It’s a nerve-wracking time of year for everyone, (not to mention we are still in a pandemic)…add in back to school, a new school, new classes, new teachers, new dress code, and it ends up being a lot. The house has been a powder keg of emotions, raw nerves that flip flop from calm to not calm in a blink. I have practiced my yogic breathing with both boys, smelling fields of flowers and blowing out more birthday candles than I can count.

Personally, I don’t know what to do with my anxiety around sending the kids back to school. Honestly, after the last year and a half of having them home much, if not all of the time, and homeschooling for periods while we continue running our business, I need them to go back to school. Badly. I am not a teacher, and I seriously, seriously tip my hat to all those educators out there – especially the middle school ones who successfully impart knowledge in seas of hormones.

However, we are still in a pandemic, and while we are a fully vaxxed family, I look South to the petri-dish experiment in the States and the rising rates of infection among school-aged kids. This is not good, and it is sure as hell not over. I am fully, fully bracing for the day the school has to suspend a class, a grade, a team for two weeks as they enter self-isolation due to exposure. I realize our isolation plans must remain, and we must be ready to go back into lockdown at a moment’s notice.

The good news (?) is that we are now all well-versed and fairly good at it. We are blessed with the space we need to isolate virtually any family member(s) at any given time, and we continue a stocked pantry.

The bad news is that this whole process has somehow become blasé. The degree of numbness which I greet the prospect of lockdown is terrifying. We, none of us, should be normalizing any of this, but as a matter of survival, everyone has built in a level of acceptance and malaise over it. That is the worst part – to see a collective wall being hit, and limits being reached, still, still with no end in sight. I feel like this is the stall-out, the seventh-inning stretch, the moment where we need to all collectively dig deeper, gather more strength , and find that last vestige of energy to take us through to the goal, the finish line, the end.

All while heading back to school…….