Not a Wasted Word

Yesterday morning, my son stepped foot on his campus for the first time in over 400 days. He was excited. He was ready. He was so relieved to be back in school.

He had a great day. He loves school again! He’s so excited to go back today.

I’m worried what Monday will bring when he’s back on zoom, or having a meltdown because he doesn’t want to be back on zoom.

It’s bittersweet. I’m happy that he’s back and angry that it took so long for him to get there, and that he doesn’t get to be there more. I’m frustrated by the needless delay in returning in person and the failure to return in the ways that were promised. I’m furious that no one is being held accountable.

I know I’m a broken record on this, and that lots of people don’t share my belief that returning in person is important. I know a lot of people are keeping their children in distance learning because they are doing fine, or community spread is out of control in their areas. I’m glad distance learning works for some kids; my daughter is doing fine in distance learning, even if I know it’s not ideal for her. I hope that families continue to have choices about how and where their children will learn moving forward. It’s the lack of choice here that makes me so angry. It’s everyone telling us it’s been fine, when it hasn’t, that makes my blood boil.

I hear my colleagues say we shouldn’t have come back, that they can cover their curriculum online, that they can teach the essentials just fine. That may be true – I think I’m covering material well, though I can’t get through nearly as much of it – but it’s not the point. School is about so much more than the curriculum that is being covered. Even for the kids who don’t depend on school for social services, the classroom is about so much more than what is taught. It’s about friends, and mentors, and independence, and figuring out who you are away from home. For a lot of kids, it’s about being happy.

I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve gone to where parents describe happy, out going students who, after a year of distance learning, can’t get out of bed in the morning. I can’t tell you how many students tell me they are trying to get work done, but they just can’t. These are the kids that distance learning should work well for – the kids with highly educated parents, stable incomes, and reliable technology at home.

At the beginning of the pandemic, when we knew less and the virus was raging out of control, it made sense when we said that distance learning was good enough. It had to be because the alternative was death. That is just not the case anymore (not in places like the Bay Area where community spread is incredibly low and vaccinate rates are high). Now, for the great majority of students, continuing in distance learning because it’s what we’ve done, and it’s been good enough for this long, is dishonest and dangerous. I know that isn’t going to be a popular opinion, but it’s mine. We need to figure out how to return students and teachers to the classroom when conditions warrant it. No, it won’t be zero risk, but nothing in life is zero risk. We do things all the time that carry some amount of risk because we have decided, independently and as a society, that the risk is worth it.

It didn’t need to be this way. Mistakes were made. I know I’m lucky to have lived in a place where the virus did not decimate communities like it did elsewhere, but that doesn’t negate the damage that was done by our school district in our specific situation.

I’m not asking for things to go back to normal. I’m not spurning public health guidelines. I’m just asking our society to value the importance of students being in schools (which public health experts say can be done safely). Distance learning is no longer good enough for most students, and we can’t keep pretending that it is.

Sorry for the absence. I’m still here. Still struggling. It feels like we’re in this in-between space, where normalcy is edging its way into my life, but nothing feels easier. Things are opening up here – in San Mateo County masks aren’t required in big open spaces anymore! – but for our family things mostly feel the same. Traffic is getting worse, but my kids still aren’t in school. I’m starting to panic about next fall – that things will be open in all the ways that don’t help me, but not back to normal in the ways I need. Will schools be open full time? Will there be aftercare that I can access and afford? What happens if I have to be back in my classroom full time and I can’t find adequate coverage for my kids?

I have no faith in society anymore. I fear I will absolutely be hung out to dry. Ultimately I am an afterthought. The government really doesn’t care about creating the circumstances in which women can work.

But they don’t care about anyone, do they? That’s the whole point. Our country expects its citizens to figure shit out for themselves. It’s a family’s business how they arrange care for their kids. If you want to have kids, you gotta deal with them.

It feels like everyone is either back to their old lives, or they’re not but that is their choice and they are okay with it. I feel like I’m being asked to do more and more, but am given nothing to make doing more manageable. I’m so tired and so burned out.

I think it’s that my schedule got a lot more intense in “Phase 4,” but we actually lost child care because my kid’s virtual learning schedule no longer works with my district’s child care (because they are back in person). Also, despite SFUSD making 5 days a week of in person learning an “unwavering priority,” my kids will only be going back 2 days a week, even though so few students are coming back in each class that they can all fit in the same cohort. The reasons my kids’ school can’t accommodate 5 days of in person learning, despite space not being an issue (which is the ONLY reason the district states would be a reason) are myriad and bureaucratic, and they sap any confidence I have in the district’s commitment to return full time in the fall. I really hope they figure things out, but so far, I don’t have a lot of faith. SFUSD is not a district that learns from its mistakes. Or anything really.

