I never thought I would fear such a quiet sound. But on a recent afternoon, as my 10-year-old buckled his seat belt, I heard more than a click. I heard a sniff. Then I heard another one, and another one.
Sniff. Sniff. Sniff.
Like many working moms, a dozen thoughts had been wrestling in my mind before that moment. Then, suddenly, they all grew still and made way for a new one: Not again.
For parents across the country, the school year started with so much promise.
We had made it past that awful year of virtual learning, when we had to teach children who had grown up hearing us talk about the importance of limiting screen time how to focus on a screen for hours on end. No, you can’t just turn your camera off because you want to. Of course, you can turn your camera off if you need to cry. That year, I saw my gregarious, normally unflappable first-grader — a boy who as a toddler would calmly offer a warning before he vomited — fight tears every time he had to log into his class.
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But we made it through that year, and the year that followed. Remember that year, parents? Or have you tried to block it out?
That was the year when children showed up at schools with masks on their faces and a weight on their shoulders that went beyond the contents of their backpacks. Teachers were forced to confront learning loss, undeveloped social skills and exhausted parents who were trying to navigate how to keep their jobs and their children healthy. That was the year when covid-19 protocols in schools were a shifting mess. At one school, a student testing positive might send an entire class into quarantine but not lead to a sibling being required to stay home. Some things made no sense at the time, but by then, parents had grown used to fumbling in the dark.
That was the year of uncertainty, and it had followed the year of disorientation.
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This year was supposed to bring more stability. Children have been vaccinated. Mask mandates have been lifted. Employers have ordered people back into the office. This was supposed to be the year of normal-ish-ness.
Turns out, this is the year of grossness.
It is the year of snotty noses, barking coughs and middle-of-the-night vomiting. It is the year in which parents have watched an earache turn into a multi-symptom, multi-week ordeal. It is the year that has seen illnesses travel between family members, and once everyone recovers, a sniffle starts that process over again.
“I am so sick of people in my house getting sick,” Alex Cain posted earlier this week on a social media page for parents in Virginia. “It’s been 6 weeks of runny noses, coughing, and goopy eyes. Just here to commiserate.”
That’s all it took for the commiserating to commence, and for the Northern Virginia mother of two (who agreed to let me share her post with you) to see she was far from alone. “Same,” one parent after another replied.
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In recent weeks, media outlets have published lists of potential gifts to give during the holidays. While reading through them, I’ve found myself replaying conversations I’ve had with other parents and thinking about what we all really want: Off this roller coaster of sickness.
My colleagues wrote last week about how the spike in viral infections — the flu, RSV, covid-19 and the common cold — have caused parents to find drugstore aisles cleared of children’s medications. The demand for all those grape and bubble-gum flavored pain relievers and fever reducers has outpaced the supply, and that has left parents frustrated, children hurting and pediatricians worried.
“It’s a huge problem,” Kristina Powell, the president of the Virginia chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, is quoted as saying in that article. “ … This is going to be a long fall and winter of viral infections.”
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If you’re not a parent and haven’t stood in front of those empty shelves, it would be easy for you to not realize what’s happening inside the homes of your neighbors and colleagues with children. Children have always gotten sick at day cares and schools. But what makes this time unique is that children keep getting sick, and their parents are now having to take care of them while trying to meet the demands of workplaces that are pushing for a post-pandemic norm.
Bosses want shifts and seats filled. That’s understandable. But if employers don’t allow for some workplace flexibility — especially when public health experts are describing unprecedented challenges — talented, hard-working parents stand to be pushed from the workforce.
A Washington Post article that ran in November told of how workplace absences for child-care reasons rose to a concerning height the month before: “More than 100,000 Americans missed work last month because of child-care problems, an all-time high that’s surprisingly even greater than during the height of the pandemic, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
Many companies have demanded people return to the office. But trust me, employers, if you saw what parents were dealing with at home, you wouldn’t want them to come into the office some weeks.
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People have proved they can be productive working from home — even while caring for sick family members — and employers who can afford to extend that grace to employees should continue to do so. Allowing workplace flexibility not only enables employees to take care of their family’s needs, it also allows them to keep their colleagues healthy. It also keeps them from feeling pressured to send their children back to school before they are well, which just continues the cycle of illnesses.
My sons are still in elementary school and when the school year started, I put their masks on lanyards, placed them around their necks and gave them the power to choose when they wanted to wear them. My younger son has worn his every day at school, and my older son wears his only if he is in crowded situations, in the company of someone who has health vulnerabilities or notices someone near him appears sick.
Even so, my family has not escaped the viruses being passed around. We have gone through several rounds of illnesses this year. The few days I have taken off from work since the beginning of the school year have not been for vacation. They have been because either one of my children or I fell miserably sick.
The morning after I heard that sniffle from the back seat, my son woke up snotty. He tested negative for the coronavirus and didn’t show signs of any serious illness: no fever, no chills, no loss of appetite. He is prone to allergies, so I suspected that was causing his runny nose. As a precaution, I kept him out of school until he was symptom free.
After a few days of him feeling better, I started to feel confident (and lucky) that the rest of us had escaped getting sick this time.
Then I heard it: sniff.
The sound had come from his younger brother.
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