Of all the milestones I’ve experienced as a mother so far, sending my oldest off to kindergarten in the fall of 2019 was the biggest. I was emotional about it from the very start, and spent all summer feeling anxious about how fast time was going and panicked that I was so anxious, I wasn’t enjoying the time I was living right then with my girl, and then woke up in the middle of the night wracked with guilt about all of it. It was a vicious cycle but then, of course, kindergarten came. With its library visits and bright sight word cards and school carnivals and everything was fine. Perfect. So lovely.
And then the pandemic happened.
I can still remember how sure we all were that this was just going to be an extra long spring break. I wrote an Instagram post about how spending two weeks quarantined with my little family might be the best thing that’s ever happened. Google Classroom was a novelty, and it was fun to sit alongside my 5-year-old and do her math homework from the kitchen table.
And then I realized my girl was never going back to kindergarten.
That crushing anxiety and guilt and deep, deep panic I felt in the summer of 2019 all came flooding back. All that worrying I had done about kindergarten, all of that “I’m not ready” I whined throughout the summer, all that sadness I felt was now flipped; I felt all of those things because I wanted her to stay in kindergarten. To finish out the year in her bright, happy classroom; to give her first-year teacher the wooden apple sign we’d had made for her; to return her library books and have her school’s bingo night. I was her kindergarten room mom, and I grieved the lack of finality, the missing end-of-year party, all of the pomp and circumstance she deserved for finishing her first year of school. All the pomp and circumstance that, honestly, I deserved.
And now those Covid kindergarteners are off to middle school. And it feels bigger than I ever could’ve imagined.
Of course wrapping up elementary school is always a big deal, but something feels incredibly special about these kids heading off to middle school in the fall. These kids who were kindergarteners to school themselves through a global pandemic. These kids whose first year of real school was rudely interrupted by a virus, these kids who struggled through the whiplash of virtual learning and in-person learning and schools shutting down for 10 days every time someone got a positive Covid test.
These kids finally got to go back to school, and even though it took until third grade for my girl to head back to class without a mask on her sweet face, we found our rhythm again. We found our safety and our joy and our comfort — and now we’re leaving it all over again.
Up and down my daughter’s fifth grade hallway are “memory posters” each of them made. And on nearly every one, there’s a photo of them doing remote schoolwork. There is some kind of reminder, a little postage stamp, of that time in their lives that felt so overwhelmingly huge. It changed everything, and knowing we can never have that time again, that little last piece of kindergarten back, still sucks. It was kindergarten. It mattered.
These elementary school years have been some of the most joyful of my life, but the joy has been up and down, sometimes tight with anxiety and sometimes loose with panic. Kindergarten through fifth grade is a long time and so much can happen: my girl still had a mouth full of baby teeth when Covid came, and now she has pierced ears and only a few molars left and reads books about World War II. She still remembers missing her kindergarten field trip because of the pandemic, and she already knows she wants to audition for the school play in 6th grade.
She contains these multitudes of surrealism and normalcy. Like reading to her classmates over Zoom at age 5 and being a part of history when she received her vaccine at 6, and also being a Taylor Swift fan and wondering if she’ll have a locker in middle school. My little Covid kindergartner, who still dressed up on the last day of school “drive-by” and who requested hot fudge sundaes that night we finally put the Chromebook away is officially ending an era. The school we were so desperate to get back to, the school that felt like it took so long to be “normal” again, will never be her school again. She’s moved past and through it all, and while I still feel the same level of sadness, it isn’t as deep. It’s a happy sad. For the school that carried her — and me — through some of the darkest days we’ve ever been a part of, while still creating some of the happiest memories of my whole entire life.
There’s still some anxiety about middle school to come. It doesn’t feel like the beginning-of-kindergarten anxiety did, and it doesn’t feel like the ending-of-kindergarten anxiety did, but something entirely different. Something a little more manageable and easier on my heart, I think.
Because my girl was a Covid kindergartener. And I know that blip of our lives built up more resilience and strength than I ever could’ve imagined having in March 2020.
She’s ready for middle school. And I think I am, too.
