Parenthood: Week 464 - The Pain and Joy Of A Bigger Heart

There's a dark side to your heart growing three sizes. 

When I first saw Ollie, I immediately felt complete and unconditional love for him. It really did feel like my heart got bigger in an instant. This happened again with Ethan and with Lucas. Each time it was an overwhelming feeling. My breath left me, time slowed down, and everything felt right in those moments.  

I felt so deeply about my children over time and I felt more for other people's children. The suffering of children affected me deeper. I had to work to ignore the cries of pain from children. And I felt burdened at times by empathy.  

In 2015, The photo of Alan Kurdi, a two-year-old lying face down on the beach, who died from drowning and became the symbol of the refugee crisis caused by the Syrian war and the European refugee crisis it triggered, emotionally wrecked me. 

Alan was two-years-old when he died, the same age as Ollie, my first son at that time. This photo reminded me of the worst nightmares in my entire life I had a couple of months before I saw this photo. I remember holding Ollie and feeling his weight, knowing what it was like for Alan's parents to hold him in the past, and not being able to imagine what it would mean to lose him.  

As hard and painful as moments like seeing that photo of Alan Kurdi are, they make me feel a more profound connection to humanity. When I read about the horrible anti-trans laws in Texas, I get on an intellectual level why they are absurd and harmful. What is more powerful is how I feel the importance of protecting trans-children. Being anti-trans is locking people into boxes around gender stereotypes. I see how much joy Ethan gets in wearing jewelry and how much pleasure Ollie gets in going to dance class. They help me know on an emotional level how essential it is to provide everything possible to help all children feel loved and supported.    

There is also joy. After having children, I get overjoyed seeing happy babies. I love seeing children be proud of themselves. And I smile when I hear the sound of children's laughter. All of these things remind me of my children and give me hope. If the wonder of the beauty of my children is filling the lives and hearts of others, there is hope for us all.  

When you open up your heart to your little one, you open your heart to the world. The full range of emotions comes more immediately and profoundly when you move through the world with a larger heart. This means that you have to pause to feel, and take time to process. All of this helps you grow as a person through connections that you make with others through empathy and love.

Year 12: Week 23: How Do I Teach After A Pandemic?

I’m not sure I know how to be a teacher without a pandemic. 

In the past two years, I’ve figured out how to be an educator during a pandemic. I’m flexible. I’m used to things changing without much warning, feeling unprepared, and teaching with the perpetual stress of anxiety of the COVID-19 virus. Getting exposed to the virus by a student, which had happened about a dozen times since September is a very different situation than when I was exposed in the fall of 2020. The likelihood of me getting COVID-19 from a student is low, and the chances that it will land me in the hospital if I do since I have had three shots is very low. However, there is still a simmering level of anxiety every time I get an email that tells me that I taught a student who tested positive COVID-10.  

Uncertainty has become a norm for me. Making plans for performances that can be canceled with short notice has become a norm. Dealing with everyday crises in a school on top of the ongoing crisis that is this pandemic is my norm.  

In the past couple of months, it has been clear there will be no victory moment. There will be no grand announcement, celebration, or parade to mark the end of the pandemic. Instead, COVID-19 is going to morph into an endemic. Even the lifting of mandates like masking, which many of us teachers imagined would be some wonderful moment in Illinois, is a transition fraught with lack of clarity, anxiety, and uncertainty. COVID-19 crept into our lives and was then hit with a sudden and violent blow when the schools shut down in the spring of 2020. And COVID-19 is not leaving us in the clear away as it came. Instead, it will become a less central concern in our lives. I’ll do the same thing as a teacher. I’m not going to put away my masks and put my “How to Teach During A Pandemic”- guide in a drawer and go back to being a pre-pandemic teacher. Instead, I will have to shift my concerns and priorities, which will take some doing.  

To be clear, there is no “How to Teach During A Pandemic”- guide. That was a joke. If such a guide existed, schools in America would look very different for the past two years.  

In a way, being a teacher during a pandemic has prepared me for teaching after this pandemic has passed. The pandemic forced me to better balance my home and work life, which will continue to happen. My ability to handle pandemic-level crises will help me handle the other crises of school more calmly and with more perspective. Most importantly, this pandemic has helped me better understand my role as a teacher with more perspective. 