Having said that, I’m excited for my kids to return to their classrooms and I’m excited their teachers will be in those classrooms so they won’t just be doing “zoom in a room” which is happening at a lot of other schools. Over 500 teachers and other staff at SFUSD were allowed to stay home despite having the opportunity to be fully vaccinated before they returned. No other district in the vicinity is allowing more than a handful of teachers to stay home after being vaccinated. It really doesn’t make any sense.

On a related note, in the next five weeks my husband and I get two days a week in which we can just do our own work for 5.5 hours a day. I can’t even fathom what that will be like.

I wish we got more days.

In more positive news, our numbers, and the numbers of SF’s neighboring counties are still very low (Marin county almost entered the yellow (least restrictive) tier this week). We’re far enough out from spring break to feel confident that people’s travel did not mess up our downward trends. At least 65% of people over 16 in San Francisco have gotten one dose, and 45% are fully vaccinated. That is with eligibility only opening to everyone 16+ this Monday. I know a 19 and 20 year old who have gotten their first shots! I think we have every reason to expect that a large portion of San Franciscans will get vaccinated – I guess ultimately we’ll have to worry about tourism propagating virus spread, once people start traveling again. There is also the influx people from neighboring counties once they start commuting again for work (did you know SF used to double its population during the work day?!), but neighboring counties should eventually be vaccinated at about the same rate as we are in SF.

So there are lights at the end of this tunnel, I just worry that none of them will be the lights I really need. I am so worried about the fall; it keeps me up at night. I really don’t think anything could assuage my fears – nothing is guaranteed during a pandemic – so I’m going to have to figure out how to deal with the uncertainty and maybe start brainstorming some plans B, C, D through Z.

This in-between space is a hard place to be.

At one point I mentioned that my school was returning in our full “hybrid” schedule and someone asked me what that looks like for us. I thought I’d take a post to describe what in person learning looks like at my district and at my kids’ district.

{Semantic note: When the pandemic thrust us all into distance learning, we needed new words to talk about our new teaching and learning experiences. Like any vocabulary that is introduced quickly and haphazardly, words that describe different kinds of learning are used incongruously across the country. I will be using words to mean what they do here, and I apologize if I’m using a word for one kind of learning when that refers to something else in another area.}

In my district the K-3 elementary schools went back in person with a “hybrid” schedule about a month ago. At that district, families that assumed they would want to stay in distance learning applied for an online “Connections” program that they knew would continue throughout the school year. Once it was clear that the district would be returning, in some capacity, to the classroom, families were given another chance to join the Connections program, which would mean a change in teacher and classmates if they didn’t want to return in person.

My understanding is that all families that applied to the Connections program were accommodated, so there are no students remaining at home in the classes that returned in person. This means that the K-3 elementary teachers in our district are either teaching entirely online (through the Connections program) or in a hybrid schedule. For us, “hybrid” means that students receive a portion of their school day in person and a portion online via zoom and/or asynchronous work (but not that students in the classroom are being taught at the same time as students at home, which we refer to as “simultaneous” teaching or learning).

Right now the elementary students come to school four mornings or afternoons (M/T/T/F) a week and have asynchronous work to complete when they are not in school. So if students see their teacher in the morning, they have asynchronous work in the afternoon and vice versa. Wednesday is entirely online for everyone. So teachers are teaching half their class in the morning and half in the aftenroon and assigning asynchronous work four days a week. This will be their schedule for the rest of the year, despite the new CDC (and locally adopted) guidelines suggesting 3 feet between students in the classroom, and despite our very low numbers in San Mateo County and the Bay Area as a whole.

I’m pretty sure the 4th and 5th grade “upper elementary schools” are doing something similar (K-3 and 4-5 are separated in our district because of space issues at the elementary schools).

At the middle school level, where kids have 4-6 teachers depending on whether they are enrolled in an elective and/or PE, it’s a lot more complicated. In anticipation of a return to the classroom, our school did group students in one “class” that stays together for core instruction. So one set of 32 kids stays together for English Language Arts, History/Social Studies, Math and Science. This is not usually the case at my school – kids usually meet with different groups all throughout the day, but this year they grouped them for the core classes so that if we returned to the school we could more easily split them into stable cohorts for their core instruction.

