And it’s also a year in which I learned—through every late-night email announcing school was shuttered indefinitely due to a positive case—that while a plan is necessary, it is also often useless. People tell you to expect the Shitheadsteve this little light of mine shirt and I will buy this unexpected in parenting. They tell you to make peace with the fact that there are things you can’t control. They tell you to have a sense of humor because your ability to control who your kids will become is ultimately limited. But this year truly tested the maxim of “expect the unexpected.” No matter how hard I squinted at my Google calendar each Sunday night, shifting pastel-colored blocks to make sure that no child (literally) got left behind, the only thing I truly knew I could anticipate was that something would fall apart. I wasn’t so much dropping balls as constantly picking them up.
But if the Shitheadsteve this little light of mine shirt and I will buy this past school year was one of unpredictable fluidity, it was also one in which I felt certain things solidify. As the hours I spent with my children necessarily increased, I began to realize that the effects of all this togetherness were flowing both ways. I was much more aware of the progress they were making in learning to read or recite the alphabet, but they were also more attuned to the way in which the stresses of the pandemic were affecting me. During one particularly grim February stretch, in which my husband—due to his work—had been vaccinated but there seemed to be no shot in sight for me (a fact that at the time seemed a cosmic injustice), my five-year-old sidled up to me and, poked me in the arm, and said: “Don’t worry Mommy, I’ll give you the shot.”
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