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Let’s Stop Romanticizing Post-Pandemic Life
Even on the other side, we will not have transcended the mess of who we are
For months, I’ve been playing school with Stella, my four-year-old daughter. Usually, this involves difficult homework that must be checked, a class pet that must be fed, and the teacher eventually adopting the student because her parents have disappeared. (The teacher was looking for a kid to live with her anyway, so it all works out.)
As such, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that on Monday, the first morning that we took Stella back to her little home-based preschool in real life, she was psyched. As we drove, however, I noticed Stella becoming quieter and quieter. We rode along in silence, both of us starting to feel the strangeness of this transition sink into our bodies.
When we got there, she clung to me like a baby monkey. All of the giddy energy was obscured by a palpable sense of terror. Going back to school had seemed like such a good idea. And now, faced with the sight of her old teachers and her old friends — one who had new glasses, the other who had grown at least a few inches — she wanted to crawl back inside the strange cocoon of our family that we’ve been ungracefully weaving these five months of sheltering in. It’s claustrophobic in there. It’s filled with the groans of her sister, who is so sick of her breaking her Legos, and the frustration of her father — why must she always go up the carpeted stairs with her filthy feet? It’s lonely sometimes. It’s boring sometimes. But it’s hers. It’s ours.
Her teacher took her temperature at the gate, just as we’d discussed she would, and then led Stella by the hand, back into the fold of her little preschool.
As I was driving home, I kept searching for my own elation, but it wasn’t there. I finally had a break, for a few hours, from that frenetic, four-year-old energy. It was a moment I’d dreamed about often while taking a rage walk around the block. I needed time away from my child. She needed…