We did not, however, create and populate a “Connections” program because that was a lot harder to manage at the middle school level due to staffing and credentialing issues. The absence of a Connections program at the middle school level made distance learning a lot easier, but is making it much harder to come back now.

The hybrid schedule that the two middle school in my district are using is… nuts. I will attempt to outline it here, but for how confusing it seems, know I am omitting the most confusing parts.

The students coming to school were split into A and B groups (in their core class). The A kids have 1st and 2nd period in person on Monday mornings and 3rd and 4th in person on Tuesday mornings. They go home before lunch, to eat and finish their asynchronous assignments for the core classes they didn’t see those days (so they do asynchronous work for 3rd and 4th period on Monday afternoon and for 1st and 2nd period on Tuesday afternoon. They also might have an elective or PE in the afternoon.

Everyone meets entirely online on Wednesday.

On Thursday and Friday the A group students have electives or PE via zoom (or time to complete asynchronous work) in the mornings, then they meet with their 1st and 2nd period teachers on zoom on Monday afternoon or their 3rd and 4th period teachers on Friday afternoon.

So the core teachers are teaching half of the students in two periods in person in the mornings and the other half of the students in those same two periods on zoom in the afternoon on M/Tu then do the opposite on Th/F. They see all their students together in every class on Wednesday. This means that a teacher meets with a student three times during the week, and assigns two asynchronous assignments.

The C (Connections) group always meets online in the afternoon with the students who are not on campus that day. So that means teachers cannot really refer back to what was done in class when they are online because there are always students in a class who never come in person.

I was super lucky and they scheduled all the students from any class in a specific group, so I don’t have to teach the same thing to half my class and then again to the other half of it. This means all of my 1st period goes to school in person on Monday and Tuesday so I can meet with them on zoom in the morning on Thursday and Friday (we also meet on Wednesday). (I have to meet my classes in the mornings so the Connections kids can meet with me, because they ALWAYS meet with their core classes in the afternoons).

To make it all more complicated, the 6th grade has their own stand alone Connections class that meets in the mornings, so they can have their elective classes in the afternoons. And to make it even more complicated, some teachers teach core class for some periods and elective classes for other periods, and some teachers teach at different schools (either the 4-5 elementary and the 6-8 school or both 6-8 schools (like I do). One teacher has an ELA/Social Studies core AND teaches an art class at the 4-5 school and another 6-8 art class that students from both 6-8 schools attend). It’s a logistical nightmare.

But somehow, they made it work, and 6th-8th grade students can come back two mornings a week, while remaining in their elective classes. It’s a classic example of a compromise that makes nobody very happy, but we are “returning in person” and that is all that matters now!

(Not to say I don’t think we should be doing this – at the very least it’s good practice for a full(er?) return to the classroom next year. And students are VERY EXCITED for the opportunity to return to classrooms so it’s not, in my eyes, for nothing.}

I’m curious to hear what other districts that are just coming back (and have been back) are doing. This ended up being a long post, so I will attempt to tackle what is happening at my kids’ school separately and soon. The reality is I’m not really sure what their plan is yet, because, to my limited understanding, what they are doing and what the district said would be done are VERY different.

What in person return plans are happening in your part of the world?

I’m only a couple chapters into Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost ARt of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, but I think it may be a game changer for me and my family. It’s not about trying new strategies (different kinds of chore charts, incentives or consequences) in the same situations, it’s about changing the situations themselves. It’s not a new approach to an old problem, but recognizing it as a different problem entirely.

I knew it was going to change things significantly for me when I read this paragraph:

Rebecca tells me, “We have mothers tell us things like, ‘I need to do a chore very quickly, and if my toddler tries to help, he makes a mess. So I’d rather do it myself than having them helping.'” In many instances, parents with Western backgrounds tell their toddlers to go and play while they do chores. Or give their child a screen. If you think about it, we are telling the child not to pay attention, not to help. We are telling them, this chore is not for you. Without realizing it, we cut short a toddler’s eagerness to help, and we segregate the from useful activities.

pg 58, Hunt, Gather, Parent. HunMichaeleen Doucleff, Phd.

Have you ever read a thing and recognized its truth and wondered how you never recognized that truth before because it is so obvious?

