are maybe worst, maybe better. We could be sticking our heads in the lion’s mouth, or quite possibly realizing we’re the lion.
And yet, thus far at least, you’ve survived. That’s no small thing. Cross your fingers, you’ve managed to outwit a deadly pandemic, master the technical snafus of online schooling, and learn how to talk to clients on the phone while making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. You’ve looked everywhere for your mask before realizing it was on your elbow. You’ve avoided awkward conversations (most of them anyway) with anti-vaxxers. You learned how to live on pizza crusts, four hours sleep, five hour Zoom calls, and bored, restless kids bouncing off the walls like hornets in a jar.
You deserve a medal. That’s the truth. Only all your heroism went unnoticed and unsung, at least until your kids grow up and realize that despite your failures and mistakes, you’re not as bad as they thought you were.
That won’t be for a while though.
Until then, I’m here to say: You did good.
All of us- save for the fucking morons who think they're too smart to get the vaccine- are heroes. We've persevered, and we've survived. I wonder sometimes what scars will remain with school-age children, but at least they'll be alive to tell the tale.
Not exactly the stuff of the Greatest Generation...but you do what you can with the cards you're dealt. Ours were just a tremendously shitty hand. Then again, we didn't have to face down a mad man bent on killing an entire race and enslaving the planet, did we?