I have a friend who I greatly admire. She’s bright, funny, intelligent, articulate, and (dang it all), beautiful and refined on top of it all. She has it all together with a husband and four amazing children. They are the picture-perfect family. Until everything fell apart.

Enter Covid-19.

The pandemic hit her family hard. Like wrecking-ball hard. Her youngest son took a nose dive and she recently wrote about him and what they’ve gone through this past year. As I read it, I thought, “We are two mothers with the same story. We live in parallel universes.” It certainly makes me realize how her words will resound with other mothers.

She writes, “Done with the quarantine almost before it started, my son was desperate to reclaim a sense of agency he felt had been ripped away from him. Confined in an environment he already viewed as restrictive, dubious about claims of what the virus would do to him, he pushed back…What I saw all around me were kids suffering from lethargy and restlessness by turns, limping through school under the constant shadow of overwhelm, while services and infrastructure faltered.”

When you read her story (link below), you may want to cry out #MeToo. Welcome! Join the Covid Club. We are living as a village of parents scratching our heads and pulling our hair out, trying to raise the village idiots. But…she also offers level-headed, brilliant advice for how to handle Covid Kids. Something true to hold onto in this time of uncertainty.

https://becky-davidson.medium.com/how-the-pandemic-sparked-an-identity-crisis-in-my-high-schooler-and-the-counterintuitive-approach-ce8544372452