She doesn’t know how close it was to being different.
We’d come to the decision, forced upon us by the school, to let my daughter go back to school, at least temporarily. She’d been home since March and it had gone pretty smoothly but she was itching to get back. For now, our school was sticking to a “hybrid” system, half the school going Monday and Tuesday, the other half Thursday and Friday, deep cleaning on Wednesdays. As long as it stayed like that we decided she could return.
Her teacher and superintendent were informed, her backpack was packed, outfit picked out.
And then her mom balked. The numbers were spiking, other schools had gone back to full remote, ours had just taken a two-week time-out. Until the night before we remained undecided.
We decided to let her go, the knowledge that we could pull her back out at any time a card kept close, ready to be played at any time. She was excited.
Then I balked. I hadn’t asked her if she was nervous, didn’t want to give her any reason to think that she should be, but it had been eight months since she had walked out of her school thinking that it was going to be a two-week break. If you know me or are a long time reader here you know that I work nights at a hospital, that a silver lining to this hellish year has been a lot more time spent together than we typically get but also that I see first hand how badly this thing can ravage a person. I was more emotional than was probably reasonable and when she timidly asked if I was going to be able to walk her to her classroom I came really close to just turning around.
I didn’t, and I held it together until she disappeared into the building. I went for my morning walk, took another shower and headed off to work, trying my best to trust her into the care of others until I got home and heard all about her day as I tucked her in.
Hear about her day I did, though not quite as I expected. I heard about the weather, how the rain had held off. I heard about some new tricks she had tried, about how she was getting more comfortable dropping in and going down ramps. I heard about how happy she was that there wasn’t a lot of teenagers at the skate park when her mom took her there after school, about the new place they might go to this weekend and all about the new gear she was going to ask Santa for. I heard about some tape they had ordered to stick to her board.
School? That was fine, really not that different other than the masks and the small class size. Now back to this new trick….
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Previously Published on Thirsty Daddy
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