The Kids Are Not Alright
Scenes from quarantine — Day 137:
Our kids are not alright. Our kids are not going to be alright. We need to get comfortable with occupying that place.
Among the many reasons put forward to push for the reopening of schools, foremost, consistently, has been that the mental health consequences of continued isolation at home are devastating. Our children are traumatized, depressed, scared, lonely, numb. They need the socialization, the engagement of peers and educators, frequent whole-body activity, lessons as a focal point to occupy their minds instead of long, empty hours stretching across each and every day, and a return to normal routines, normal life before their mental health shatters. Fundamentally, this argument is not wrong. There is not a parent in this country that does not see this need and desperately want it for their child, which is what makes it so painful to realize that it will remain out of reach for, at the very least, months more.
As we have collectively considered all the benefits that school provides to our children’s health and well-being, we have watched it slip further from our grasp. Yet another camp shut down after four days when administrators realized they were in the midst of a super-spreader outbreak of COVID-19, this one administered by the YMCA in Georgia, and within its first day of instruction, a junior high school just outside Indianapolis had to implement outbreak policies and quarantine a large number of students and staff after finding out that one student was positive four hours into the new school year.
The outbreak at the YMCA camp afforded the CDC a rare opportunity to study an outbreak in children very nearly in real time and the data that comes from this study is horrific. Of the portion of the camp population (staff and kids combined) for whom testing results were available, 76% tested positive. The greatest rate of infection was found to be in children age 6–10, where over half of the attendees were found to be positive, while only around a third of 18–21 yr olds (these were staffers) were infected. We have been telling ourselves that children do not get infected and do not spread this disease and this is why our schools can reopen. This study presents very good evidence that we were wrong.
With testing delays of over a week making negative results almost meaningless and Major League Baseball teetering on the brink of cancelling its recently started season after throwing millions at implementing plans that are not working to keep players from being infected, there is little sign that anyone can make this work. We cannot bring students and teachers together in the classroom for even a few days, without inflicting the far greater trauma and “contagion guilt” that comes of watching disease sweep through friends and respected leaders, of living through the experience of having a teachers or classmate die.
We need to become comfortable parenting traumatized kids, yes, even while we ourselves are traumatized. No, it isn’t fair, it isn’t right, it isn’t kind. It is needed.
My beautiful, bright, and endlessly thoughtful youngest child unfortunately lost the family genetic lottery. While she was still an infant, she fell off the growth charts completely and was diagnosed with “failure to thrive”, a devastating designation that squeezes any parent’s heart as the word “failure” echoes endlessly through their mind. When she was 8 months old, she was given hand-me-downs from a four-month old. My mother told me, “Maybe your milk just isn’t nourishing enough.” and as I wept over that, I spent untold hours feeding her, supplementing her, adding every possible kind of fat and caloric load into her diet, desperately hoping she would Just. Grow.
By ten months, my daughter had major gross motor delays, though it took me months to convince my pediatrician of that. She did not crawl. She did not stand. By the time she took her first steps at eighteen months, she was already speaking in complete sentences and meeting with a physical therapist three times a week. She had “caught up” on growth after abruptly weaning and she “caught up” on using her body by the age of three and could ride a bike and climb like a monkey by four. Nobody knew why.
In elementary school, she complained about dots in front of her eyes, about being completely unable to see and we took her to the optometrist who checked everything she could possibly think of and found nothing. She complained being too weak to walk, of pains in her arms and legs. She always looked exhausted, dark rings etched beneath her eyes. I can see exhaustion and pain in every photograph I have ever taken of her. When she had her first migraine, or at least the first one she could describe well enough for us to recognize it, I held her close in the dark room for hours until she fell asleep. The doctor didn’t believe it was a migraine and prescribed antibiotics for a sinus infection she did not have.
Her last two years of elementary school were hell. She could not abide the blinding sun on the pavement at PE. The flickering fluorescent lights and the chatter of excited children triggered non-stop migraines. She missed a month of school in a horrible cycle where she would throw up from uncontrolled nausea, be sent home from school until she hadn’t thrown up in 24 hours, repeat every other day. Her regular pediatrician referred us to a specialist who referred us to another specialist who referred us to another specialist, the wait to get in to see each one was weeks of suffering for her.
It took two more years, all spent relentlessly researching, reading, seeking out anyone who could help, trying anything we could to mitigate what had been an entire lifetime of unrelenting trauma, before we could put a name to what was wrong. And it was then that we learned that her condition was genetic, that the chronic pain, the weakness, the suffering would dog her for the rest of her life. We had no power to make it go away, we could only be there with her through the pain.
More than perhaps anything else, it tears you apart to see your child suffer, to see your child in such deep pain they cannot even find the words to express it. To know that there is nothing you can do, that you have tried everything and fallen short, the guilt is consuming. You question every choice you ever made. You weep, you scream, you cry. Ultimately, you sit with the knowledge that you have brought a sweet, undeserving soul to a place of suffering. You sit and watch them suffer and you know you gave that to them and you cannot take it away. The only thing you can do is hold their hand and pray, and that is not, will never be enough.
We don’t really talk about the pandemic with our children. We don’t ask them what they would feel if their grandparents got sick after just a quick visit, or if their friends cried when they realized they would never walk across that stage in culmination of years of study, when they realized that every college in the country looks the same when you’re attending from your bedroom. We don’t tell them when this nation passes another grim milestone or ask them to look upon the faces of those who died. We know they are watching the news, talking to friends, turning the insanity of this cruel world over and over in their minds. We see their knowledge, their fear, their pain writ clear upon their faces, and we cannot bring ourselves to heap more upon it.
Instead we talk about the world not like we hope it will be, pretending for a moment that new classes, new activities, eagerly anticipated family gatherings will somehow be magically okay. We talk about expectations, that ours are guesses as much as anything and that some will be wrong. We talk about what choices they face, and we remind them that absolutely anything they feel or think in this mixed-up, tumble-down world is okay, right now. We encourage marathon gaming sessions without judgement, binge-watching, comfort foods, and crazy projects. Today we planted an avocado pit and boy are they excited for the day fifteen years from now when they can eat an avocado from it. These things are not trivial. They are the way our children, and we, ourselves, endure wave after wave of new pain, stay sane, survive. We tell them that what is being asked of them is unreasonable, that the systems are unstable, that when they fall short, it is not because they are failures, but because there is no way for anyone to succeed in the situation we are placing them in.
Their pain is real, and it will leave scars, long and ugly, stretching out across their whole lives. We give them words to express it and when those words are wrong, are not enough, we give them more. We tell them we are all struggling to understand it, and understand the forces that caused it. We apologize for falling short, for being unable to take their suffering away. We hold their hand, walk beside them along this path, draw them close in the darkness and softly sing.
Youngest child told us that she can already feel the psychic wounds of the pandemic. Even watching a cartoon, she is distracted from the story seeing people without masks, people shaking the hands of strangers, people drawing close in public places. I gave her a high-five. “Quarantine generation!” There is a short pause. “I’m sorry.” Middle child joined in, “I read on Tumblr about a guy whose grandmother would sometimes sit in her chair in the living room with all the lights turned off, for hours on end. She had lived through the Depression and they had to do that back then and all these years later, it felt comfortable to her.” “Yup. That’s what happens. It’s not even just feeling comfortable. Your brain has gotten the message that this behavior is Important, that it is what keeps something even worse from happening, and you…never let that go. It becomes part of you.” They laugh at the idea of being middle aged and anxious to step outside of the house without a mask. I can see the trauma behind their laughter, but I can also see the laughter. We are helping them build the foundations to navigate a lifelong pain. It is all we can do. It will never be enough.
