I feel like I've been rolling with the punches of this virus. Work not safe - pack up and head home. School for one closed - welcome to my dining room office. School for the second closed - no problem, I'll just take some time in the middle of each day and try to make sure you're OK. At first, Ed would eat breakfast and lunch with the kids, and I would try and be available more throughout the day if anyone needed anything.
Those first couple of weeks, we were all in limbo. Nobody knew how long the stay home order would last. And really? Really were our schools going to be closed for the rest of the year? It was almost unfathomable, so I just let myself believe that things would somehow get under control and we'd reopen.
But, staring at the last week of school in front of me, it's obvious that was misplaced hope.
Connor burned through an entire course learning material in the hopes of getting placed in a higher level course next fall. I was so relieved. He was busy, he seemed relatively happy, and he was progressing amidst all the chaos.
But then all those plates that I was barely managing, just started to wobble.
Everything at work takes longer than it should. Everyone needs something urgent so my brain is switching gears constantly. And I'm still trying to make this not totally stink for the kids. Milkshakes one day - a friend over for frappuccino another day. I was desperate for an activity so even signed them up for an online debate tournament - which Connor commented passed the time and he seemed to be enjoying. Helen was less into it, but she and Connor would strategize a bit together so it at least provided something to talk about.
Diligently, I would ask each child about each class. And they would report things were fine, assignments were being turned in, nothing to worry about.
So, as I felt like so many other plates I was trying to keep spinning were crashing to the floor - at least this one thing was OK. Not what anyone wanted, but OK.
Only it wasn't. And today that became perfectly obvious as I looked in ParentVue and noticed that one of my children hadn't completed a single assignment in a class. Instead, the child had "attended" each class, by which I mean, the child signed into the online classroom, turned the camera off, and promptly played phone games or perused random news. You see, I knew it was totally a mistake to let the child have a private bedroom setup for work, but I let it happen. And now I'm just kicking myself because it facilitated this mess.
When all this was discovered, amidst a different school crisis that had the child sobbing which I was trying to figure out how to solve, I just totally lost it. I actually went into my bedroom and screamed an obscenity so loud it woke a sleeping child on the floor above.
Ed came home from his run, I briefed him on why I was so furious and disappointed. He yelled, we talked about how the ship could be righted. We informed the child that summer would involve making up these assignments, trying to stress that the learning still needs to happen and that it would've been better just to do as was expected the first time.
I'm totally crushed that even this last plate has come crashing to the ground. There is no relief in sight. There are too many stessful things. Every day we miss something else that someone in the house was looking forward to. And there's just no way out.
Elaine
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