If your country finds itself in the middle of a pandemic, and it is no longer safe for children to attend school, a mom might be struck with the news that she will now become her child’s teacher.
When she is bombarded with this unwanted career, she might want to cry. When she feels like she wants to cry, she might drink some wine. She’ll decide she’d like some chocolate to go with her wine, and she will hide in the closet to consume them together.
When she decides to emerge from the closet because it’s time for her to teach, she’ll log on to her school’s website for her child’s daily assignments. She’ll try to corral her students into their new workspace, and she will begin the day’s lessons.
While she’s trying to help her kids do their homework, she’ll also try to keep up with the house. Somewhere between laundry, taking care of the baby, housework, and schoolwork, she’ll find a few moments to get some work done for her normal day job.
After what seems like 3 hours (but it’s actually only been five minutes) of school work, her child will decide they need a snack (even though they ate breakfast twenty minutes ago). She will get them a snack and then they will decide they need a drink to go with it. She’ll get them a drink and they’ll want to tell her forty-three stories while they spit out crumbs as they eat their snack. As they eat their snack, they’ll spill their drink on the table and drop one thousand crumbs on the floor she just swept, so she’ll get the vacuum back out.
After she vacuums the crumbs, the kids will get started on their schoolwork again. She’ll try to facilitate a grand scavenger hunt prepared by her child’s amazing teacher, but it won’t go as planned. She won’t be able to find her child because she actually lost them on the scavenger hunt. Meltdowns will happen, messes will be made, and she might cry again. Back to the closet with a bottle of wine, she will go (kidding – mostly).
After the first failed activity attempt, she’ll give the math lesson a try. She’ll try to explain to her child how to carry the one, and they won’t have any clue what she’s talking about because the math now is basically a foreign language compared to the math she was taught a thousand years ago. Everyone will be confused and she will want to cry again.
When she’s given up on the math assignment, she’ll start on the art project. She’ll try to create a handprint flower, but her child will touch their painted hand all over her white kitchen cabinets while she’s turned around for three seconds to get a towel and she’ll want to cry again.
When she’s sure that nothing else could possibly go wrong in the day, she will notice the washing machine is leaking and she will scramble to call a plumber. Then she will call her husband and ask him to pick up more wine on his way home from work.
When you make a mom a teacher, the mom will realize quickly just how much planning, preparation, patience, and energy it takes for teachers to get through a single day of teaching, much less an entire year, and she’ll realize just how thankful she is that we have kind, loving teachers to love on and pour knowledge into our children each day.
She will realize that we all wish we could have given our teachers a proper send-off into their much-deserved summer break, and she will want to cry again.
We didn’t get to properly thank our teachers this year for all the time, energy, and love that they pour into our children each and every day. We didn’t get to hug them, shower them with gifts, and have fun end of the year parties to culminate a year full of growth and memories. What we did get to do, though, was witness just how creative and amazing our teachers are. They proved once again that teachers truly are angels, and even in a nationwide pandemic, the most important thing to them is seeing to it that our children are thriving and learning.
So when you make a mom a teacher, you make a really, really thankful woman who truly appreciates the work teachers do for her children!
