I Don’t Want My Daughter to Go Back to School
It’s not for the obvious reason, though.
She’s been a high school junior for exactly a week now. She glosses over this fact when she cheerfully reports to me this morning that she is currently getting straight A’s. It’s one of the more amusing parts of our day together. There will be many more.
School for her is a spot to the right of me at our dining room table. She’s wrapped up in a blanket that looks like a tortilla. Air Pods, Zoom calls, breakout rooms for group work, and awkward class discussions about The Crucible. This is not what she expected her junior year to look like.
Truthfully, I love it. I don’t want it to go away. I’m in no hurry for schools to re-open. It has nothing to do with the fact that there’s a virus still spreading rapidly.
I know there is an army of parents out there trying desperately to get their work done while their 6-year-old navigates online school. It’s time-consuming and frustrating. I can’t even imagine what that must be like. The 5–8 years were not my strong suit.
There are just as many parents who have to find creative solutions to find care for their child who is too young to mind themselves. Parents whose jobs don’t afford them the luxury of being able to work from home.
I understand how and why these parents long for normalcy. It’s needed to sustain their homes financially and to save their sanity.
I also understand I’m blessed. When my daughter was staring down her teenage years, people warned me.
“She’s gonna hate you soon. Just wait. She will become a human that is totally foreign to you,” they would tell me. “Teenage girls become mom-hating demons.”
I’ve been planning for that since she was little. I used to joke around with her that I was keeping notes and pictures of every nice thing I did for her, like filling the entire house with streamers for her 9th birthday.
I let her know that someday when she yelled at me that she hated me, I would break out a PowerPoint presentation with this archive of love to remind her that she actually loved me and I loved her back…