I realize this is not rocket science, but it feels profound.

When our kids are young and learning, we tell them to go play, or watch TV while we clean up, and then later when they are older we are offended or resentful that they would just play or watch TV while we clean up. Even though that is EXACTLY WHAT WE TAUGHT THEM TO DO.

Why did I not realize I was doing that? Because I absolutely was doing that. Absolutely. I think I actually did that MORE than most parents because I am not very good at cleaning up. “Chores at home” is maybe my biggest weak spot – the thing in life I do least well. I have always felt lacking in that area, and it’s so hard for me to do it myself, I could never bring a kid into the equation. Not only would the chore not get done, but I’d be more frustrated that I couldn’t really do it.

But then, years later, I’m frustrated that my kids won’t get off their butts and help. I know it’s because they don’t know how, I know that I have never taught them (because how do you teach someone to do something you can’t do yourself!?) but I never recognized that in playing and watching TV while I walked around cleaning up or doing dishes, or making a meal, they were doing EXACTLY what I trained them to do – stay out of my way and entertain themselves while I get something I can’t do very well done.

At the beginning of the pandemic I realized that we had an opportunity to teach our kids more independence and responsibility. Early on I tried to give them more tasks. I would tell them how to do something a few times (like fold their laundry or load the dishwasher) but they were clearly overwhelmed and didn’t feel confident in their abilities. As my husband and I became more and more overwhelmed by our attempts to manage our kids’ distance learning while also working full time from home, my efforts fell by the wayside. They clearly couldn’t learn to do these things and I didn’t have the time to teach them. It felt more tedious and time consuming to manage them doing their chores than just doing them myself. The return on investment just didn’t make sense.

I made so many mistakes in those early attempts. Instead of asking them to help me I tried to hand over, in its entirety, a very complicated job, and then felt frustrated when they couldn’t master it quickly. I wanted very little effort on my part (a couple of quick explanations and quicker examples) to yield immediate and satisfactory results. I was expecting the impossible.

I knew I was doing something wrong, but I had no idea how to do it right.

What I should have done, and what I’m doing now, is asking them to help me when I’m doing something that needs to be done. I should have broken tasks into smaller steps and asked them to help consistently with just some of those steps, while I was there to guide them.

We have always picked up the house together, but now I have them check certain areas and tell them exactly where the things they find there should go. I have my daughter take all the things out of the kitchen and explain that I need the floor clear so I can use the stream cleaner. Then I have her put everything back. She is only learning a part of the task, but her help is valued (moving the stuff is my LEAST favorite part of cleaning floors), and she will have that step mastered later when she learns what comes next.

Whenever the dishwasher needs to be emptied I ask a kid to come and help me. My daughter loves to put away the silverware and my son can hand me dishes to put away in cabinets that he can’t reach. When we load the dishwasher I rinse the dishes and they put them in the racks.

When I fold the 50 small towels we keep in the kitchen in place of paper towels, the kids help me fold them into imperfect squares and stack them into messy piles. It takes them forever to fold each one, but we talk while we do it and they’ll get better as time goes by.

This week my daughter took the frozen waffles out of the freezer, put them in the toaster over, checked the settings and turned it for three mornings before she felt confident enough to reach in and turn them over. Tomorrow she is excited to do all of it herself. My son isn’t interested in making himself breakfast yet but he’s filling up his own water bottle. Small steps help them gain confidence, and show them they can take care of some of their own needs.

We’ve only been working at this a week, but I swear it’s made a huge difference. Every night the main living areas are picked up and I spend a full minute talking about how much more calm I feel when my surroundings are neat and clean. I thank them for being a part of our team, and making things feel manageable. My daughter is always very happy to help, and I can see it’s doing wonders for her self image to feel she’s a valued part of something bigger than herself. My son is less inclined to step in when he isn’t asked but he’s only had one big tantrum about helping and I let it go quickly and he almost immediately came in, apologized, and did what I had asked. It turns out he thought the task was much bigger and when he saw it only took us five minutes he was relieved. The next time I asked for help with that task he was happy to do it.

I’m barely 100 pages into this book and it’s already changed my life. I really do think we will keep doing including our kids in the basic maintenance of our lives and in a couple of years our kids will be different people because of it. I will be a different person too, a happier, less stressed parent who is grateful for how much her kids help around the house. I feel like I know HOW to do this now. I feel like I know WHY it will work.

