Sarah Leach: Parents, we can make it through this if we forgive ourselves

Nov. 28--When I was in my mid-20s, an older co-worker of mine described motherhood to me from what, at the time, I considered to be a fairly pessimistic perspective.

"Sarah," she said, "the moment you give birth, a feeling of guilt will settle upon your shoulders, and it will stay there ... for the rest of your life."

Fast forward nearly 20 years, and I've never revisited that conversation more in the decades since than I have in the year 2020. Thanks a lot, COVID.

I'm now the mother of three wonderful kids and, although my family's safety always factors in as the paramount priority, the decisions after that are not always simple or straightforward.

In March, when I only had a second-grader in elementary school, my aunt offered to travel from her home in Detroit to help my son with his schoolwork. That quickly turned into helping me watch my two younger children while juggling work from home after my daycare closed as well -- that turned into months of co-quarantine.

Fast forward eight months and now I have two children on remote learning. My poor middle child was set to start kindergarten this year. She's been looking forward to this for two years -- to FINALLY be a big kid and go to the big kid school. Trying to explain to her why it just wasn't going to happen was crushing for both of us. And the guilt worsens.

My aunt, bless her heart, has now devoted the better part of a year traveling back and forth 150 miles each way in order to serve as her grandchildren's surrogate teacher and mother, as I type on my laptop in the basement in order to fulfill my job obligations. Some days I don't even come up for lunch because I'm just too busy -- even to praise my children for their work achievements and art projects. And the guilt worsens.

They want to go on playdates and sleepovers. They want to go to trampoline parks and the local aquatic centers. They want to go to restaurants and visit family out of town. And each time I have to say no. And the guilt worsens.

My youngest, only 3 now, remains in daycare after it reopened. She gets upset because she knows her siblings are at my house. She doesn't understand that we're not having fun and playing all day long. And each time I drop her off, I fret about whether or not bringing her around other kids negates all the other steps I've taken to minimize exposure. And the guilt worsens.

School was rocky in the beginning, and it still can confound us. Sometimes assignments don't work or the teacher's internet goes out. Even though my children technically attend the same elementary, they have different computing devices and different applications to deliver assignments. One teacher communicates days in advance to help us plan. The other sends out lesson plans 30 minutes before school starts. It makes me question if I made the right decision. And the guilt worsens.

We were in the minority at the start of the year. I fretted not only over my children's health, but I also had a sense that schools would be back and forth between remote and in-person. At first, we didn't see too much of that in the K-12 districts. I began to question if I overreacted. Then everyone came indoors when the weather turned cold. Then my predictions came true twofold. It didn't make me feel any better being right. And the guilt worsens.

Now we have doubled down on a second semester of remote learning. My aunt will have sacrificed at least 18 months of her retirement to help me pseudo teach and parent -- because as a single mother I'm physically incapable of doing it all myself. She insists that it's a labor of love. It doesn't make me feel better that I'm asking this of her. And the guilt worsens.

The moral of the story is that there are no right answers in a pandemic. In the spring, we had a comprehensive game plan. We did "if this happens, then ..." scenarios. We pooled our resources. But psychologically, none of us were prepared to be in this place for this amount of time.

Now we live week to week, sometimes day to day. I'm not planning ahead much. I'm just trying to act like everything is normal, so I don't make the kids anxious. I try to come up with fun things we can all do within the same four walls we all live in, work in, go to school in and play in, but there's only fumes left in that creative tank.

And the guilt just keeps piling up. Did I make the right choices? What would I have done differently if I could? But if I'm really being honest with myself, I have to let it go. Kids are resilient. This will be a defining time in their life, but they get to cement how that will influence their lives in the future.

As parents, we need to forgive ourselves. We will never get it right -- hell, there's no such thing as "right." We are the ones projecting that guilt onto ourselves based on our own past experiences. Kids are beautifully innocent, remarkably optimistic and endlessly forgiving of their parents' shortcomings.

One day we'll look back on this and say it helped shape our children into the strong adults they became. We just need to find a way to do it with lighter shoulders.

-- Sarah Leach is executive editor of The Holland Sentinel. Contact her at sarah.leach@hollandsentinel.com or follow her on Twitter @SentinelLeach.

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