Steady yourselves, parents. The ride is about to get bumpy.
If you have children, you likely haven’t stopped thinking about the impact of COVID-19 on your kids since you first heard the words “novel coronavirus.” Maybe you noticed the rest of the world took a bit of a breather when schools let out in the spring. It was a time to focus on hospital capacity, unemployment, remote learning, and even tourism and travel. Teachers quietly took the bulletin boards down. Custodians cleaned, cleaned, and cleaned some more.
Still, it’s been lurking in your mind the whole time — going back to school, moving back to college. You imagine the playground, the lunchroom, the drinking fountain, the dorm. Maybe your child hates the very idea of wearing a mask, physically can’t wear a mask, or is so terrified of people not wearing masks you worry he will emerge from 2020 with a permanent phobia of the human face. Maybe your child washes her hands until her skin peels away, or maybe they lick their fingers every time they touch something, anything, to see how it tastes.
What are we going to do when schools reopen in a few weeks? What in the world would we do if they didn’t?
Well, we’re going to figure it out; we just don’t know how yet. We’re not going to take the easy route and pretend the worst case scenario can’t happen. We’re going to study our options, ask questions, demand answers, and listen to our children. We’re most likely going to argue with our spouses (and our former spouses) about the right thing to do and the right amount to worry. We’re going to close the bedroom door and cry, only to emerge with dry faces and confident words because we figure that’s our job. We are the adults.
Adults aren’t afraid to do the next hard thing. (Well maybe we are, but we feel the fear and step forward anyway. And when the world shifts once again, we’ll do the next hard thing, and we’ll never really know for sure if we’re getting it right.
My daughter is most likely going back to college. There are precautions and plans, and I’m sure there are sleepless nights and second guessing ahead of us as well. When I look at her, I see the luminous adult she has become, but I also see the child inside. I see a wisp of a wild creature whose hair looks like spun chocolate and is often flecked with leaves and flowers. She whispers conversations with rabbits. She writes inquisitive letters to fairies. Yes, she grew up. But all that is still part of who she is, and I remember. I remember all of it.
It's been my job to protect her, to love her, to explore the world with her. Yet I never imagined the world I invited her into would be upended so quickly by a terrorist attack. How do you explain that? How do you explain the end of a marriage? How do you explain that first shattering death of the boy down the street, the one who stood in our front yard laughing with the sun shining on his back like he was immortal?
So here we are at the threshold of the next hard thing. We know the right thing to do, but so far, as a nation, we seem unable to band together and do it. We have not defeated this virus. We go back to school with far more cases of COVID-19 in South Dakota, in the United States, than we had when we sent children home in the first place.
We launch our children back into to the world not because we are ready but because it is time. We also have endured the sting of dropping them off at school the day after a mass shooting with nothing more than a lingering hug to protect them from fear. We have been forced to teach them the meaning of the hashtag “me too,” that police officers are not always the good guys, that yet another generation intends to leave the planet worse than the generation before.
Don’t let them tell you not to worry. Don’t let them tell you it’s not a big deal. And most of all, don’t let anyone tell you we can’t do better by our children.
We must. We are the adults.
