Which is harder: parenting a kid who doesn’t want to go back to school, or homeschooling that kid and his brother?
Answer: they both suck. And these are the lose-lose moments of motherhood, the isolating and excruciating struggles that I must walk alongside them through because I cannot not walk with them, my body and soul tied to them messily and inextricably and eternally and inconveniently and beautifully.
Hello! It’s Tuesday morning.
The boys went back to school this morning, despite collective parental fears with every informational email from the school that this would be the one announcing suspension of onsite learning; that we’d be returning to the hell that is homeschool because COVID numbers have gone up here (though nowhere even near the same league as what’s happening back in the good ol’ US of A). That email didn’t arrive, so we did: at the school gate on this sunny morning, one mother, one happy kindergartener, and one anxious third-grader.
So our return was both excitement- and tear-soaked, happy and sad and everything in between. And with every repetition of the question from the unexcited one–“But why is it the law to go to school?”–I both felt the recognition of myself at his age, and the frustration of being compelled by circumstances and emotions beyond my pay grade.
What I’m saying is that this is hard and I’d rather be catching up on old episodes of Gossip Girl on Netflix. That is the familiarity I crave: images of the streets of New York that I last watched when I was on those streets, living a decidedly less complicated life (in that no one depended on me for their well-being/survival), but also…a less full one. One marked by less frustration with what was, but more yearning for what was not yet.
When I walked those streets, countless as they were, I would rarely get lost–owing not just to my familiarity with them but maybe more my unwillingness to stray from the areas I knew and frequented. But when I did run aground on some unfamiliar spot, I only had to find landmarks–a known building’s spire plunged into the sky, a street sign with a number or name–to know where to go next.
The Kid is in the unfamiliar territory of not having a therapist at school with him, of not having someone dedicated to just him, and though he’s managing his schoolwork beautifully without help, he has decided that this is not a street he enjoys traversing. There have been tears, so many of them, and I struggle to not feel them as an interruption to the smooth sailing I prefer, even as–and maybe because?–I see so much of myself and my own young (and often current) struggles in his own. Fighting against change, clinging to what feels safe. Resisting movement in favour of a dropped anchor.
And then, by grace (another Great Interrupter), I remember my landmarks–like a fire in the night or a cloud in the day or a whisper on the wind or the North Star that led to freedom–the breath that is the truth of what I believe: we are not being interrupted, but unfurled, like the sail on a boat driven by winds beyond its control but always, always, in its favour. So many of the choices I made in life, the paths I wanted to take–those were the actual deviations, and time after time I was set right, moved back on course, by what felt like interruptions but were grace gently leading me where I was meant to be.
And so I tell them this, in whispered moments at bedtime, in tearful ones putting on shoes, in still ones in the car battling traffic outside and anxiety inside, I tell them this–not that they’ll be okay or that it’s fine or any of the sayings I’ve heard that were meant to brush away the interruption–but this: that their lives are a great story, one of hard parts and easy, storms and sun, but stories full and beautiful, told by a grace that will always lead them home. And then I hope and pray that, like me on my good days, they’ll believe it.