We are full of paradise without knowing it. –Thomas Merton
Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again? This lockdown is feeling like a sequel that got its shit together. Mostly. This is due, in large part, to all we aren’t doing.
Gone is the cursed whiteboard with which I used to start our days: I’d prop it up next to me while the boys watched from the couch. Little Brother would survey what he had to do with excitement; The Kid would tally up his list with anxiety. Then we’d attack the day like we were at the battle line. Zooms, worksheets, and tears would follow. One day I had a glass of champagne in hand by 10 am (to be fair, that was for a video call with some friends in America, but still–it left me thinking most days would be better if they started that way).
This time, during Zoom meetings in which teachers run down the list of assignments, the boys and I look at each other and shake our heads. “Are we doing that?” they ask. “Nope,” I reply. I’ve spoken to their teachers and told them that we’re taking more of the “world is a classroom” approach: that we’re cooking and baking together, reading together, researching together, playing maths and reading games together. There is a lot of together. The “how can I miss you when you won’t go away” kind. But so far, only one major meltdown (mine, and I’d rather not discuss it except to say that TK has forgiven me and we’re not doing Reading Eggspress together anymore).
Occasionally that twisted form of FOMO will hit me and I’ll wonder what the other kids are up to; I’ll lurk on Google Classroom and check how many assignments we’re avoiding; I’ll consider whether I’m setting my kids up for failure for life.
Then I remember what we were doing a year ago and I push the F*ck It button, again, and we head to the beach. In the winter.
Because here’s the thing: all the materials we’re sent, they’ll acknowledge that you don’t have to do everything, that you need to choose what works for your family, that bonding with your kids is the most important. Then all the metrics–the awards given out, the recognition dispensed–lies in favour of those who do the most. And I may have just become a maths teacher (again), but to me? That doesn’t add up.
I know my kids better this time around. I know myself better this time around. I know that this whole thing is a shitshow where everyone is trying their best and attempting to keep it together and staunch the tsunami of uncertainty we face each day (for reals, I just read that the moon’s orbit has a “wobble” to it, WTF, that will result in global coastal floods in ten years) and honestly? We are never going to run out of uncertainty.
What I know, in the face of and beyond that uncertainty, is what is true. I watch TK add huge sums in his head and LB read volumes and it warms the cold part of my heart that wants to buy into the metrics, then we go to the park and I watch TK talk to strangers and tell them our life story, and LB make friends in an instant. I see how they are similar to me and, thankfully, different. I know they are both fragile and impenetrable, that they are protected by me and a grace so much bigger than me.
I can actually relax, which feels so wrong and foreign to me. But when I do–when I let go and just see them and stop trying to fix the world the way I think it should be–that’s when that grace has space to move, to fill.
The other day we were at a secret garden and LB picked up a huge tree leaf from the gardener’s cuttings. “Look, Mom!” he shouted, waving it with his typical gusto, and I told him how cool it was then suggested maybe we weren’t supposed to take it. The gardener came around the corner then, pushing a wheelbarrow, and shook his head. “Let him have it,” he said.
I have never been a rule breaker. But now I’m getting a second chance. I’m seeing the magic that happens over mixing bowls and flour strewn across the bench top (GASP! I cleaned it up immediately); at playgrounds and on shorelines; in their books and my own. In their stories and my own. Grace instead of lists filling the pages. It’s a bit terrifying, mostly uncertain, and, I’m pretty sure, completely sacred.