Just One of the Sheep

Go on Facebook these days and you’ll soon find yourself a fun little argument over schools reopening. There, you’ll most likely meet a whole bunch of parents all in varying locations of a place called wit’s end. Open the schools, don’t open the schools, hybridize the schools, remoticize the schools, ping, pong, ping, pong, ping. I’m dizzy from the constant back and forth over this issue. I have no idea what or how to think anymore and have parked myself firmly in the “what will be will be” camp. I could sit and wring my hands over the issue just like everyone else but I have a thumb injury from kayaking back in June and I’m trying to nurse it back to health so I can use my fingers for the remote teaching/learning situation that is most likely to come. What? You disagree? Cool, cool. I don’t feel like arguing so I’m just going to go garden or do something else that helps unclench my teeth. Mmmkay?

I’m a teacher and a mom of three public school children. We live in a multi-generational home and I’m as overwhelmed as the rest of y’all. I want my kids back in school, lord KNOWS I do. But this pandemic has its eyes set on killing, not just infecting, another 30,000 in the next three weeks after it has already killed 150,000 in about four months. Call me “one of the sheep” if you must but I want to keep my friends and family alive until 2021. One of the sheep, ha! This is an “insult” I have seen hurled on Facebook over and over again at people who are falling in line with the public health guidelines. My kids practically lick doorknobs and handrails and I have personally witnessed two of them licking windows and ALL of them wiping boogers on the wall. Even if they do stay six feet apart from the rest of the world, I don’t think they’ll part with their nasty little habits anytime soon and THAT, my friends, does not bode well for virus transmission. It just doesn’t. If feeling uneasy about going back to school makes me one of the sheep then all I have to say is BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, BAA, BAA-AAAA. I have been called much, much worse. Gray hair, don’t care is my new motto Take that, haters.

The strategies I have devised to keep this family functioning properly have had to evolve over the past few months and will continue to evolve as summer progresses into fall. Whatever hand we are dealt regarding school will require parents, families, and communities to pull together to make this work. This might mean going out of your way to help or provide for someone who will struggle with this more than you. It could also mean community resources putting themselves out there and partnering with schools to help enrich the curriculum we teachers will be forging on with. We could argue about this from sunrise to sundown, that is one thing we have gotten really good at in this country. But for the sake of the children, we should just shut up and figure this out no matter what. The kids are watching us very closely right now, waiting to see how we handle their needs. It is in our best interest to figure out how to make this work for them. They’re a pretty cool generation and I want to help carry them into a brighter future. They’ll be the ones wiping our drool someday so let’s not screw this up.

A while back I wrote about a thing called radical acceptance and this pandemic is a real challenge to that. Do we really have any other choice though? Teachers are some of the biggest planners around and radically accepting an acute inability to plan anything at all is driving us bonkers. So when anyone asks me how I plan to handle this school year, I tell them I plan to have coffee every single morning and eventually switch over to organic tea (yeah right, I know). Other than that, I got nothing.

If you don’t see me chiming in anywhere on Facebook about this whole issue, it is because I use what little energy I have at the end of the day to watch Schitt’s Creek and memorize the epic one-liners of Moira Rose. “Stop acting like a disgruntled pelican” is my personal favorite and I am going to start using it all the time, maybe even on Facebook comment threads just for kicks. I’m going to go ahead and continue to suck the marrow out of this gorgeous summer, water my gardens, and say things like “Gossip is the devil’s telephone. Best to just hang up.”(-Moira Rose) I will also continue to be a sheep so if you need any wool, let me know. I’m always willing to share.

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.