A couple of days before Halloween, my son went to the bathroom to pee one morning after eating breakfast and noticed there were a few drops of water on the bathroom floor, presumably from when one of us had washed our hands earlier. He came outside to grab the kitchen rag to wipe the bathroom floor, and when told that we didn't want him to use the kitchen rag in the bathroom, he broke down sobbing. He sobbed so hard, that it could not have been about the rag or the water. It was not the first time in recent weeks when he had broken down crying at the drop of a hat. I held him and asked him what was wrong, and eventually it came out in broken pieces, that he just felt desperately sad about being at home without seeing his friends. He had been home with us from the start of March to the end of October, with only a handful of interactions with kids his own age during that time. My son, who is normally a bright and happy child, was really struggling mentally to cope with what seemed to be a permanent predicament.
It broke my heart. A week or so prior to this, I had grieved when we saw other kids at the park and he ran away from them. I had grieved when his bestie saw us outside and ignored his multiple attempts to say hello. I had grieved when we were over visiting a newborn's family, and the older child sprayed a few drops of liquid on his neck and my son had cried and screamed. My husband and I had a long chat that day of the bathroom sobbing incident. We decided after consulting our pediatrician, (tons of) mom friends, our daycare director, another daycare parent, and a friend who works in public health in our city, that we would send L back to school even though it means greater COVID exposure risk for our family. We made that decision because our son's mental health was clearly suffering, and at age 4, we had asked him to be at home for 8 months with no end in sight, and it was cruel to continue to shut him off from the world when he did not have the emotional capacity to cope with the indefinite wait. Once we made the decision to send him back to school, it lightened my own mental load immediately. We sent our son back to daycare on October 30, and within a couple of days, he went back to his normal, chatty, rambunctious, and happy self. It was a really tough decision, as the COVID numbers in our area are still going up, and there are some outbreaks at local daycares (not ours yet, thankfully). We plan to keep him out of school for a couple of weeks after Thanksgiving and after Christmas, assuming that other families will be seeing extended family members during those holidays. We try to balance the risk by sending him to school for only the first half of everyday. At school, the kids nap without their masks on, and I wanted to avoid that needless exposure. So, he wears his mask during the first half of the day and then I pick him up after lunch, while his little sister is napping at home. It's not perfectly safe, of course, but I feel like daycare is a necessary risk, considering that we don't know what the next school year will look like and whether there will be another long stretch of time without regular peer interactions for L. As I know is true for every family, parenting in 2020 is just being stuck between a rock and a hard place. I was incredibly grateful to read today that one of the vaccines in the works has the potential of being 90% effective. Last week, I was immeasurably happy that the Biden-Harris ticket won the election. Among other things, it gives me a glimmer of hope that our country could be on track to curbing the spread of the virus in 2021. Keeping fingers crossed for 2021.
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About MeBorn in Asia, I have spent more than a third of my life living outside of the U.S. thus far. I currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with my techie husband and two biracial children. Categories
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