We have made it. Today is the last day of school. After this, we will be free of scanning, printing, posting, and Google- Meeting.
Remote learning is not for everyone. Many students struggled to stay engaged. My daughter was not one of those. She thrived academically. She had the best grades of her school career, and her standardized test scores were off the chart.
Socially was another story. Already shy and awkward, the isolation did not help. She really missed her friends, and even frequent phone calls just didn’t fill the void. As an only child, the lonliness was sometimes intense. When we swung by the school the other day, she yelled, “Mom, there’s people! Real people!”
Re-socializing next year should be fun.
But this year—this crazy, disorienting year—is finally over. We close that chapter and start another, this one a more-normal-than-last-summer summer vacation. My daughter is already wondering how she will fill her time, lamenting the loss of that everyday contact with her teacher and classmates.
We will find ways to fill the time, hopefully using the time to heal and rest from the enormously stressful school year. Hopefully there will be more outdoor get-togethers with her friends. Then she’ll be ready to dive back into regular school in September.
Will I be ready to get back to a real routine? To have enough time to myself to think, to breathe, to create? To finally start putting this pandemic behind us?
Time will tell. I hope so.
Summer Brain–CoronaLife Day 467
A weird thing happened this week. My daughter ended school last Thursday…and my brain went on vacation.
I have been oddly unable to focus or scare up too much motivation this week, even after a decently productive week last week.
Some of it may be my change in sleep schedule–or lack thereof. With no need to get up for school, my daughter and I are sleeping in, making up for the sleep deficit we’ve been running on for months.
The advice is usually to keep to a regular schedule, and I expect that I will settle into a new sleep routine shortly, but right now it feels really nice to not have to get up at a certain time. To really SLEEP.
The last week and a half has been very social, too. Lots of people. As an introvert with more than a year of quarantine behind me, the sudden re-immersion in society has been stressful and exhausting.
So I am giving myself permission to let my brain be on vacation this week. Next week I will have to get back to reality.