Eleven and her feelings about COVID-19

Eleven messaged me when we first heard the time out of school would be extended. She was feeling all the things and also actually dealing with all the things so I was impressed. I still am.

Then she dropped off the radar for a bit. I was concerned because some of the list comments she made in her journal were about her very real feeling of fear for her mother to go to work at the hospital. Eleven was worried about what she would do, she was upset that her mother wasn’t getting breaks, she was scared to death every time her parents came home from work and essentially changed outside and left their clothes there to get bagged and brought to the laundromat to be washed with previous days worth of scrubs in very hot and very soapy water.

When Eleven popped up again she posted in her journal that she was thrilled to hear her family would be getting stimulus checks. Then it was only days later when she was truly upset that her mother still couldn’t take time off from work. She had really been sure the $1200 would buy her mother some respite but her mother knew, as all adults do, that sometimes you have to go to work even when you don’t want to.

After reading her journal and messaging with her I came to realize that it wasn’t her mother not spending the $1200 on herself, or having to go to work but rather the fact that she thought she saw the light at the end of the tunnel but she wasn’t….still isn’t actually…even close. She experienced the first grownup disappointment at a time when she should have still been able to have a childlike belief that her mom could do anything because she was all powerful. Instead she learned that her mom was someone’s employee and that her job had to take precedence over the fears of her family.

That was a hard lesson to learn and it made me think about when I learned that lesson…that sometimes work has to come first and all the times I’ve re-learned it since then. I appreciate that I am incredibly lucky to be able to work from home during this wave of the pandemic.I also appreciate that Eleven’s parents, like the parents of many of my students, have to go to work.

This week, Eleven taught me that we all do the best we can, while we deal with what we have to. Thank you Eleven.