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Across the world children are heading back to school although what they knew to be a scholastic experience has changed quite a bit. In some places they have kids attending school a few days a week. In others it’s for a few hours whereas in many places in Europe it’s been business as usual for good long while. The word ‘bubble’ has changed the meaning it used to hold and it looks like the connotation is going to be with us for a while longer.
While most Indian states grapple with the notion of reopening the schools and when to do so, the ones which have already started off the process find that the adjustment to campus life isn’t a cakewalk; neither for the school, the parents and of course the children themselves. With schools that are offering the hybrid model of attending classes, it’s a stretch with allocating their teaching resources to cover both in-person and online classes for the same grades and do it without dropping the ball on the quality of education.
For the rest of us the raging debate of should kids go back to school without the benefit of the vaccine to will the third wave actually hit sometime soon; it is an ongoing balancing act to decide about resending the children to an environment which is more fun for them for sure, but is also less protected than the one they have become used to for the past 2 academic years. And while attending classes in pyjamas isn’t an addiction that can’t be dealt with, the entire discipline that surrounds the whole process of schooling is something that kids will still take time reacclimatising to.
From getting up at least an hour earlier than before to riding the bus and standing in the lunch queue to not being able to get up and stretch one’s legs in between classes or have parents pop-in for that quick look-in to check if the child needs anything, it’s a big change to get used to.
I was away from home while TO rejoined in-person school and Red messaged me saying the house seemed really quiet and empty without him there. Although there was a regular amount of strict parenting going throughout the day while he was attending online classes, there was something comforting about seeing him hunched over the laptop while I went about my day.
While I’m not seeing my child struggle with his disenchantment for online lessons any further I am also dealing with a regular worry of either him or his peers coming down with coughs and colds which could potentially turn into something more serious. And while this worry isn’t debilitating, it’s not something am able to shake off either. His environment was so well-regulated for so long and under the supervision of two adults who had no greater goal than to keep him safe; relinquishing his safety to others who are miles away is something I struggle with.
What makes it easier is seeing him head out the door without the heavy zombie steps he used to take towards his laptop at the start of every school day while at home. He comes back happier too and while I shake my head that the kind of stains he inevitably gets on the pristine whites of his school uniform, it’s this kind of normalcy that I had also missed right from the middle of March 2020.
Whether the pandemic is entering into an endemic stage, whether the third wave is nothing more than just a slight blip, whether the vaccine for children is genuinely going to help keep them safe; as a parent our worry never ends. It eases a bit when you check in on them while they’re fast asleep or when you see them eat their fill, play their hearts out with their friends.
And I sincerely hope that’s where the world is slowly heading back to; parenting shoving their kids out the door while they’re still putting their shoes on and the school bus is about to pull away from the curb or the chidings about leaving assignments till the last minute. Am mighty sick of face masks, sanitisers and social distancing. It’s not the kind of parenting any of us want to do. We all want to tell us our kids off for the good ol’ reasons that have been handed down to us over the generations.
Amen!
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Here it goes in no particular order:
- He calls you Bruh..mom and dad have left the building and Bruh reigns supreme.
- Angst is the name of the game.
- Being contrary is also the name of the game.
- Tantrums are usually lurking around the corner.
- Flashes of brilliance (I use the term loosely) can be expected.
- Hugs and kisses are still accepted but otherwise you end up embarrassing them by stepping into the room during online classes with your mere presence.
- Growth spurt has kicked in and is still kicking butt- usually the parents.
- Advice about music is being shared- by the child to the unfashionable parents.
- Eyerolls are the accepted form of communicating.
- So are sulks.
- As-if, what-the, effs are all de facto modes of answering and are often complete sentences by themselves.
- Everything is BORINGGG!!
- Parents are UNFAIR!!!
- Global issues (like the present pandemic) have specifically come into being to make their lives especially hellish.
- Bathing is optional. Also, when it’s indulged in, one must have a reservoir at home to accommodate musical talents of child that peak while they’re in the shower.
- Bathing without looking clean is a newly cultivated skill set.
- Feeling hungry while eating the main meals of the day are another newly cultivated skill set.
- The opposite sex is no longer dumb. Cooties don’t exist any longer.