I am worried because I don’t know what this experience of being a teacher during this pandemic will do to me in the long term. Like people raised during the depression who carry on necessary depression-era habits long decades later, I wonder what I will carry with me as a teacher. I am worried that there will be things that I used to do that I know are good and right but will be a struggle to do. And I am worried how the challenges and traumas from the past two years will revisit me in the classroom, as many of them sit with me unprocessed.  

One of the saddest things about this pandemic is that it has gone on so long that it feels normal. Even good changes feel scary because they disrupt what feels normal and predictable. We may be getting to the point that we can be done with this pandemic, but I feel like it will be a while before this pandemic is done with me.

Parenthood: Week 463 - My Third Rodeo

Lucas was stomping around the house. He had twisted his face into a full-on pout. I asked Lucas what he wanted, and he walked over to a shelf and pointed up. I reached up and pointed to a book and asked if this was what he wanted. He sharply said "no" and shook his head, which caused his adorable curls and bangs to swing around his head.

"Ah, I see, you want the iPad."

Immediately, Lucas' face relaxed and became a smile. And he reached up in anticipation.

"No.No iPad."

His face tightened back up, and he let out a scream. I picked him up, and he looked at me crying, and all I could do was smile. "Dude, this isn't my first rodeo."

Compared to the meltdowns and tantrums of my second son, Ethan, Lucas' tantrums are just downright adorable. Sometimes when he wants to go up the stairs, and I need him to stay with me, I pick him up, and his little legs frantically kick in the air. If Lucas weren't my third, I would probably be a little more swayed by his screams. Too bad for him, well, actually fortunately for him, I've been there.

When he was three years old, I walked away from Ollie while he screamed. I was trying to get him to a birthday party, and he was refusing to walk. Knowing that this was a wide sidewalk with very little traffic and people around, I turned away and walked away. He screamed in full tantrum mode in the middle of the sidewalk. Finally, after I moved away for about twenty yards, he got up, realizing I wasn't going to give in, and he stopped crying and ran over to me.

A memory of Ethan losing it. Um…

Dear reader, for those of you who have been reading my blog, you probably have a sense of what I'm about to tell you. Ethan is a "spirited" child. For those of you who aren't a 21st-century parent, "Spirited" is a euphemism for a stubborn child who often doesn't like to sleep, talks back before they learned to talk, refuses to act logically, and engages in power battles consistently. However, like my special-little-guy-Ethan, most children are brilliant, loving, and creative.

The other day, I took Ethan to the grocery store and said he could pick out a piece of candy. He did, and I bought it for him, and then he asked for a second piece of candy. I said "no," and he started screaming. Finally, we got to the car. As I started driving, Ethan calmly said, "You are mad at me, so I'm going to kick your seat." Thinking that ignoring him was the best path to go, I drove home, and he sat there kicking the back of my seat for the entire ten-minute drive home.

I do miss how everything was new with Ollie. The "firsts" I have with Lucas as a parent are so much fewer than they were with Ollie. But, at the same time, it's a nice feeling looking into the face of a screaming baby and knowing that "I got this."

Year 12: Week 22: The Process of Unmasking

"We haven't really learned anything in the past two years, have we?" 

I was at an online educational conference earlier this week. The mask mandates in school came up in a break-out room discussion. The presentation we had just finished was about getting buy-in from school community members when change happens. One of the people in my group pointed out that every single thing the presenter said to do didn't happen in most schools in the fall of 2020 when the issue of teaching in-person happened. None of this stuff is happening as society struggles with this issue of mask mandates in schools. She reflected that we hadn't learned anything after going through all of this trauma. 

I don't think we haven't learned anything, but it feels that right now.  

Think about it, all of these things are true: 

• There are reasonable and respected medical professionals who feel that masks mandates should continue in schools, and there are reasonable and respected medical professionals who feel they should end.  
• Decisions about health and safety should not be made based on public opinion, and parents should have input into policies in schools.   
• The CDC and other state and local health authorities should move cautiously to adopt new COVID-19 mitigation policies and recommendations, and they need to move faster to address the needs of children in America.  
• Cities and states should be able to make decisions around mask mitigations at schools to reflect the needs of their communities, and decisions should be considered across communities.  
• Some parents are ready to have their children go to school without masks, and some aren't. Some of these parents have very good reasons for being concerned, and some do not. But all of them deserve empathy, as do all of the people who are frustrated that their child has to wear a mask at school.   

