My Kids Finally Went Back to School

Both of my kids returned to school in-person this week, for the first time since the pandemic began to change our lives in March 2020. For nearly two years we’ve been schooling at home. (There was a brief interlude when my younger kiddo joined her class in-person.) The night before for their first day, my older daughter baked chocolate chip cookies and both kids packed their backpacks. My oldest kept saying “I don’t think this is really going to happen.” School was canceled farther north because of weather, and I think we both expected something to sideswipe their re-entry to in-person learning.

But nothing did. Now I’m sitting here, in bad need of a shower and over caffeinated trying to figure out how to navigate through this next life phase. The kids have loved school every day this week, each afternoon coming home and monologuing for hours about friends and recess and their awesome teachers. Hallelujah.

Two years ago, I put notice in at a job I loved. I reasoned that if I invested my time and energy on my own writing projects, that I might make something of myself. It all felt very nebulous and uncertain, but for the first time in my life I felt secure enough to be impractical. My husband supported my decision and encouraged me by saying “You do everything for everyone, it’s your turn.”

Back then, I also felt a pervading sense that I needed to quit now, with an urgency that must have been intuition. Before I had begun to help my organization transition to new leadership, Covid-19 rolled in.

Learning at Home

At the start of spring break in March 2020 I picked the kids up from school and we laughed about perhaps having an extra-long break.

Who could have known that it wouldn’t be until January 2022 when they both would return?

We did it all. Learned to make candles and can pickles. Found a favorite bridge where we would escape when homeschooling was too much. We celebrated the end of a semester with a hot chocolate party. We read history books by the fireplace. Made slime. Did science experiments that were epic colorful explosions and science experiments that imploded and ended in tears. We stuck close to a literature curriculum we loved and played math games, until it was too much, and I took them to the library and said “This is your curriculum. Read whatever you want.” We went cross country skiing and ice skating and inner tubing. We went on a road trip to Denali National Park, and it was a down pour for the entire week. We spent time at our remote cabin and baked bread, collected seaweed, and played board games. We found a Covid-safe group and had roller skating sessions. We got vaccinated and went to Hawaii and swam with sea turtles.

We did it all. I gave my younger daughter reading lessons in the autumn sun because the tension in the house was overwhelming. I stayed up late trying to figure out how to implement the mail-order curriculum. I re-learned long division and how to subtract fractions and divide decimals. We yelled, and sometimes screamed. My older daughter was motivated, but pretty darn conflicted about having her mom as a teacher. My younger daughter read Dog Man a gazillion times and spent hours in her room with audio books. We were together all. the. time. I tried to root myself in humility, but a lot of the time shame took over and it felt like whatever I did, it would never be enough.

The Marathon

I felt like a failure. My husband is a builder, and his life didn’t change much. If anything, his business intensified, leaving me at home to do and be all things to our kids. But we were scared what would happen to us economically if he slowed down — would the jobs run out? Would people run out of money for home improvements and projects? Meanwhile, my life was diminished to cooking, cleaning, and educating. Everything was so challenging, and also, I missed being challenged. I was writing in a minimal way, not prolifically or strategically, as I had envisioned. I was filled with joy and completely miserable.

I got so mad one night when my husband’s family was over, the first time we had an indoor gathering after the grandparents were vaccinated, that I packed a bag and spent the night at the Best Western. I woke in the morning and didn’t rush home but laid in the hotel bed still sobbing and journaling. I probably needed anti-anxiety meds. Instead, I began listening to meditation apps like Shine and podcasts like We Can Do Hard Things. When the snow melted, I started running a few times a week. I moved my desk and started writing essays. I began reading more and using headphones to listen to books when I needed a break. The headphones were big, purple cheap things that sent the message to my girls “mom is having a time out.” I had Zoom therapy sessions and Zoom friend sessions and still felt so alone, but I felt something shift in me — a claiming of some small modicum of agency.

(Also, if your doctor prescribes you anti-anxiety meds, don’t be stoic. Use whatever tools available to you.)

At the end of the school year, we celebrated. Tensions lessened in the house when I wasn’t the teacher and the mother. Then in the fall, when cases rose precipitously and our school district declined to follow CDC policies, I cried all over. I couldn’t send my kids back to school. I got fairly angry at the happy pics on Facebook showing the people in my small town moving on with their lives, even as hospital beds were dwindling. So, I stopped posting anything personal on Facebook. Anything I wanted to share was implicitly political, even a simple pic of my kids in the yard would reveal that we can afford a yard, a house, that we are choosing to live a Covid-safe lifestyle, which included masking and homeschooling. It burned to watch case counts rise in my state while in Facebook-land so many were living as if the pandemic had ended. I didn’t know how to productively contribute to that noise.

It was like feeling like I had finished a marathon, only to learn that I still had ten more miles to go. I didn’t want my kids to know how disappointed I was, so I found new curriculums that excited me and prioritized our learning goals. I was determined to expect less of myself, and thereby expect less of them. Though I had always maintained our relationship was more important than academics, in practice that was so hard to manage.

What Just Happened?

Most of us aren’t the same people we were two years ago. I’m trying to let go of everything I didn’t do, and show up here, on the page, as I am. I want to tease apart what we went through, “we” being women and families, my family unit specifically, and make some kind of narrative that acknowledges the complexities of this period and also pushes us to be better. I know Covid-19 isn’t over, but my kids are finally vaccinated, and for better or worse, as a society we are now adapting to living with a disease that has become endemic, and infuriatingly profuse.

I have a bit of grief about that…there was a moment, many moments actually, when I thought those with privilege would behave in ways where the disease would be controlled, and our humanity would be upheld. Wearing a mask felt like such a simple action to help other people stay well. One of my main reasons to educate my kids at home was because I knew other families wouldn’t be able to make a similar decision, and I thought smaller classroom sizes would make it safer for all kids. I’m still learning how to be in this world with the understanding that all lives don’t matter, and the fact that I didn’t already understand this is because I’m white. If you’re black, brown, indigenous, transgender, or other marginalized identity, you’ve probably known this all along.

Friends and acquaintances ask me what I’m going to do with my time, and the question makes me uncomfortable. (My kids have barely been in school for a week!) I’m going to write, that thing I set out to do, but I don’t know yet how that translates into being a professional person. I haven’t worked in two years, and I’m sensitive to the privilege that implies, even though it was one of the most isolating and demanding periods of my life.

So I spend the mornings taking deep breaths — not because I’m intentionally trying to regulate my nervous system, like when the kids were home all day, but because I’m genuinely relaxed and curious. And honestly? I don’t know what comes next.

How did Covid-19 change your life? How does it continue to impact your family?

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