- Excuses for not doing homework or household chores assume epic proportions.
- Parents have turned into insensitive devils who routinely torture the child…erm pre-teen for their own amusement. Ergo reinforcing point#13.
- Screen time is a right more precious than Right to Life since life without screen time is no life at all.
- Selective hearing is firmly established.
- Very susceptible to sarcasm. It reinforces points #13 and #20 when indulged by the grown-ups of the house.
- Being largely unflappable in the face of parental ire and asking them to chill is par for course.
- Being a big baby about birthdays and gifts- still status quo.
Can’t imagine that age 13 will bring our way!
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Right off the bat, it’s a bit of a downer watching Black Widow knowing that Romanov sacrifices herself in Endgame. Set in the time after the incidents of Captain America: Civil War, this movie gives a proper backstory to Natasha Romanov and lets the audience know how she became the Black Widow. But that’s not all it does because this movie is a portal to the Black Widow’s sister (herself a Black Widow) getting a movie, if not a franchise, for herself.
Onto the movie- like all superhero movies it’s over the top. And while that’s a given, what makes the other ones stand apart as the special effects, pithy dialogues or the droll humour that you get from Loki, Ironman and even Banner. This one falls fairly flat because a) you know Romanov is going to come out unscathed and b) the back story and the players are seem tired and rather jaded to do any real justice to the plot.
Florence Pugh as Romanov’s “sister” provides a bit of freshness to the otherwise droll tepid plot which has a ‘bent-on-ruling-the-world’ bad guy and a bunch of people who need to be rescued while the widow moves onto reuniting with the Avengers.
The chemistry between the characters in the movie was off to say the least with the title sequence possibly being the slickest bit of footage in the entire movie. The way Romanov and her family manage to escape the destruction of the bad guy’s lair; careening and free falling without getting the slightly nick from all the debris falling all around them is extremely ho-hum. But it’s a superhero movie and Barton and Romanov were the only two Avengers who didn’t have any extraordinary powers barring their innate prowess in fighting.
Rachel Weisz, William Hurt are held back by the script from taking their characters further and Ray Winstone as the baddie leaves a lot to be desired since his menace, overall creep-quotient is rather lame.
This movie is streaming on Disney Hotstar in India and for that am glad because I’d have kicked myself for paying money to watch this in the theatre in a non-Covid world. For those of us who are MCU fans, it makes sense to watch it to preserve the continuum of the entire series (although BW was released much later than it was supposed to be); the rest of us can give it a miss. Neither the acting nor the sequences or the OST do anything for the audience.
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I’ve often mentioned the focus on English language that was given during my education. That I also ended up studying English literature during my undergrads was of no surprise to many.
One of the things we’ve been taught over the years, in appreciation of poetry and prose, is the figures of speech that add that little extra sumthin’ to the written word. It would be fair to say figures of speech figure heavily in my speech. That was an example of a pun just fyi and probably something else but my ever-present brain fog prevents me from figuring out what exactly.
Alrighty, enough of punning…yesterday on our way back from his cricket practice TO exclaimed loudly that his stomach was “fully empty”. My years of being at the beck and call of my education rose to the occasion and I mumbled something about an oxymoron while trying to park between a pillar and another car. It was purely reflexive on my part but I forgot about the ears of a fox that children have when they’re about to get the wrong end of something. Pat came the repartee, “You’re the oxymoron!”
And for a rare moment, I was speechless.
If only my teachers could see me now…
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We watch one movie as a family every week. We usually do it on Friday nights since it’s a good way to bring in the weekend for TO. And since it’s usually a family movie, we all end up being either parts of “awwww” or “siggghhhs” or just have lots of laugh-out-loud moments.
With TO growing up the focus is moving onto movies which aren’t always in the kiddy genre although this topics are usually not too varying. Just the presentation of it changes from time to time. Last night he chanced upon Pacific Rim after I had nixed all the horror movies as being unsuitable. I had done in thinking about all the what-ifs he gets into when he sees the paranormal stuff apart from the fear which lingers when he sees scary stuff. With Pacific Rim I thought we’re on safe and familiar territory with Kaijus, sea creatures, aliens and people protecting the Earth.