Yesterday I was regretting that I didn’t find this book at the beginning of the pandemic (it hadn’t been published yet so I can’t be too mad at myself), but I think I needed this year to beef up my own skills and confidence around the house, so that learning about this could be effective. I think maybe I can do this with my kids now, because I’ve had a year at home to find a rhythm to things. Every day I know what needs to be done and I think of how I can ask the kids to help me do it. Before I don’t know if could have done that. Maybe, if we keep including them in tasks around the house, by next school year their participation will be second nature – for all of us.

Even if it takes longer than that it will be worth it. I’m confident that, for me and my family, this is a game changer.

You may have noticed in my last post that I mentioned my kids going back to school (two short days a week) at the end of April. My son will start the week of April 19th. My daughter will start the week of April 26th. Their school year ends on June 2nd.

Because of some Mondays off (for my son), they both will get 10 days in their classrooms. 10 abbreviated days. For the entire 20-21 school year.

If you had told me, last March 13th, that in the next 15 months my kids would be at school for 10 days, I don’t know what I would have done.

I know many children will never enter a classroom this year. I know so many students are struggling.

What my kids are getting is not much, but something, even a very small something, is better than nothing. So many kids are getting nothing. They are getting nothing at home and they won’t get to go back to school. How does anyone expect these kids to catch up?

My kids get 10 abbreviated days. I’ll take it.

We had a nice, low key spring break. Why was it nice? Because… vaccinated grandparents!

My in-laws, who have been fully vaccinated for a little while (a couple weeks more than the two weeks after the second shot), had communicated to us that their fear of the variants outweighed their desire to see their grandchildren. They thought they might meet us outside for a masked meal, but otherwise they didn’t plan to see us any more than they had before they were vaccinated (which was a weekly wave from our front door to them in their car). We were disappointed, but understood that everyone has different comfort levels during a pandemic. We assumed we wouldn’t be seeing them again anytime soon.

Then they called us late last week (I think after talking to their daughter) and let us know that they had changed their minds; they weren’t going to quarantine due of the variants because there would always be variants and so far it seemed the vaccines were effective enough against them. To say this was amazing news is a MAJOR understatement.

Our son spent the night with his grandparents last Saturday night. Our daughter did on Sunday. They were both SO ECSTATIC to hug their grandparents and go to their house. My daughter wanted to bring over a ton of stuffies so they could all come back home smelling like her grandparents’ house (which has a distinctively pleasant smell).

It was so nice for them to see their grandparents and so nice for each of them to have some time without their sibling. My daughter got some time with her friends (outside and masked) while her brother was spending the night, and my son and I ordered a pizza and watched Shazam! when his sister was away. It was a great break from our regular routines.

On Tuesday we went to the zoo, which my son had done with his friend and RAVED about. It has been a LONG time since I took my kids to the zoo and it was great to be back. We got icees and hot pretzels and saw all our favorite animals. We had a really good time and enjoyed the unseasonably warm weather.

That unseasonably warm weather (::cough:: heat wave ::cough::) lasted almost all week. My parents took both kids on Wednesday to spend the night and they took them to the beach where it was 80* and they could swim in the estuary which is a lot warmer than the frigid Pacific ocean. They tried to hit up a splash pad on Thursday but the water wasn’t on yet so they retreated to the house (my SF kids melt in 85* weather). I picked them up Thursday and we brought In-n-Out to my friends house where we visited with her and her kids (outside and masked).

Friday, after they got their teeth cleaned, my daughter went to my in-laws again while my son and I met his friend at the playground and Saturday my son went to my in-laws again while I hosted my daughter’s friends in our backyard. Having a place for one of them to go while the other is (safely) seeing friends has been something I’ve wished for over and over again for the past nine months.

Sunday we went to my parents’ house for Easter. The kids found a ton of eggs and got some books and a couple D&D figure sets to compliment the crazy amount of candy. My husband (who is not yet vaccinated) stayed outside, but I went inside and helped with the dishes and sat on their couch for a moment (just because I could).

It was a REALLY nice spring break, ONLY because both sets of grandparents are vaccinated and trust in the protection of the vaccinations (and live close enough to visit easily). We are very, very lucky and I have not felt this much hope for the future in a long time.

