By Laura Myslinsky
I gather with all the mothers at my son’s sixth birthday party. We are maskless and have yet to know any better. We carry on with small talk of Texas weather and spring break plans. We slip into a COVID-19 discussion. “Have you heard, WHO has declared COVID-19 a pandemic?” one mother says. We huddle in a circle; our yeses and noes alternate between us.
Before we bid farewell, another mother asks, “Wouldn’t it be funny if this is the last birthday party of the year?”
“No way! That couldn’t happen,” I say. I giggle at her concern while cleaning up the last Minecraft plates littered with foil wrappers from vanilla cupcakes.
On the way home, I play the news instead of automatically turning on music. I listen to the radio host as he announces, COVID-19 cases are rising. I brush it off again and turn on music which I play too loud to drown out my children’s sugar high shrieks.
Schools move to virtual learning after spring break and stay that way until the end of the school year. I juggle three kids, aged six, three, and one. My husband is now working remotely. I spend my days managing my son’s Zoom school schedule, reciting the ABCs, and bribing my children with lollipops to keep them from screaming. The kids are excited to have Daddy home, bursting into his office with wide-tooth grins and endless questions. Boundaries are meaningless within their tiny minds, leaving me to serve as National Guard while he conducts meetings.
Summer camps are cancelled, and playgrounds shut down. I become the sole entertainer as we move through summer vacation. We read, explore nature, and build complex train tracks. Some days are harder than others. The kids fight endlessly over toys, hitting or kicking as they express their own frustrations. I try not to complain on the days we unravel with tears from screen time limits and bedtime quarrels.
Sometimes I cry. The triggers are mostly mundane — over a diaper change, thrown meal, or simply mirroring the cries of my children. The isolation threatens to swallow us as we shelter in place. We miss friends, playdates, and spending an afternoon at the jungle gym.
I find myself thinking back to a couple of years ago. I was in New York City and harbored life inside me for the third time. One evening I commuted home on the New Jersey Transit train, naturally resting my hand on the hilly landscape of my belly. I had recently handed over my resignation with the intent to leave the career I had worked towards for nearly fifteen years. Up to that point it was the one thing I was proud of in my life. I settled into a window seat, then looked out. What I saw startled me. Looking back at me was the woman I didn’t want to become: my mother. The mother who wished to be an artist but kept having children. I looked and looked and all I saw was her, a woman whose dreams were laid aside as she accepted the gender roles of cooking, cleaning, and tending children.
Through a clenched jaw, she had dealt with my alcoholic father until he threatened her life with his work-worn hands. As a teenager I made a promise to myself that I would not become my mother. I knew our circumstances were vastly different, my marriage no comparison to my parents’, yet my fear was etched deeply and interwoven into my interior being. When I glanced out the train window, the truth glared back. Mother. I was her; she was me. Eyes with dark crescent-moon circles, a translucent face, and solemn bewilderment. I wondered as my unborn daughter fluttered inside, had I made a mistake leaving my career behind?
Now that COVID-19 is on the rise and school uncertain, I have an unwavering instinct that Zoom education will not be a fit for my children. My son told his first lie during the spring quarter, shutting the computer saying his class was over. Later, I read a note from his teacher informing me of no schedule change, his lie a poignant marker. I fear a detachment from nature, loss of tactile skills, and too much screen time. I know with certainty what I must do.
I will homeschool.
My husband agrees. By midsummer, I unenroll our first-grade son from elementary school and purchase our new curriculum.
Together we all make a sign, naming our class The Mommy School. The kids hang it on the door of my husband’s former office. He now works from our guest room. In the beginning there is yelling over reading resistance and my youngest daughter pulls my arms during lessons, only to tantrum in despair moments later when I cannot give her attention. Even so, we make progress.
We adjust our schedule allowing time for individual lessons. My husband takes my daughter on walks in her pink car while he’s on phone meetings. By the second month, my oldest is reading independently and breezes through first-grade math. I am in awe of how quickly they learn, and it is as if I am seeing my children for the first time.
Looking back at the mother I was on the train, I recognize the uncertainty of my life’s purpose, an insecurity deep-seated even as I have come forth on the other side. Nonetheless, I do not wallow in the shadows of my past. I am exposed to the rawness of motherhood, my perspective a baptismal surrendering.
Suddenly, reading for hours while sitting in the grass, placing a Band-Aid upon the skinned knee of a new bike rider, or crouching in the dirt for twenty minutes to watch the leaf-cutters, are moments of profound pause.
Furrowed within the pandemic, my lost soul surfaces. I bend down and scoop it up like an object found floating in the stream, for only now do I see the reflection of myself as my children view me, Mother.