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My children will be entering 6th grade this coming Fall semester. Our school district has announced it has intentions to open with 100% in person learning, five full days a week. “But we still have plans for a hybrid model and a 100% online model, just in case.”‘

I think the 100% in person learning is a little optimistic.

I mean, I get why. Most kids learn better in person. Many households can’t teach/homeschool and work at the same time, no matter what kind of on-line system you’ve got set up. I’m a Stay-At-Home-Mom and it was exhausting to constantly ride herd on my son to keep him doing his online assignments.

Don’t get me started on me helping him with those assignments. I wasn’t certain if he was playing dumb or has just honestly not quite grokked it, but it frequently took us an HOUR to get through 12 math problems.

Like many parents, I can’t wait to boot the little buggers out of the house for 6 hours a day after 5 months of having budding adolescents hanging around, all day, every day.

On the plus side, they’ve learned to clean their own bathrooms, so that’s nice.

While I don’t really have a system for my infrequent gambling that has proven effective, I’m willing to put down money that the schools will close from 100% in person to 100% online by Halloween. I imagine they’ll try to stretch the in-person model to at least the start of Thanksgiving Break, but I’m not hopeful.

My children desperately want to go back to school. Which I find hilarious in some ways because it wasn’t that long ago that my son declared he wished he was homeschooled because he hates regular school. Now he wants to go back because he misses his friends and because “online learning sucks.”

All I really know for certain is that the uncertainty of it all is driving me crazy, and not in a good way. When it’s good, I make lists – I know what to do and when and how and where and yeah, it might take me a little bit to pull myself together between each task because my depression has decided to be active, but I know what my tasks are.

When it’s bad, it looks a lot like I ran head first, full force, into a wall. I lay around, constantly talking to myself, constantly trying to convince myself to “just get one this one thing done and then you can quit for the day.”

I’ve been trying to plan for all those “just-in-case” scenarios that have spun about in my head since late February, but the uncertainty is killing me. How can I plan for anything if I don’t know how prepared I need to be for which scenario? I’m trying, of course, but it’s the uncertainty of all of them that’s dragging me down a giggling black hole of bad depression again.

Not that there’s a good kind, there’s just a more functional kind.