Parenting During a Pandemic: Tick Tock

Another week's gone by.  Or is it a month?  Or a year?  Or is it just a single day that won't quite wind down, instead just ebbing from night to day and back again, but with no fixed beginning or end?  And does it even matter?

I can hear a chorus in my ears of "kids need structure."  And while my kids technically count as adults, they need it too.  I think I might need it more. Even so, it seems just out of reach, my best intentions notwithstanding. But therein might lie the problem; my intentions are not enough.  It's as if I think I can think myself into structure, rather than actually creating the structure I think I need.

I suppose the same goes for my kids.  My daughter has classes on line, but when those end, then what?  What does a twenty year old's day look like, without the rhythms of school or work?  And what of my autistic son? His days were fully defined by school before he "graduated" from high school at age twenty-one.  Then he went off the famous cliff of aging out of school.  I worked doggedly to build something for him from scratch, including moving him to an entirely new community.  And things were looking pretty good.  Not perfect, but pretty good, considering all that wasn't available to him.  But pandemics don't care how hard you've tried, what your intentions are, and how much or little structure your kids might require to enable them to have a life that isn't just about some kind of terminal stasis.

I consider a day a kind of triumph when there is something akin to forward motion in it.  For each of us that might mean something different, and it might mean moving only one ball down the field.  Maybe that's not much, but there's an awful lot these days that feels like it's not enough, that it's inadequate to the growing list of things that need tending to, correcting, repairing, healing, holding up, and so on.

So whatever day, month, or year it is, I'm going to hold fast to the notion that getting something done that needs to get done needs to be enough. For that day, month, year, or whatever the heck time period I can no longer keep track of because trying to keep track feels like piling rebuke upon disappointment upon expectation upon hope upon need upon urgency and back again...