We need to accept and acknowledge these things, many of which feel contradictory. Trying to hold all of this in your head feels dissonant. It's hard. Do you want a headache? Try to hold all of what I put above in your head simultaneously.  

This process and controversy around mask mandates in schools feel horrible to me. I don't want to go against authority, but I also think it's a ridiculous ask to have my 2-year-old wear a mask. I want schools to be as cautious as possible, but I also feel like maybe we are being too cautious. And while serious COVID-19 cases with children are exceedingly rare, I shudder to think how it might break me if a child in my school or my children's school dies from a COVID-19. At the same time, my heart is heavy thinking about all the smiles we miss every day because of masks and the incalculable cost of masking on our children.  

It's going to be harder before it gets easier, and I hope that we do learn something about what it means to do the best for our children after all of this. 

We've been through too much to learn nothing.

Parenthood: Week 462 - Holding Hands and Sleeping With Buffy

Ethan’s not much of a hand holder.  

I have to fight sometimes to make him hold my hand when we walk in a parking lot. He’s happy to cuddle all day long and be held, but he’s not into holding hands. This is interesting because his older brother Ollie, who is eight now, has always loved held hands. Since he first started walking, he was happy to hold my hand. Even now that he’s older, he still enjoys holding my hand while we walk. It’s endearing, and I’m glad that he feels that he can connect with me that way. 

As I was cleaning up the house and winding down for the evening the other night, I noticed Ethan was walking around the house holding his younger brother Lucas’ hand. There were these moments when Lucas would get distracted and let go of Ethan’s hand. Then Ethan would rush over, put Lucas’s hand in his, and then they would happily walk side by side, hand in hand, around the living room.  

Maybe Ethan sees holding hands as a way to help others. Ethan likes being independent so maybe he doesn’t want to hold my hand because he sees that as a way of taking my help. While this is annoying, especially at times when he needs to hold my hand, I find it wonderfully heartwarming that he wants to help out his baby brother.  

*****

I don’t think Buffy has ever spent a whole night in bed with me. Sometimes I will pick her up and bring her into our bed and cuddle with her. I pull her close and put my arm around her or I spoon her. Her soft fur is comforting and warm and I enjoying hearing her breath. Inevitallby after about fifteen minutes of cuddling Buffy is done. She gets up and goes to the foot of the bed. She usually only stays there for five minutes and then wants to get off the bed. She used to jump off on her own. Now that she is older she will while and I will pick her up and put her on the ground.  

Almost every night for the past month, when we go upstairs for the night Buffy pushes open the door to Ollie and Ethan’s room. She jumps up onto Ethan’s bed, sniffs around for a second, and then settles down for the night. Buffy will then sleep there the whole night with Ethan. One night last week, Ethan woke me up upset that Buffy was in his spot. I walked Ethan back to his room. Somehow buffy has ended up on his pillow. I moved Buffy and helped Ethan settle in bed. 

During the day Buffy doesn't like it when Ethan pushes her or kicks her, but in the nighttime, it’s different. One time when I went to check in on them, Ethan was kicking his legs out and hitting Buffy and she didn’t move. Ethan ended up using Buffy as a footrest and instead of getting up to leave she lay there. I whispered to Buffy, “hey you want to come to our room.” She looked at me, closed her eyes, and as she exhaled her body relaxed into the bed.  

I’m so glad that Ethan knows what it’s like to sleep with a puppy at the foot of his bed. It warms my heart as I go to sleep, knowing that they are together.

Year 12 - Week 21: Maelstorm

Some people are passionate about schools because they understand that the future well-being of our society rests in the work that we do with our children right now. And some people are passionate about school issues because they want to use school as political tools. Sometimes it’s clear where people are, and other times it gets muddy.

It has felt like schools have been at the center of a maelstrom throughout this pandemic. While people mainly were on board with closing schools, the transition to remote learning was a mess. People had different opinions on how it should be done, and many people pushed for schools to go back in person that spring of 2020.

Being in person in the fall of 2020 was a highly debated issue. Whether teachers should be forced to get vaccinated was an issue. When and how to go back to remote learning in-person was another debate—all of these issues carried over to the 2021 school year. And now we are dealing with the non-existent “issue” of CRT in schools and book banning.

