When You Can't Make it Right

No Matter How Good You Are at Making Things

So it’s been a while. I have hesitated to write this particular letter because it is, in part, about sending my children to school in a pandemic, and I know that some of the people I like and respect and care about are going to think me a monster for making that choice, even though the school is masking and social distancing and had a total of four cases out of more than 450 students in the fall, none reported among faculty, and none of them connected in a way that indicated spread. But that’s the choice we made, and since we’re not seeing anyone socially, and haven’t in a year, nor have we seen family or celebrated a holiday with anyone outside our household, we were standing by it.

Then two unpredictable things happened.

The first is that our six-year-old, who is brilliant and social and empathetic and also loves, with all his being, a good, solid conflict, began to thrive. Before this experience, he resisted learning to read, flouncing off in frustration if I tried to teach him. And his pre-k experience at the same school last year was horrible—his teacher was a mean-spirited nightmare, he was bullied for months by four other pre-k kids (in preschool! what the actual fuck?!) and told no one, and all the adults in the room, save one, watched it happen and failed to advocate for him. We thought, well, shit, getting this one through school is going to be a long haul. But as it turns out, all he needed was a teacher who was kind to him and believed in him. He is reading now. He loves math. He has loads of friends and they call out his name, their beautiful six-year-old voices muffled by multi-layer fabric masks clipped to school-issued royal blue lanyards, as we walk away from the side door where we parents gather, six feet apart, in a giant semicircle waiting for our tiny lights.

The second is that our four-year-old, who was known as “the gentlest friend” at his nursery school last year, cannot function. He has scratched his teacher, drawing blood. He has bolted to other classrooms, seemingly looking for his (shockingly well-adjusted) brother, though he told me calmly that he was following his class instructions, where the children were on an imaginary safari. (“I thought the leopards were in Mrs. Blake’s room. I was looking for the leopards.”) He has turned off the teacher’s computer while virtual students were streaming the class. He has thrown crayons on the floor, climbed on desks, screamed and screamed and screamed, and generally earned the assessment that something might be wrong.

Yes, something is wrong. The thing that is wrong is that you’re parking four-year-olds in front of iPad screens all day. The thing that is wrong is that making a four-year-old boy sit behind a desk all morning like he’s working at a call center is not workable.

Even better, he has brought some of these behaviors home, though in short bursts, and added to them a habit of soiling himself after he falls asleep, exclusively on nights after he goes to school.

When I last wrote to you it was semester break and, like a sky clearing, my gentle, light-filled boy had come back to me. The anxiety and bouts of rage had trickled away. The vagueness, the self-soothing via rigid recitation of beloved stories, the unreachability: gone. So we worked hard at preparation, and we sent him back to school. And a week later, my gentle boy has again gone underground, under skin, under cover. The only answer is to take him out of school. For a four-year-old, virtual school is worse than a joke—it’s a taunt, nearly a harassment, look what you cannot have, so shifting into that mode is no help. It’s also a pain in the ass, complete with a screen that zaps the light from his lovely eyes.

Probably, you don’t need to hear another parent bemoaning the mess of pandemic school, which is a disaster in all its forms, built seemingly to keep people employed and justify expenditures and budgets while lining the pockets of tech companies whose apps are designed not to teach but to scrape children’s data and sell it, and built not even a little bit to serve the children it’s supposed to be serving. Probably you have encountered more of these conversations than you can bear, and probably you have tuned out unless you’re one of us, suffering with us while you watch your children drift hopelessly away from anything that resembles healthy early childhood development.

I’ve said in a lot of conversations, “my kids will be fine, I’m worried about the children in my community,” and it’s mostly true that they’ll be fine, as long as we don’t believe the mountain of available research about the importance of early childhood education, an education I can’t provide because my employer denied my request for a Congressionally-approved leave of absence because, technically, yes, it’s possible to do my 40+ hour/week job in the middle of the night when no one needs childcare. It’s not possible to survive such an expectation, but there is a clock and the clock has 24 hours in it and sleep is not a human right, it turns out, after all. The real answer, of course, is that employers in every industry are supportive of working parents only when it costs them nothing and benefits them in advertising, and they are actively hostile to us when it costs them so much as a single dime. The working committee on work-life balance at the university is unaffected, therefore unconcerned. If those of us who are attempting to raise the kind of humans who might have the chance to make the world a better place die of exhaustion-related illness or shorten our lifespans by years, so be it, as long as nobody has to pay a few grand for a faculty overload to make that possible, and as long as we die quickly and don’t incur outsized insurance expenses via hospitalization. But really, if you care about this, you already care; if you don’t, you’re not going to because I’m pissed off and telling you about it.

So I will tell you this instead: This morning when I drew our house on the little chalk easel in my kids’ room, the four-year-old insisted I write Black Lives Matter on the picture, as I did all summer and fall in chalk on the front steps. When I asked him what he wanted to draw, he said, “A squeal.”

“A squeal? Like the sound?”

“Yes. The sound a mouse makes.”

“Would you like to draw the mouse?”

“No. Just the sound.”

(Yes, he really does talk like this. He’s been able to read full paragraphs/pages/books for months. We don’t know how that happened, it just did.)

Then he drew the yellow column on the left side of the board. A squeal, if I ever saw one:

Or maybe a primal scream, to send his voice out of this untenable place where he cannot grow appropriately and he cannot stop his brain from telling him that everything is wrong and he cannot properly express those feelings which, no matter how many words he knows, do not conform to language.

Later, he pushed the easel on top of me, bruising my back, without warning. When I asked why, he said that he wanted me to go sit on his bed with him. Why did this astoundingly language-oriented child use aggression to communicate that, something he’s never done with me before? He has no idea. Neither do I. Afterward, he ate his lunch calmly, got tucked in for a nap, and was an unceasing delight for the remainder of the afternoon.

We will not know for years what our government’s neglect of an entire generation of children for a full year will cost us, as individual families, yes, but as an entire culture, a world. It’s important, I’m told, to direct my rage at the correct people, so yes, I hope the former presidential administration suffers greatly via the courts or the cosmos for the rest of their days. But I also hope those who are eating indoors at restaurants, that the woman across the street who had weekly brunches of 20+ guests all summer and fall, that people who had multi-household, multi-generational holiday parties while schools remained hampered in their ability to deliver the education that we all agree, when it costs us nothing, is vital to the future of our society, I hope those people feel the burning lasers shooting out of my eyes. I hope that the mass unemployment and low tax revenues that follow a full quarter of our school populations just plain disappearing during these bullshit virtual schooling periods impact them the most. But of course I know they won’t. The mostly Black and brown and poor children who have disappeared from those virtual classrooms will bear the brunt of that pain, just as they bear the brunt of every other bullshit decision our incompetent leaders make.

I have torn my hands and muscles to pieces trying to build a peaceful, sheltering space for my children to grow up in, but even in quarantine, you cannot keep the world out. It comes in and comes in and comes in, and you can’t do much more than let it, and see what happens after that. I am tempted to say that what happens after that has to be better than this, but we should know by now that’s not true, that hope’s feathers are as often as not weighed down with anguish and debris and the slowly drying mud from the flood’s depths as the water recedes.