As life in Sacramento returns to normal, what good things did we learn in the pandemic?

It’s 8 a.m. and I am parked at an unfamiliar high school in the San Juan Unified School District. Two of my kids are walking away, backpacks slung over shoulders. Part of my heart is going with them.

Will they find their way? Will people be kind?

This is their first day of school – eight months into the academic year. My son is a freshman. My daughter is a sophomore transfer student.

I have been anticipating this day the way you look forward to a once-in-a-lifetime vacation, or world peace.

I should be ecstatic. So why do I feel so sad?

“I thought you wanted them to go back,” my mother said when I called to share my sorrow.

“I thought I did, too,” I said.

No ‘Going Back’

I’ve come to dislike the notion that we are “going back” to our lives as the pandemic subsides. Sure, we might eat meals with people outside our pods. We might reunite with empty desks in office buildings.

But there is no undoing this past year.

In my more philosophical moments, I think, “This is what it’s like to live through a thunderclap,” a truly historic time that wrenches us forward. In other moments, I just feel weak.

As my kids walked into a separate existence for the first time in a year, I took stock of the fact that the atmosphere has changed and so have we.

A year ago, I would not have believed more than half a million Americans would die of a disease I had barely heard of. I didn’t think my aunt would pass away alone in a nursing home, separated from her daughters and husband. I didn’t think a man would die with a police officer kneeling on his neck, that wildfires would blot out the sun, that the U.S. Capitol would be violently invaded by fellow Americans who considered it their “patriotic duty.”

All of this has happened. All of it unwanted.

So I find ways to compartmentalize. I have turned inward this year. I focus on what’s in front of me – my work, my husband, an mostly, my children.

I want them to go to school in person – this is what I’ve been dreaming of! And yet, I already miss them.

Zoom School Problems

This time last year, we’d gone from “Wahoo, vacation!” to “Does time have meaning anymore?”

It was a month into lockdown. I turned to my husband after the kids were asleep one night. Tears flowed.

“I can’t do this,” I said, knowing I had no option. I didn’t see how I was going to fill the stretch of endless days ahead.

As COVID-19 worsened, we fell into a rhythm with our three kids, ages 12, 14 and 16. My daughter’s education unfolded at the kitchen table. Wiping the counter after breakfast, I’d overhear her teachers ask questions lobbed like hopeful baseballs onto an empty field.

“And so who can tell me one of the causes of World War I?”

Crickets.

We set up a desk for our ninth-grade son, despite his hope that “bed” was perfectly fine for a Zoom existence where classmates, and even some teachers, rarely turned on cameras.

One of the more heartbreaking sights was my boy’s slumped frame, peering for hours on end into a laptop with a bored look on his face. What became of my curious, animated son? I worried for his posture and his social connections.

But strangest of all has been knowing how lucky I am. Even in my low days, when I lock myself in the bathroom to be alone and regroup, I emerge to things so many people can’t take for granted, like reliable internet, functioning computers, a home and economic security. My husband and I have been privileged to keep our livelihoods and our health as we’ve tried to guided our kids through a year marked by tedious sameness and momentous change.

A Year of Dinners

Dinnertime has taken on new meaning in the pandemic. There’s more to talk about, which is odd, because less is actually happening in our lives.

In before times, we’d be away from each other for entire days (a lifetime!) and all kinds of unknown things might happen.

Now we pretty much know everything about each others’ lives. I know where my children are at all times, as when they were very little. That’s led to plenty of claustrophobic moments, but it’s built many sweet ones, too. I’ve become newly acquainted with who these beings are – how they think, react and learn. I have come to treasure the proximity.

I have learned that my younger son gets easily overwhelmed but is good at providing structure for himself; that my daughter tends to pop in frustration when things don’t come easily. I see that my older son thrives on sharing ideas, and that being among friends holds him accountable.

Many days, the best I could do was make sure the kids stepped outside for a moment and tilted their faces towards the sun. On our better days, we biked to the farmland south of the city and learned to kayak on the American River.

In Person or Remote?

When we were given the option of staying remote or returning in person for school, the kids were clear: They wanted to return. Vaccinations are happening, COVID-19 infection rates are down. It feels safer.

Yet I can’t shake the feeling that I am losing something in this proposition — and how ironic that is, considering where I started a year ago.

So I get perhaps overly anxious at things like my children going to high school for the first time. And I absorb the fact that as the world has become more uncertain, I have sought, and found, great comfort in my own world. I’ve tucked my family under my wing. It’s perhaps brought more to me than it has to them.

This is what I realized as they walked into school.

At the end of that first day, my high schoolers piled into the back seat of the car brimming with stories. How they recognized classmates by the sounds of their voices (since so few have cameras on during Zoom). My son reported with delight that a chinchilla and a rabbit were allowed to scurry around during his science class.

Hearing their excitement filled me with strength.

I know it’s time to turn outwards again. Yet I find myself afraid of what’s next, overwhelmed by the anger, strife and hurt in the outside world.

As I move forward, my challenge will be bringing the good things we built this year in our family of five – the empathy, respect, compassion, love – into the world as I rejoin the universe.