The support of grandparents is coming at an important time for us, when the kids’ schedules are being turned upside down as the district attempts to return in person and my own schedule changes as my school transitions to more in person learning. We’re not so stressed by the fact that our kids were given opposite in person schedules at the end of April (our son will go M/Tu and our daughter will go Th/F) because we know grandparents can help us with the very inconvenient drop off and pick up times. We’re not as stressed about the lack of coverage at the childcare we’re paying for because we know the grandparents can step in every once in a while to take the kids. All of the sudden we have a little bit of breathing room, and after how suffocating the last year has felt, that little bit goes a LONG way.

As the parent who was with the kids all week so her husband could have his first week of uninterrupted work (during a very busy stretch), and as the parent who still manages most of the kids’ “away from home” activities I am so, SO thankful the presence of other adults in my kids’ lives again. So, so thankful.

I just started Hunt, Gather, Parent and the first two chapters are about how Western family structures and parenting paradigms are such outliers in the world and especially in human history. How the “traditional” nuclear family has barely existed in European society, and doesn’t really exist anywhere else and how the way we parent is not based on generations of wisdom being passed down from those that had already raised children to those that were just having them, but instead is a series of inventions that have not withstood the test of time or even rigorous scientific study. Parents are not supposed to be the only important, stable adults in children’s lives and the pressure of providing the love, care, and support that should be given by extended families and close knit communities, is crushing for parents. I REALLY appreciate reading these thing because they validate the feeling of “why the fuck is this so hard!” that I’ve been fighting against since my children were born, and that has metastasized into an undeniable fact in the past year.

The feeling of relief I’ve felt in the past week, as the grandparents have reentered our lives, only highlights how unnatural it is for families to be isolated like they are in the United States. The pandemic exacerbated that isolation, but it existed before. I wonder if there are ways to combat these ineffective societal structures as we return to our normal lives…

I’ve been thinking a lot about leaving San Francisco. I don’t really think it will happen, because inertia is a motherf*cker especially when only one half of a whole is fighting against it, but I think about it a lot. And I’m coming to realize that it’s not just about leaving a school district I have absolutely no faith in, it’s also about how tenuous my sense of community feels here.

When everything locked down, people had to choose who they were going to see because more contacts, even outside, socially distanced, with masks on, meant more possible exposure. We were incredibly lucky that our kids’ friends’ families were comfortable with outside socialization and were taking the same precautions as we were otherwise. My daughter has seen three friends regularly (always outside, socially distanced, with masks on) since last summer and my son has seen one friend (who is really his only friend at this point). Those relationships sustained us during the past nine months. I really can’t overstate how important they were to our overall well being.

{And I know many people have not been able to see anyone for the last year and the prospect of that is terrifying to me. I know those people have had a much harder time of all this than I have.}

Now, as things open up, I’m reminded that those people have broader communities they want to be a part of. Now that grandparents are vaccinated, and friends are more comfortable meeting outside, our tight knit community is loosening. Sometimes it feels like it’s unraveling.

Knowing that my daughter’s friends will likely attend a different middle school feels like someone is holding a piece of fabric of my community and waiting to pull it all apart. It’s scary.

We were seeing my son’s friend 3-4 times a week until his grandparents were fully vaccinated. Now we’ve been told they can see us once a week, otherwise things get too hectic. They have other families and friends to visit and fill their time. My son has nobody else so I’m left scrambling for ways to fill the time when his sister is out playing soccer or just spending time with her friends.

I’m not very good at creating and maintaining community. My husband is abysmal at it. I have been so, so lucky to find real friends in my daughter’s friends’ moms. Truly I am consciously grateful for it every day. I spent the early years of motherhood basically alone, with no community at all, and it was awful. Not a day goes by that I’m not thankful for what I have.

But what I have is changing. And it will continue to change. I think part of me wants to move away to get in front of that change – to have some control over it. Maybe if I move away and we create a new community, these friends will still exist on the periphery, and we’ll still see them sometimes. All my friends seem to have these eccentric circles of community, and it’s the outer rings that they have and I lack. Maybe if I move I can preserve my current community in some way, in an outer circle, before my inner circle unravels on it’s own.

It’s good to recognize why I’ve been so stressed out about seemingly minor problems. This is not just about my daughter being alone at her new middle school, it’s about my own fears that my community is coming apart. I know that change is coming for my community even if all my daughter’s friends go to the same middle school – kids commonly change social circles during adolescence – but it was easier to feign ignorance when the possible changes resided in nebulous future probabilities. Now it’s staring me down, and it’s hard to look directly at it, to acknowledge and accept it.

