This Novel Season
Living, working, and schooling two kids under 10 years of age at home for almost 18 months has revealed a lot about our family.
For one, my wife and I are not very good teachers.
Two, her saintly patience isn’t as unbending as I once thought.
And three, while I show up to work on camera every day with a smile, inside I’m quietly suffering some (read: many) days.
The changes have been incremental for all of us, but perhaps most noticeable in our kids.
Once super-outgoing boys willing to set off on an adventure at a moment’s notice, they’ve morphed into homebodies, content to play inside or watch cartoons for longer than is healthy.
After Zoom class, they often return to their laptops and get lost in mindless YouTube videos of marble mazes and Hot Wheels races. It’s a real problem in our home.
And we as parents aren’t modeling very well as we log inordinate amounts of screen time for our own work.
When we can extricate them from home, they usually normalize to pre-pandemic norms, playing in the open air with ease.
It’s around crowds and busy indoor spaces where they get on edge. How they try to open doors with their elbows or feel compelled to wash their hands often are surely helpful acts, but I wonder if we have imprinted inchoate obsessive compulsions.
Our last kitchen table discussion about whether they return to live school or continue on virtually this fall resulted in groans and replies of: “I’m scared to go back to the school.”
Sure, their reactions are the product of mom and dad and our waxing and waning paranoia over the last year and a half. It probably didn’t help that my wife and I talked openly almost daily about the pandemic and created a safe bubble around ourselves, which in turn established their stance on this whole thing.
I also realize their are countless individuals and families for which this whole thing was an annoyance; for many, there was never a pandemic.
So, as those of us—namely children—reintegrate, my ask is that we understand that the trauma lasts regardless. For some, it’s long lasting. For others, there’s no mourning whatsoever.
But for our youngest, the ones who will be the first survivors of this novel season—can we give them the space they need to thrive again?
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Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