The newest issue is taking away school mask mandates, which is picking up steam all across the country. Many reputable media outlets have written about why mask mandates should be taken away from schools in the past month. Now we find many states taking away mask mandates from schools. Unsurprisingly there is debate about this issue. This one is interesting because this is a debate going on throughout the pandemic, but it’s different now. It used to not be backed up by science, and most of these arguments came from people who identified as Republicans. There is scientific research supports taking masks off students, and many Democrats are now on board with getting rid of masks at schools.

While all of this debate about these issues, many of which are chaotic, filled with passion, unfortunately, mean-spirited comments and lies persisted, school has gone on. It’s not like there was an issue with schools. We paused classes, let people figure it out, reached a consensus, and then restarted schools. We worked and taught while all of this was swirling around us. It’s like driving a broken car while people argue how to fix the vehicle and whether or not the car is even damaged. 

We underserve teachers, parents, administrations, staff, and students in schools, leading to many issues we debate around schools. At some point, we stop talking about these issues, not because they go away, but because we are tired of talking about them, and then they come back up at some point. It’s an exhausting cycle.

I don’t know how to break this cycle, but what I do know is that while there are opinions, there is also right and wrong. Lies should be called out, and uncivil debate should not be tolerated. Politically motivated policies should be acknowledged as such even when they support your opinion.

Maus shouldn't be banned. The opinion that it should is not valid because it supports an act of oppression and anti-Semitism. Acts of oppression are not valid opinions. Teachers must have the freedom to expose students to the worst of American history and help their students understand that racism and systems of oppression are part of every facet of American life and play a role in every major event in American history. More importantly our students must learn that what has made America great is individuals and movements who have fought against these systems of oppression to make this country a more free and equitable society.

We should move forward in the process of removing masks for students in schools. There is nuance in this issue. People’s feelings have to be respected, and the process is really important. What works for one state, may not work for another state, but it’s undeniable that we must move in the direction of unmasking sooner than later. You can disagree with the process, but to flat out reject this as a necessary step that should happen soon is "not following the science."  

I love teaching, but I really hate how so many people talk about education and teachers. It’s really hard to keep this car moving when it feels like people won’t stop yelling. I know it hasn’t always been clear what the next right thing has been in school during this pandemic, and many well-meaning educators made mistakes. All of us did.

So give teachers a little grace. And next time you want to chime in on an issue about education, read about it from a reputable source, and most of all reach out to an educator in your life and hear them out. Don’t debate them, just listen and let them know you hear them.

They need this more than you know. Somehow the teachers of America have find something left in their gas tank for this next battle. It make me tired just thinking about it, but what brings me hope is knowing at the end of it is seeing my students' smiles.  

Parenthood: Week 461 - Regretting The Sick Days I Didn't Take

One of my biggest regrets as a teacher is that I didn’t take more sick days in the past for myself and my children. 

I remember going to school so sick and congested that even with cold medicines, I couldn’t talk. I had a huge headache, I hadn’t slept well in days, but I still went to school and tried to teach. I have many other moments that I can remember in my sixteen-year teaching career that I went to school and taught when I was sick. This was not right, I shouldn’t have done this, and I’m glad that I’ve realized how wrong it was for me to do this.  

No one forced me to come in and teach when I was sick. I never had an administrator give me push-back when I called in sick, but I didn’t fully feel comfortable taking a sick day before the pandemic. Now, I take full responsibility for my choices, but I think it’s important to state I saw all of my superiors, except for in one school I worked at, came in and teach sick...often. And as much as they said that my health was important, seeing them come in and work sick created an atmosphere that did not make me feel comfortable taking a sick day.  

Mitigation practices around the pandemic put a hard stop to this practice of teachers going to school sick at my school, and I hope this continues after the pandemic is over. It's essential.

The other part of my regret with sick days is not taking more sick days to take care of my children when they were sick.  

In the past nine years, it feels like there are at least two dozen if not more days when I should have taken a sick day off to take care of my children. By the way, in my contract, taking care of a sick child counts as a sick day. I should have been more flexible and put less of a load on my wife to take care of our kids when they were sick. Similar to my attitude about not taking a sick day for myself, this was this preposterous level of self-importance where I told myself that I couldn’t miss work. 