I wonder if I’m handling this new uncertainty surrounding my community worse than I would have otherwise because everything else in my life feels so uncertain. I don’t even know what my job will look like in two weeks (they still haven’t shared the Phase 4 schedule with elective teachers), let alone in the fall. I don’t know if my kids will be back in school this spring, let alone in September. It’s a lot of not knowing and it’s hard.

The last two weeks have been crazy. I drove to work all five days last week and on Monday and Tuesday of this week and I have to admit, I REALLY don’t miss my commute.

Being on campus with students was weird. It was good, but it was also intense. I think it was stranger than it might have been because we brought back our Advisory classes for 2 hours of social emotional learning (SEL) so it ended up being a lot of sitting in a circle tying to get middle schoolers who have been interacting with school through a screen for a year to engage in a meaningful discussion with masks on. It felt like I was the only light in a room full of black holes that just sucked all my energy from me. It was exhausting.

But I’ll only have to do it for one more week (after next week’s spring break) because the board has decided that we are neglecting our students by even attempting Phase 3 and they want us to move straight into Phase 4. So in mid-April the students start coming onto campus for their academic classes. Because our classes have 32 students and we can only fit 16 into a room, we will be splitting classes in half and students will only actually be on campus two mornings a week. There seems to be expectations in the parent community that when our county public health officer changes his guidance in alignment with the CDC’s, we can bring all our students back at once, but there is no way our classrooms can fit 32 with even three feet between desks, so a lot of parents are about to get really upset. (It might work in the elementary schools though… we shall see).

Having said that, over a 130 students at our school of 600+ students are opting to stay home for the rest of the school year. That is compared to just 20 at the other, similarly sized middle school in our district. It’s so interesting how even in the same small town attitudes can be so different.

Once we move into Phase 4 I return to distance learning because I’m an elective teacher so they won’t mix cohorts for my class. I’m expecting that will be the case in the fall too and when I float that belief people either think I’m probably right or can’t imagine we won’t be back like the Before Times by then. At this point I’m mostly just curious to see how it ends up.

Meanwhile my kids’ district is still floating possible dates for returning while their actual school site is being very non-committal (I imagine this is district messaging so they can look good even though really it’s not going to happen). If my son sees the inside of a classroom for four weeks (possibly 2-4 times a week depending on how many kids in his class want to come back) I’ll be happily surprised. If my daughter goes back at all I’ll be astonished. I’m thinking of either possibility as an early academic summer camp my kids may get to be a part of.

We got their school assignments and they both got what we wanted. I wasn’t all that happy about it though because SFUSD has still not committed to any possible plans for the fall and I have no faith that my daughter, who will be starting middle school, will be back in the classroom in any kind of meaningful way in September. That was a big topic at yesterday’s board meeting – the fact that SFUSD has no plans to bring middle or high schoolers back this spring and how that means they will miss out on $15M worth of state funding that requires they bring just one secondary grade back by mid-May.

(Also my daughter’s friends, who all applied to the same SFUSD middle school, all got into the same parochial school that has been open all this year, so I’m pretty sure she will be alone at the public school, which makes me way less excited for her to go there. I honestly didn’t think there was any possibility all three of her friends would get into a school that has only one class per grade, with a rising 5th grade taking most of those spots. I guess the joke is on me! None of us got into the charters we applied to, and there are wait lists of over 200 per grade at all of them for next year.)

Also discussed at length at the board meeting was the fact a board member who authored tweets in 2016 accusing Asian Americans of “taking advantage of white supremacist thinking to assimilate and get ahead” and referring to them as “house n*****s” (she used asterisks) refuses to step down (despite a vast majority of SF politicians requesting she do so), and instead issued a statement basically apologizing that her words made Asian Americans feel bad (but not admitting they were racist or even biased). I’m so tired of our school board making national news for being awful.

Yes, I have tried to start the “but shouldn’t we just leave SF already” convo with my husband but he keeps kicking it down the road (claiming he’s too tired… but when is he not going to be too tired? We’ve been too tired for a year now!). So yeah, I don’t think that discussion will go anywhere even if we do have it. I’m starting to research possible Bay Area (and beyond) destinations so I have some places for him to consider, but it’s hard because I know exactly why he won’t want to move to any of them. Still, I’m going to keep trying.

