Every day, parents make roughly 2,347,289 decisions. I’ve done the math, and it checks out. For example, this morning I had to make the decision to get out of bed. Then, once that was decided, I had to figure out if I was going to wear pants. This is how it begins each and every single day.
Then I have to decide if my seven-year-old is going to wear pants. And if so, which pants is he going to wear? Maybe we don’t need pants at all. This is an excellent point that my youngest son made. Pants are for suckers. So maybe I decide that this is a no pants kind of day.
Then I have to decide if my two teenagers will get to partake in the no pants day. I also have to decide if I will wake them up or let them be late for online school. I’m not even downstairs yet and as you can see, I’ve made roughly 10,000 decisions.
Eventually, our mornings get rolling. I decide to do the dishes that we decided to not do last night. Then I choose which news source my smart home device will play while I get breakfast ready. Do I want the one that will ask me to decide between two political sides, or the one that will make me pick my favorite influencer? After that, with the kids fed and ½ wearing pants, it’s time to decide if we will start our online school.
This should be an easy decision, as it was supposedly decided for me months ago. Except, it really wasn’t. Those decisions got replaced by others, there was a kerfuffle, decisions decided they didn’t like the regime and overthrew the previous decisions. Share-croppers joined in the fight and it was very strange. So now, I decide how school is done as no one at all could make the decision.
The schedule is fluid, depending on which classes wanted to have live meets today. It changes from week to week, and sometimes when I’m lucky, minute to minute.
“Um, I don’t see a class on the schedule,” I will say to my teenage son.
“Me either, but I just got an email from Johnny that it’s time for class and he wants to know where I am,” he will say.
“Which class?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says.
And on it goes. More decisions on top of more decisions. Normally, as parents, we understand that we will make a lot of decisions. And sometimes, we even believe that we will choose the right path for our family and our children. After all, the rest of the world has decided how things should be and we are really just following along. It’s nice to be a sheep at times. You get to a deeper sleep. But this is not a normal year, although half the world seems to have decided that they will treat it like nothing has changed.
So now, every moment of our day is spent making decisions that we are not used to making. Unfortunately, this goes beyond the great pants debate of 2020. The stakes have been raised. I either let my kids do their best in school with a system that was never built for it, or I step in and take up the responsibility for all of it. But if I do that, am I actually qualified to teach high school French? Algebra? Recess? It gets to the point that I miss the pants decision in the beginning.
And it gets worse.
Do I go to the grocery store in person today, and if I do that, will I be putting myself and my children at risk? And how do I deal with people that refuse to wear a mask and believe that this is a real thing? When they start saying that the death rate of Covid is oh so low for I children, do I ask which kids we should sacrifice so they responsible adults can pretend everything is fine?
Those are a lot of decisions before I have even opened the front door of my house.
As parents, we do that every single day. Every time we need to go get something for the family. It gets to the point that at night, I put my head down exhausted, but my brain has decided to not let me sleep. I have decision fatigue, and it’s at this time that the fatigue decides to take it up a notch.
There was a Christmas light show this last weekend. An outdoor event where everyone was to stay in cars, or in lawn chairs in front. Everyone was supposed to be masked up. No one is supposed to be close. Two of the other families we wanted to go with have also been quarantining like us.
The big decision, do we go or not? My kids have not been thriving in lockdown. Their grades are mostly good. They smile and laugh with each other. But I know that they miss their friends. I know that they need socialization. I know that they are dealing with their own anxiety. I have to balance that need with the risk of a crowd that may or may not follow the rules.
Decision fatigue comes to all of this. And no matter what decision we make, I often feel that it is the wrong one. Go or stay. Pants or no pants. How much risk is acceptable? By the end of the night, I decided that we would risk it.
To my delight, everyone was masked up and kept space. My kids kept theirs on and so did their playmates. For such a simple decision that in the past I would have made without thought, this one took me days to really decide. And I still don’t know if it was the right call.
And tomorrow, we will all wake up again and decide if it’s time to get out of bed. One decision down, 2,347,288 more to go.
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