No one provides an owner's manual when they hand you the baby you just birthed, and I don’t imagine anything that prepares us to parent these teens and tweens during a pandemic. This is where I am as a parent. A GenX, latch-key, cable was too expensive, dial up modem, let me put more hair spray on that girl who is now a mom to two teenagers.
My youngest is in 8th grade. He’s cute. I’ve decided to keep him even though he’s the planet’s pickiest eater, watches YouTube daily, and slithers off to the basement because he thinks “out of sight, out of mind” will somehow compel the adults living in the house forget he needs to perform basic hygiene practices. I am sometimes forced to smell his breath, knowing my boy is a recent graduate of the Homer Simpson School of Common Sense, Logic and Laziness.
But in the last four weeks, I’ve abandoned him, left him to fend for himself. I don’t know what he eats for breakfast, if he’s done his chores, or how much grief he’s giving my mother-in-law who lives with us and can thankfully be there for him when I’m not. Most days she goes off to church in the morning and when she returns two hours later, he’s still sleeping or just waking. But I don’t see him or connect with him until the late afternoon, and by then he’s involved with his friends. I’ve definitely learned these kids need their friends. They need those social connections, even if they can only be through gaming.
I’ve apologized to him, talked to him and rubbed his back as he falls asleep at some late hour, he nods and understands why life is a bit out of sorts for now. I tell him it won’t always be this way. Much like the plague which continues to steal his milestones, this must come to a resolution at some point. Like her, there’s no going back to normal. But we will create a new normal. One day kids will go back to school without masks, but with new hand washing stations and an appreciation for things they once took for granted.
Today this is his day. His first day of his 8th grade year of his last year of middle school. His time to be “King of the Hill,” only the hill crumbled in an earthquake and all the kingdom’s subjects were forced to flee. He gets to meet his new teachers and familiar classmates online, faces on a computer screen. At least he got a stylish new hair cut and some new shirts.
Of course, at 4:30 am the boy wakes up and pukes, the result of too much popcorn, cheetos, and soda last night, which he must have snuck down into the basement. Normally, parents might keep a child who threw up at home, but life isn’t normal right now, is it? I suppose in the same way that having to record songs off the radio on a larger than life boombox to make your own mix tape defined my generation, starting the school year in the dining room even after you toss your late night binge-fest will define his.