Two years ago, I never thought I would homeschool one of my children.
Of course, two years ago, I never thought that leaving the house with a face mask would become second nature. Or that my grandma would become computer-literate enough to Zoom with me every few weeks. A lot has changed.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, my daughter Wendy would have days — in hindsight, too many days — when she begged to stay home from school. She cried nearly every morning, and she seemed to have constant stomachaches and nausea. My husband Jonathan and I spent a year taking her to doctors, scheduling medical procedures and giving her various medications, trying to figure out what was going on with her.
I remember standing over her as she cried in her closet one morning, wondering what I was going to do if she actually refused to go to school. What if she really wouldn’t get up? I couldn’t pick her up and force her into the car, force her into school, force her to learn.
I didn’t have to find out what would happen in that scenario because March of 2020 arrived, and we all stayed home. For months. And a curious thing happened. Wendy stopped getting nauseous. She stopped vomiting. We took her for a follow-up at the doctor, and her acid reflux had improved. Stress and anxiety turned out to be her triggers.