My mother has accused me of thinking my children are pretty perfect. It isn’t that exactly, though I’d admit I’m rather a doting parent 🙂 It’s like a prayer I say every night: As I settle down to sleep, I tell my husband that I love him and then I say aloud “… and I love our two babies, too.” Lately, because I want the last utterance I make to be a little bit of a laugh, I add: “If we have to live through a global pandemic emergency, I’m glad it’s with the three of you.” He obligatorily harumphs and then I feel I can go to sleep. It isn’t that I think my children are perfect, but I certainly think the world of them, by which I mean they’re my world.
Yesterday, a friend asked me how my kids are doing at this time. At risk of confirming my mother’s accusation, I will say that they have been pretty great during this past month at home. I have two babies, as I mentioned, and my 16 year old is a 10th grader now home for the rest of the spring from boarding school, and my 12 year old is a 7th grader at our local middle school. I feel bad about what my 16 year old is missing. She was supposed to go to France for two weeks! and go “on tour” with her high school dance company! and so many other lovely plans that just have to wait now. Ditto my 12 year old, who was having a terrific year at school, hitting his stride with work and friends and everything. He was looking forward to running his first season of track, so we had ordered running shoes that arrived about two weeks before the schools closed.
Because they are 16 and 12, they can do a lot for themselves. They are conscientious students, and I do no homeschooling of them at all, and they seem to be keeping up with their work from school–and my 10th grader in particular has quite a lot of it–and staying occupied while my husband and I are working.
Most important, they are good company for each other. I do not mean to talk down on the experiences of only children–at one point or other, I think all of us in our house have wished we had been onlies–but I have to say that right now, in this moment, I am particularly glad for my children that they have each other. So, my hope is that years from now, they will look back at this time and remember not just the strangeness and sadness of this moment and spending so much time on screens and missing their friends, but also that they got to be together and enjoy having a brother/sister who would walk, ride bikes, sing along to the same songs. So, maybe that will be a happy memory from now.