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Broke Wife, Big City
Honey, I screwed up the kids
By Aprill Brandon
We are living through historic times. Unprecedented times. And with any
luck my family and I will make it out of these times and many years
from now, my great grandkids will gather around and ask to hear all
about the time Gam Gam lived through the Great Coronavirus of 2020. And
I will tell them, my voice dripping in rich sepia tones, tales of
staying up late into the night writing novels to stave off the
insanity, the feasts I cooked to stave off the boredom, the endless
books the children and I read to stave off the despair. And how we all
hugged each other a little tighter each day to remember why isolation,
as hard as it was, was important.
I will tell them all these things and many more because I am going to lie. Lie so hard. All the lies.
Because here’s the thing. Saying I ate my weight in delivery pizza and
wine while battling depression and insomnia just doesn’t have quite the
same ring to it.
“And late one night, children, Gam Gam had so much to drink that she
went on Amazon and bought roller skates for herself, completely
forgetting she was 38-years-old and this activity would likely kill
her. Oh no, I’m no hero. I was just a proud patriot doing my duty.”
This is all assuming, of course, that I eventually have great
grandchildren. That I don’t screw up my children so thoroughly during
this isolation period that they are able to eventually turn into
semi-functioning adults who have families of their own.
Cause it ain’t looking too good so far. My kids are looking to me for
structure, for guidance, for how to handle all the Very Big Feelings
they are going through. And I, in my raggedy pajamas and roller skates,
am looking back at them while eating an entire wheel of cheese and
crying a little bit.
I mean, sure, it’s unlikely they’ll end up serial killers because of
all this. Or at least it’s unlikely my oldest will. My youngest, at 3,
simply isn’t coping. At least once a day she screams at us that she
doesn’t love anyone, just herself, and she hates this stupid, poopy
house. And I respond in one of two ways depending on how little sleep I
got the night before. I either cuddle her and coo to her that I know
this is hard but it’s all going to be ok. Or I threaten to set her
tablet on fire if she doesn’t knock it off.
There’s a reason why they say it takes a village to raise a child. It’s
so that a child has multiple people to model for them how to survive in
this world. People who don’t have a special Math Homework Cocktail she
invented.
It also doesn’t help that we can no longer do all the things the “experts” say you should do to raise happy, healthy children.
Get your kids out in nature as much as possible!
Our yard is the size of a postage stamp and the parks are overrun with
everyone else whose backyards are the size of postage stamps.
Kids need unsupervised and unstructured play time!
Fantastic. Will you tell them that? Because they won’t leave me alone and I have nowhere to hide.
Limit screen time!
My son spends roughly three hours on screens doing school work, which
means his younger sister is also in front of a screen for three hours
unless I want to deal with a three hour long tantrum. And then, here’s
the kicker, when my son is done with school he wants more screen time
because his screen time was school screen time, not fun screen time
like his sister, so he gets fun screen time, which means his sister
gets more screen time because I don’t know what I’m doing and can never
seem to win these arguments.
And then, one morning after another sleepless night spent pointlessly
worrying, I was helping my son with his reading assignment online.
Every time he completed a task, a small snippet of a song would play.
Just maybe ten seconds or so long. I happened to look over at him at
that moment and saw that he was crying.
“What’s wrong, baby!?” I asked, immediately assuming it was the stress
from the schoolwork and ready to set the laptop on fire if so (I might
have a problem).
“It’s just so beautiful.”
“What is?”
“The song. It’s just a really beautiful song.” And a few more crocodile tears squeezed out.
And then I started crying too. Tears of relief. Because I remembered
that even though they are tiny, my kids have complicated emotions and
deep intelligence and vast interior lives that I’m not privy to (even
though on certain days it feels like they do, in fact, tell me every
single thought in their heads). That they are strong and resilient and
adaptable. That they are fantastic creatures that can be moved to tears
by the beauty of music.
And I realized it’s going to take a lot more than this to ruin them. All of them. The kids will be alright after all.
Can’t get enough of Aprill? Can’t wait until next week?
Check out her website at http://aprillbrandon.com/
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