I was W-R-O-N-G. So so so W-R-O-N-G.
He LOVED the movie. He was entertained. Mission accomplished. And then came bedtime. It kind of went like this:
TO– “Ayu, the last one that came out of the Breach…it was that 5 thing right? Me– Yeah, a Category 5 Kaiju (yawns widely). TO: Is there a Category 6 one also (more than a hint of hopefulness in his voice). Me: Baby why don’t YOU draw a Category 6 Kaiju the way you think it should look like TOMORROW. Good night!
TO (even more excitedly): What if that happens…IN REAL LIFE??!! Me: Not going to happen. It was a movie. Got to sleep (does air kisses and none of the kisses connect due to an extremely sleepy mother’s bad hand-eye co-ordination). TO: (wide awake) You don’t know that! It was an INTER-DIMENSIONAL portal Ayu. It could exist!
Me: Look, no portal exists under the Pacific Ocean that will let alien beings from other dimensions come back and attack us. And even if it did, the movie showed us how to defeat them so don’t worry about it. We’re good. TO: I’m not worried! We’re gonna NUKE the suckas! Me: (in my head) DAYUM! That movie choice backfired, didn’t it?”
And the chattering went on till I slept off. I could still hear him going on and going as his voice faded into the distance
(Excerpt taken from one of the seemingly endless conversations between a boy and his mother)Note to self: NEVER underestimate the power ugly, sea-aliens who spit neon blue acid will have on your child. We’re back to Ninja Turtles.
PS: I also blame the distributors of Deep Blue Sea 2. If your movie was available to stream or rent and not just buy online we’d never back gone to this movie.
Ye Gods…
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I was largely educated in convent schools where wooden rulers and thick books (Wren&Martin) flew through the air and landed on unsuspecting hands and back with unfailing frequency. They were almost always accompanied by beady-eyed looks of utter disapproval and disappointment by nuns sporting sparse to scary amounts of mouthbrows. Yikes!
Add to that my father’s continuous litany of ‘Perfection Is NOT an accident!!’ and you have a person who is a bit uptight about her language and the way it gets expressed.
Red has some lovely memories of me scrunching up my face going ‘what the..!’ during the time we were dating; they usually involved something he said which I knew was pronounced differently and it was *quite* a task not correcting him then or even now.
This is not to say my spoken English or English comprehension is sublime. It’s good, that’s all there is to it. And given the number of girls who studied with me, there are hundreds of us out there with a good level of competency in their English grammar, syntax and expression.
But habits die hard. Good or bad; they really do die hard. So when I come back from the gym achy, sweaty, wondering why the space below my knees feels like it’s tied up in knots and my kid, seeing me for the first time in the day, starts talking by using double negatives…the experience is just GAH!!
Sadly, I’m not sure what the more painful part of that whole thing is.
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TO turned 12 recently and barring the beginnings of a slight sprinkling of hair on his upper lip, am seeing very few signs of him growing up per se. There are plusses and minuses to this as can be expected. Let’s tackle the minuses first so I can get them out of my system; for now.
- He’s SUCH a kid even now! I can’t fathom one conversation that happens without him “but-but-but-ing” all through and interrupting us in his hurry to speak up.
- He’s still quite self-indulgent. ‘I’ features predominantly in his speech.
- He’s still quite naive about life overall and is fanciful (not entirely a minus in my book).
- He’s deeply embraced the tween life and is giving us a look into what teenage angst is- for the parents.
Now the plusses-
- He’s become quite independent wrt his needs- has turned on the stove by himself to make a snack; all without burning the house down.
- Is gradually learning to make tough choices from time to time- when to choose the high road and when to get down&dirty and spew *#@&E$&^#$ during the bust-ups. In case it wasn’t clear- the former is the plus here and not the latter but if I had to look for a silver lining it would be that his vocabulary’s grown!
- Is more understanding of our shortcomings as parents and people overall.
- Is a kind person and quick to forgive.
Note: I still had to tell him a little while ago that if it doesn’t look like food, don’t put it in your mouth.
S-I-G-H….
