Another morning and another day of willful consideration of the current events. As much as we try and ignore it, the uncertainty of the Covid hangs over things like the Louisiana humidity. You think “oh today it doesn’t feel that bad out!” only to soak through your t-shirt on the way from the back door to the car. It’s just hanging out. Maybe you’ll get sick, maybe it will be bad, or maybe absolutely nothing will happen, but you’d better act like the worst will happen lest you be unprepared and look like an ass. Fun times indeed. 

But what about our kids?  If you are whacked out and uncertain, how do you think they are handling this?  I’d like to think mostly better than adults, as kids prove daily that they have a resilience adults can barely remember. If you’re bored and don’t know what to do, rest assured that your kids are feeling both your stress as well as their own and as much as you’d like to, acting like things are normal and or ignoring it, probably isn’t doing them any favors. 

I bring it up because every single day the game is changing. 

“Schools on!” 

“Psyche!”

“Virtual only!”

“Nope!”

“It’s a hybrid, if you can do the splits you come on M-T and every third Friday we meet at the Walmart parking lot!”

And on and on it goes. 

We tell them to roll with the punches that “this is just how it’s going to be right now.”  We apologize and wonder if we are going to put on pants today. And the kids keep on. Seemingly unfazed. 

Remember when you were 16? When every weekend was like your oyster?  Carefree and reckless, likely doing something dumb?  Kids need some of that right now and I’m not sure how we give it to them. Reckless and COVID-19 go together like shit and sandwich. 

I’m wracking my brains daily among the ins and outs of supposed “new normal” business on how to deliver something meaningful for my kids to look back on with joy and the same love I have for the 80’s. For a long time I’ve railed against making everything awesome for my kids. We’ve always parented with a slight toughness on the reality of life while not being mean. “This is how it is. You can control how you react and how you look things.”  Great in theory but now it’s beginning to sound downright cruel. 

There is no tidy ending paragraph to this post other than to remind the adults to consider how their fragile teenage minds would have dealt with this. A reminder that every year as a teenager or kid marks incredible growth and change and that this shit show may have an exponential impact on their lives.  A reminder that “normal” was never a word you’d have used to describe your world back then and so to press it on our kids while things are as far from that ideal as we may have lived does them a disservice. 

Just a reminder. 

Luckily for us. Our kids are smart and get it. They may even teach us a better way to move through this. 

#hugsandhi5s