By Sarah Yaffe
Every
parent figures out what parenting means to them in their own time and way. For
me, it was three days after the birth of my first child when I struggled with
breastfeeding. My son was not gaining weight despite all my best efforts. It
quickly became clear that the priority had shifted from my desire to nurse to
what my son needed. And that was formula. Immediately.
I realized that motherhood was about making the
choices that keep my kids healthy, safe, happy and thriving, pretty much in
that order. My son is now five-and-a-half and that understanding of parenthood
still holds true. Sometimes those choices pushed my comfort zone – letting him
use knives and scissors or swim without floaties, etc. But nothing prepared me
for the wrench COVID threw at us.
When
I have an important decision to make, I gather all of the information I can and
do a pros and cons analysis. I crowdsource the challenge and
talk to my friends. Going through this process usually gets me to a conclusion I can feel good
about. But COVID changed all of that.
In the age of the pandemic it
feels impossible
to get all the information I would like to have
and, somehow, no
matter what choice I land on, it never feels good. COVID has shown me that risk tolerance is an incredibly personal
matter and raised the stakes on parental decisions like never
before. The mental and emotional toll that it takes, especially for mothers, and even more so for racialized mothers, is huge.
Now, as the summer wraps up, a major question
looms: What to do about back to school?
I
have been reading a lot lately about the return to the workplace, articles
that include lines like, “as the pandemic winds down.” I cannot
help but feel, as a parent of two children under 12 who are
ineligible for vaccination, that this reality does not
reflect my own.
Ontario's current plan for the return to school is
less rigorous and has fewer precautions than its 2020 predecessor. And yet
the risks of COVID for kids under 12, as a result of the Delta variant are greater than they were then. Still,
Sick Kids and a slew of other pediatric and psychological experts maintain that,
for the sake of mental health and development kids desperately need to go back to in-person
school.
And
at the risk of piling on here, our kids are our hearts
and souls, but they are not our entirety. I subscribe to the oxygen mask theory
of parenting: Put your own mask on before assisting others. For me that means
dedicating some energy to prioritizing my health and happiness: focusing on my
career, carving out space for physical activity, spending time with my friends. The
specifics will be different for everyone, but I believe that every parent should
be a little bit self-interested in order to be a better parent. Kids
need to develop independence, and seeing a parent take time for themselves is a
great way to model this. But where do my needs come into play
in the back-to-school decision? Again,
this answer is unclear.
And now I, as a parent, have to weigh the risks to physical health versus those of mental
health. I need to consider the semi-knowns of the short-term versus the
unknowns of the long-term. It does not help that, depending on
the day, the Government, the news, and the experts and advocates I bombard
myself with on Twitter, all have different, and often contradictory, things to
say. The choice, for those of us in a position to make a choice, is an
impossible one. And there are far too many families who have no choice at all.
So
whichever choice we make, we have to try not to second
guess it every day. This will be extra hard on the days that the kids we sent
to school come home with a cough, or the kids we kept home come to us weeping
about not seeing their friends. After sifting through
as much information as I can consume, and carefully considering all aspects of
my family’s situation, my son is headed back to in-person school in the fall. I
send him with hope and fears and good-quality masks. And in the time of COVID,
that is the best I can do.
--
Sarah Yaffe (she/her) is a committed
intersectional feminist who has built a varied career in the not-for-profit
sector. Her work has ranged from running an award-winning theatre company to
helming the AGO’s Yayoi Kusama exhibit to building a portfolio of public-facing
urban innovation programming at Future Cities Canada. She is currently focused
on making democracy more democratic with MASS LBP and sits on the board of YWCA
Toronto.
(Image by Kelly Sikkema)