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The brat is officially a preteen effective yesterday. He’s also officially a slightly bigger brat than he was before. I was telling Red that it’s as if I gave birth to a Valley Girl instead of a kid living in South India. But am told the rolling eyes, the general disdain for any parental advise and touchiness which goes from 0-100 in a nanosecond, is just a teaser of the years that will follow from next year onwards.
Harking back to my own tweens or teens- there wasn’t much of a differentiator there to be honest. It’s not that I was a model child but when I checked with my mom about the stuff that I did or didn’t do, she simply said that I did what was expected because there wasn’t any other option! And that seems heavenly for me now as a parent.
Our kids have OPTIONS! They shouldn’t. Not much anyhow. In a nutshell; I think keeping them alive, getting medical intervention when they’re unwell and basically making sure they don’t look like hobos looking for handouts is what’s needed. So the access to Netflix and every other kind of OTT, the choice of vacation locations amongst other new fangled expectations is the icing on the supremely expensive, uber rich and delicious cake that parenting the Get Zs has become.
Earlier a cake with a cherry on top was considered having arrived. Now there’s frosting (coloured), cherries, sprinkles (also coloured) and no nuts (allergies) on top of a triple layered chocolate layer which has chocolate ganache and chocolate flavoured butter cream frosting!
But seriously, it’s a mixture of difficulty+absolutely dafuqery parenting kids these days. TO’s taken to grumbling and mumbling snark at us more frequently these days. The ‘tude is crossing newer levels as well and I’m quite sure if these kids are not reigned in, we’ll all be facing a world there the adults have been taken hostage (properly this time around) and the small to mid-sized hoomans are ruling the roost and we’re all basically doing room service 24/7!
The plusses, if there are such things, are that you pretty much know what your kids are feeling. Not thinking, because thinking is all about screen time, games and self-indulgent things which make you want to slap them upside their head! The kids these days express A LOT.
Whether its angst, joy, anxiety, vulnerability..they express things at the drop of a pin. Sometimes while the pin is dropping even. Some more than others and as a parent from a generation where this level and extent of expression was relatively rare and therefore not encouraged much; it can take a lot of doing to have to discipline your child and then have a beady-eyed kid look you straight in the eye (yes, I am *that* short) and tell you that he’s very disappointed with the disciplining process and how it played out.
You try to take the moral higher ground only to have that smh-look leveled at you and before you know it the balance of power that was so firmly in your grasp is now slipping out like an eel and you are grasping desperately in front of a kid who’s poopy diaper you changed not so long ago.
So parents to Gen Z’ers…load up! It’s a bumpy road ahead but give thanks for the night when the imps…I mean our beautiful children sleep like they used to as babies and the remote is finally back in our hands. AMEN!
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TO and Red have their little skirmishes from time to time. It mainly arises from TO growing into his teenhood and Red being the perennial good cop who realises that he can also be the bad cop from time to time instead of punting it to me.
This morning’s conversation with TO brought to light a streak of vengeance that seems runs a mile wide especially when it comes to someone who done him wrong. We’ve been pretty strict in enforcing bedtime routines since TO has difficulty getting up in the morning and going for his online classes.
Yes, it does sound ironical that a child can get up without too much rancour and board the school bus at 7am for his in-person classes but treats getting up by 8 am to join a class that starts at 8:20 am, just a few feet awake from where he’s been sleeping as a task akin to that of the Labor of Hercules!
Anyhoo, Red’s had a slight sore throat since yesterday and we let him sleep late this morning. When TO got up, I asked him to go check in on Red and ask him if he wanted a cup of hot coffee to make his throat feel better and immediately the temperature fell a few degrees and a very somber and frowny child turned me to and said, “I don’t think he deserves his coffee! He was up till late watching tv when he should have gone to bed. He has his work in the morning too! He sent me off to bed saying I have classes and he stayed up late…that’s what gave him the sore throat probably too! Does he really deserve our loyalty Ayu?”
Whoever coined the phrase about hell hathing (yeah yeah I know what I wrote) no fury like a woman scorned clearly didn’t factor in children who have had their screen time cut down by parents who then binged on their own shows without thinking about getting caught! I mean to deprive one of coffee as a punishment…oh the agony!
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