The final thing making our days harder is the fact that our son’s friend, who we’ve been enjoying a reciprocal “park playdates” relationship with is now totally AWOL because his grandparents are fully vaccinated and want to see him all the time. My inlaws are also fully vaccinated but remain too afraid of the variants to see us. My own parents are also fully vaccinated but my mom had shoulder surgery so they can’t have our kids yet. Without being able to take his friend (and have his friend’s mom take him) to the playground, we are really struggling to get him outside and with peers.

Also the child care situation at my district no longer works for us because the kids are back in there but he’s not and the schedules conflict so now we don’t really have any childcare on the two afternoons a week we were clinging to. Meanwhile his behavior continues to veer into total meltdown pretty much all day when he’s home. It’s really hard.

I’m really glad next week is spring break. We aren’t going anywhere (like it seems so many people are!) but just not worrying about all this (as much) for five days will be nice. Plus getting ready for Phase 4 (the schedule for which is still not confirmed for elective teachers) will hopefully ease my work anxiety a bit.

I have been tentatively looking toward the summer, but I won’t be writing much about any plans here because I’m not interested in being excoriated for my choices in my own space. I have been following public health guidelines all year – and have been more locked down than the vast majority of the country – and I’m done putting my possible choices out there for others to judge, especially when I know my own husband can help me determine what is safe or not for our family.

I think the biggest thing weighing on me is the idea that returning to our post-pandemic life won’t actually make me happier. There is a lot about it I don’t miss, and I worry those parts will be back before the parts I need to stay sane return. My husband can’t fathom that I feel that way, which surprises me until I remember that his post-pandemic life was very protected from the chaos of our kids’ commitments. It’s understandable that he expects everything to be better once they are at school and he is at work.

It feels like 2021 has been really hard. I wonder if it’s just that I thought it would get easier but instead it stayed the same, and my perception is that it’s worse. You’d think by now I’d have lowered my expectations.

Guess who had her period this weekend? This girl! And it’s been a while so I’m guessing that it was a doozy (as far as hormone fluctuations). JJ wins the the prize for spotting that way before I did. You know me too well friend…

Things in my head are definitely better. Mostly I’m just not thinking past the next two weeks, which will be totally nuts at school. This week we have our orientations for returning students; I will be helping the six graders return to campus on Monday and Tuesday and seeing my own (Advisory) students on Thursday and Friday. It’s a bit much to wrap my head around, so I’m trying to take it one day at a time.

It’s also creating a child care crunch that will be hard on my husband. I tried to take on more last week in anticipation of being gone a lot this week (which is also part of why I was spiraling last week – I was on with my kids way more than usual). I hope he doesn’t have as hard a time of it as I did.

I may get to go for a run down on the peninsula on Wednesday. That is my biggest bright spot over the next five days. Here’s hoping Thursday’s gloomy forecast doesn’t rain on my parade.

Last Thursday I went to my first martial arts class in the dojo in over a year ago. Only three of us were in a giant room with windows open and fans blowing (and all three of us had received our first vaccination shots). It felt SO GOOD to kick and punch all the way down the floor. I actually teared up multiple times during the 90 minutes I was there. I honestly did not realize how much I missed it until I could do it again. I also picked up my FAVORITE meal afterward. Thursday evening was really, really nice.

The weekend was pretty decent as well. My kids are suddenly interested in D&D so we got a starter kit (along with some books from the library) and played our first campaign on Sunday, after spending time Saturday creating our characters. My husband led the campaign (he has played before) and our kids were really into it and two hours passed by very quickly. We’re excited to play again next weekend (or maybe this week, but I’ve tempered our kids’ expectations on that because I assume I’ll be a zombie by the time I get home from school this week, and that my husband will be playing catch up whenever I’m at home).

We had parent-teacher-conferences this past week and our son’s teacher thinks his class will be back in some capacity in May. So he may get 2-3 weeks in a classroom this year. The agreement with the union is still not official (and the schedule they are asking teachers to adhere to is NUTS – I would never agree to it) so I’m not getting my hopes up. It would be AMAZING if he returned in some capacity before the school year ends. I’m hoping for it like one hopes for an early summer camp offering – tentatively as a possible fun opportunity that we can live without. My daughter’s teacher doesn’t expect them to return this year, which I expected since she’s in 5th grade.

Spring break is in two weeks and I’m (as always) ready for it. Here’s to looking ahead only to the end of March.

I am definitely spiraling right now. Maybe if I turn into the spiral I can regain control?

In the meantime, here is a pile of pretty rocks.

Thanks for helping me through this everyone.