Back-to-School and Spaderman

It may be shitty, but it's still real.

When I was a little kid, every summer we made the trek from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Monticello, New York, in our brown Volvo station wagon (standard-issued to all Cambridge liberals in the 90s), to visit my grandparents. They were my only living grandparents, and with five kids, we didn’t get out much, so a week at a senior community called “Delano Village,” eating Nips butterscotch candies and listening to my grandfather talk shit about Hitler, was pretty darn exhilarating. We would swim in the community pool, the only children for miles, and get 5pm dinner at a Kosher pizza restaurant (we didn’t eat out much either, this was El Bulli in my mind). But the highlight of the trip was undoubtedly our holy pilgrimage to the Apollo Mall, wherein lay the glorious Toy Liquidators, a heavily discounted toy store. Though we were not deprived by any objective measure, we really only got toys twice a year - birthdays and Hannukah/Christmas time (or if you really wanted to put all your eggs in one American Girl Doll basket, you could argue for a single “combination” birthday/Christmas present). But at Toy Liquidators, land of opportunity, our grandparents allowed each of us to choose one precious item, whatever we desired, from among the Maxie dolls and Spaderman figurines, the knock-off Sea Monkeys and Tamogotchis.

When I reminisced about Toy Liquidators as an adult, I realized with great horror what a complete dump it was, remembered how each of our prized purchases, without fail, broke within days or sometimes minutes of being opened. But all of that was retrospect. As a child, I certainly registered that these were not top-notch items, that I had never seen a commercial for a “Quickly-Cook Oven” during Saturday morning cartoons. But I didn’t care. Toys are toys. Just ‘cause something is shitty doesn’t mean it’s not real.

As I prepare my two little guppies to return to preschool next week (it starts Tuesday August 18th, 9:00 am, Pacific Standard Time, but who’s tracking?) I’ve been thinking a lot about my visits to Toy Liquidators. Just as the aisles there probably looked like a hoarder’s yard sale to my parents, this school year looks reeeeaaaaal funky to me. It feels like someone buried school in Pet Sematary and it came back kinda looking like school but, y’know, also looking like it might kill you.

One dad in my neighborhood, who sent his son back to the summer session that we skipped, keeps telling me “it’s like prison school” every time I run into him. Masks, temperature checks, no touching, no sharing toys and food, no parents in the classroom. The decision to send them back (and yes I thank the universe every day that I had that decision to make) was a hard one. Ultimately, Zombie School seemed better than Home School to us. Still, I am not looking forward to battling with them about wearing their masks, to dropping my two-year-old off at the door for her first day of preschool like she’s a Shen-Yun flier, to viewing every classmate of theirs as a possible disease vector. But to my kids, they are still going to school. School is school. Just ‘cause something is shitty doesn’t mean it’s not real.

For many of you, the zombie school that is being offered is even further from the school you buried in March. It is 30 minutes of Zoom circle time every morning and a few assignments and videos. If you’re lucky, like the family at my sweet neighborhood school, you will get one socially-distanced visit from your child’s teacher so you can etch the contours of their 3-D face into your brain for the year. But that does not feel like school. That is like gluing some cotton balls onto a little yellow figurine and calling it a Troll Doll. But the thing about kids is, they will still play with the cotton-ball Troll, for hours on end. They might even insist on sleeping with it, on naming it Ned (this is my son’s imaginary name of choice at the moment, for reasons unknown to us), on building it a house made from an egg carton.

If our kids are on board for a school year, then I believe we have found ourselves in the Back-to-School transition, however janky it may feel to us growns. But when I googled the topic of “back to school this year,” all I got was a list of sales and district plans - no human-to-human guidance about how to handle this very new fall.

If we’re honoring that this is still a school year for our children, maybe some of the old wisdom still applies. My school psychologist friends at NASP made a handout three years ago, where they encourage us to ease the back-to-school transition with a number of practical and emotional suggestions, many of which made me sad or defensive:

• Freeze a few easy dinners (even heating up a can of soup is not easy these days)

• Arrange play dates (you mean have “the talk” about COVID practices with people you don’t know, then have your kid and their kid play separately in the two ends of your driveway while you try to talk to their parents about how terrible life is?)

• Visit school with your child (not an option)

• Plan to volunteer in the classroom (um, do I have to?)

• Reestablish bedtime and mealtime routines at least 1 week before school starts (what are these “routines” you speak of?)

• Make lunches the night before school (oh shit, I have to make lunches?!)

• If the first few days are a little rough, try not to over react (is there any such thing as an overreaction anymore??)

But in truth, more of these tips apply now than I have the time or energy to admit. After reading, I begrudgingly emailed another parent to see if there was any way her daughter wanted to come over and play “with space” in our backyard. Instead of an awkward “prison playdate,” they had a distanced blast, and they didn’t seem to care that they weren’t allowed to hug. She also brought this card, which made me cry, as pretty much everything does these days:

A lovely elementary teacher I know said he has been enlisting parents to do small things to help the classroom community, like lend an extension cord or read online to a few students. In a way, distance schooling may be a bit of a “parent involvement” equalizer in that you don’t have to take the day off of work, or be a stay-at-home parent, to pitch in. We did let the kids pick out new lunch boxes, and today to my shock and delight they packed them up this morning, mostly independently, and carried them in their backpacks to a picnic. As I looked at my kids practicing with their zippers and clasps, I had the thought that we should not have placed our picnic blanket amidst such a tremendous amount of goose shit, and also that it almost feels like we are, in fact, going back to school.

Young kids remember the excitement of things, right now, the anticipation. They don’t put every little moment into a cultural and historical context. Older kids, teenagers, are bearing the brunt of this back-to-school dissonance, but even they are happy to get their virtual schedules, talk shit with their friends about their teachers, have something to do that does not involve their parents.

And kids are used to things changing, often for reasons they don’t understand or no one will explain to them in a satisfying way. Your new teacher makes everyone use a hand signal to go pee. Second graders get to eat in the cafeteria, while first graders had to eat in their classrooms. Yesterday everyone wanted to play four-square at recess and now four-square is “for babies.” All your teachers are wearing masks and there’s no more bringing toys from home. Kids can be whiny and anxious and inflexible, but they are also impressively game in moments when adults are stuck on mourning some perceived loss or difference.

I can still imagine myself walking down the aisles of sweet, sweet Toy Liquidators, breathing in the smells of lead paint and gazing with wonder at the possibilities, not believing my luck. I hope my parents didn’t spend one second feeling guilty that we were missing out on some brand-name experience that would have probably involved an equally unpredictable amount of joy and pain.

I hope you and your children enjoy this new beginning, whatever it looks like. Spaderman was a good choice :)