This logic feels so stupid in retrospect. I’m a MUSIC TEACHER. What happens if students watch an educational music movie instead of me teaching? They learn a little less music. Big deal. I should have been there more for my own children.  

There were days when our children were borderline sick, and we chose to have them go to school. It took not having that option at all because of COVID-19 mitigations which set a higher standard for student health for attendance, for me to see how wrong it was for me to not take a sick day when my children weren’t feeling well and keep them home. 

I’ve been some days with my children when they aren’t sick at all this past year. They have fully recovered from an illness, and are home because we are waiting for a COVID-19 test results that we need to send our child to school. While these extra days are annoying and I wish they could be in school, I’m kind of glad that this situation has forced me to spend more time with my children at home when they aren’t sick. I’m thinking that maybe I should take a personal day in the future just so that I can have a special day with my children.  

I feel bad about not taking sick days off to take care of myself, and I feel horrible being away from my children when they were sick. However, I have never regretted taking a sick day off to be with my children when they need me.

Year 12 - Week 20: The Next Greatest Generation

I'm proud of how my students have handled the pandemic. 

Over the past two years, they have shown up, they have given of themselves, and they have tried. I can count the number of times I've had to remind students to pull their masks up other than their noses on the one hand. They have protested and complained as they developmental are supposed to, but rarely have they complained about the pandemic and what we ask of them.  

One reason that my students are making things work is that they are younger. I teach grades 4th through 7th. The stage of life moves quickly when you are that young, and they don't know what they are missing. Unlike high school students, they have much fewer expectations of what life is supposed to be. So when the pandemic hit, the bubble that popped wasn't as big and wasn't as meaningful.  

Children develop a sense of "normal" much faster than adults. Now, wearing masks and not doing things in big groups no longer feel extraordinary for most. There is some solace in this, knowing that they do not come into school feeling annoyed at having to put on a mask, but it's also very sad.  

From the first moment of this pandemic, the children in our country were not a priority. As the pandemic spread through assisted living homes and a disproportionate amount of older adults were dying of COVID-19, our focus was not on children. This made sense. Not having children in school for fear they would spread it in school and bring it home to elderly family members was a logical concern. 

As we got ready for the fall of 2020, it was terrifying. But many of us took risks, and many schools did open in-person. With masks on, students podded up with desks spread out, and we got to work. And for most of the schools that were in-person in the Fall of 2020, it did work. It will take further research to know how well it worked. But, in my observations, in-person in the 2020-2021 school year was far superior to remote school and was worth the risks.  

I am frustrated and disappointed in our country and many leaders that we didn't give everything we could to make in-person school happen in the 2020-2021 school year. Buildings were empty throughout cities that could have been as teaching spaces, funds could have poured in to hire and train teachers, and we could have rallied, but we didn't.  

Now more than halfway through the 2021-2022 school year, many schools continue to struggle to make things work. While research is scant that mask-wearing in schools is effective and neccsary, our littlest ones are wearing masks all day long and eating lunch silently at their desks. It made sense to have many mitigation factors with children to protect adults, but at this point, adults have access to vaccinations. We continue to ask our children to do more for those unvaccinated who choose to do less. 

I don't begrudge what we did last fall to make in-person school work. However, I do question what we are doing now. I'm not going to go to a school board meeting and scream that making children wear masks is child abuse. But I am looking more closely at scientific research around mitigations, and thinking critically about what we are asking out of our children. 

People will soon celebrate the biggest unofficial holidays, Super Bowl Sunday, with fewer mitigations (besides vaccinations) since the beginning of the pandemic. At the same time, students are being asked to do much of the same mitigations they have been doing for more than a year.

I teach my students to be critical thinkers, ask hard questions, and be active citizens. When they are older, I hope they look back to these years and wonder if we did right by them. I want them to wonder if what they lost as children did lead to better outcomes for us as a country. I want them to mourn the childhood they didn't have. And I want them to make sure that their children are a priority in the best of times and the worst of times.

My students' generation needs to know that they have been extraordinary. They have acted with kindness, done for others, and in doing may prove to be the greatest generation. However, there is only so much they can take, and there is only so much more we can ask of them.   

I hope that we see our students' bright smiles soon, say thank you for all they have done as this pandemic comes to a close, and we can finally let them fully be children again.