I Sent My Kids Back to School. It Took 3 Days for Them to Get Sick

After a short-lived homeschooling experiment, I made the difficult decision to send my second-grade son and first-grade daughter back to school. Our elementary school in a town in rural Michigan had fully opened at the start of the school year offering in-person classes and a third-party virtual platform with district teacher “mentors” as options. Neither choice felt ideal—neither the uncertainty of a full classroom nor endless hours on a screen appealed to me—so I decided to try my hand at homeschooling. It only took three days for me to throw in the towel.

By the end of that first week, the combination of my own full-time job, a very active toddler, and no supporting childcare left me completely exhausted on every level. I had fears about COVID-19, but if I’m being honest, they felt a little irrational; both my husband and my mom (who is living temporarily with us) are math teachers in the district where my kids attend, and both are currently teaching in-person. The hard truth is, if the novel coronavirus is at that school, it’s coming home with us whether or not my kids go. 

So I made the call to send them back. They were happy to go back and make new friends, so why make my life more difficult than it needed to be? Off they went, bright-eyed and in real clothes—purchased hastily when I realized my son especially had outgrown almost every single piece of clothing he had—for the first time in months. 

Their first day was a Tuesday. By Thursday evening, my daughter was running a fever.

Like dominos, the rest of the nine people living in my house went down, one after another, right down to the one-year-old. Our symptoms ranged from runny noses to congestion to coughing to fatigue (although in my case, a toddler who doesn’t sleep through the night kind of blurred the lines on that specific symptom). We discussed getting tested for COVID-19, but our symptoms were mild and testing is extremely limited in our area. Ultimately, we decided to follow the school’s outlined protocol for mild illness and kept both kids home until they were fever-free for over 24 hours.

The kids got over their sickness fairly quickly, but it took a full month before everyone in our house was symptom-free. My sister, a nursing student who had experienced the same head-cold-type symptoms we did, wound up testing positive for COVID-19 shortly after we had all recovered. Had I exposed my kids to the virus by sending them back to school?

The decision over how to navigate my children’s schooling in the midst of a pandemic that’s claimed over 7,000 lives in my state has been agonizing to me as a mom. I stressed about it for weeks. My husband, of course, had input. But because he works out of the home—meaning I would be saddled with the full responsibility of either virtual schooling or homeschooling—the decision ultimately rested on my shoulders.

It feels like I’m weighing my own needs against my children’s. Frankly, it makes me feel like a shit mother.

I know that no one normal human being should be expected to homeschool full-time and work full-time and have a toddler full-time and manage a household full-time. Even in the context of the superhuman standards we often hold moms to, that’s ridiculous. But these aren’t exactly normal times, are they? Faced with two options that literally keep me up at night, it feels like I’m weighing my own needs against my children’s. Frankly, it makes me feel like a shit mother.

I don’t know a mom who isn’t feeling this way. “I do need a mommy moment too, so the time away would help us both,” notes Lydia Elle, a consultant and the mom of an elementary schooler from Los Angeles. “But there’s the worry that she could get sick going to school. I’m entrusting her health to the many people that she will exponentially come in contact with.” Parents everywhere are facing similar situations, staring down even more difficult challenges as the cold-weather months—and the resulting inevitable increase in all types of respiratory viruses, even with precautions in place—approach.

“We sent my now six-year-old to kindergarten at the end of August and he came home with a cold within the first week,” Laura Burton-Bloom, 36, a mom of three from Montreal, says; she’s unsure whether or not it was COVID-19. “After a day, all seven members of our household were sick. It really put it into perspective the risk we face.”

Our district initially opened with masks required only for common areas indoors for K-5 students, but with new emergency orders in place, all elementary students are now required to wear face masks all day, even outdoors during recess. I’m behind the mask mandate, but I wonder if it’s enough—how much protection are they really providing for a group of 30 six-year-olds who share the same classroom air all day long?

“I wonder if it would be easier to just keep them with me and not worry about what they experience out there.”

Briana Meade, 32, a mom of a third and a first grader from North Carolina, works from home as a health care communications professional—she knows my struggle. Her kids attend an in-person charter school two days a week, with strict restrictions that include a school app to record temperatures and log health, all-day masks, and no options to use the playground at recess.

“I worry about the compassion, or lack thereof, they might experience in a school environment where the focus is not really on my kid anymore, but on the larger world and issues of COVID,” she says. “Sometimes I wonder if it would be easier to just keep them with me and not worry about what they experience out there.”

Our first foray into sickness after staying home since March was a chilling reminder of how easily an entire household can get sick. It brought up a whole host of new questions for our family: If one child is sick, should the other stay home as a precaution? What about my husband, who is a teacher and therefore risks exposing his own students if someone in our household is sick? Should we be tested every time someone has symptoms?

After my kids got sick, I found myself questioning if I should continue to send them to school. I worried that our experience was just the first in what would be a vicious cycle of nonstop illnesses and that, while they had mild symptoms this time, another exposure could be worse. My two oldest girls are doing our district’s virtual school option. They’re fully independent in their schooling and old enough to make that choice on their own but, as we found in the spring, the experience was a nightmare for my younger kids. All day on screens plus twice-daily meetings was double the work of in-person school. For the younger kids, it felt like my choices boiled down to homeschooling, which offered more flexibility, or sending them back into the classroom.

As we head into the cold-weather months, I am feeling cautiously on edge about what the rest of the school year will hold. It was one thing to send them back in August, when they were excited and eager and the sun was shining. But it feels like another to keep sending them, when they are tired and complaining about their ears hurting from wearing masks and spending time outside in the fresh air will soon be a thing of the past. Every day I debate the decision over and over again, weighing what’s best for my kids and for me against the ever-shifting path of the virus. It’s exhausting.

I finally came to an earth-shattering conclusion: I can take the school year day-by-day if I need to. And I’m allowed to change my mind.

I’m a person who likes to plan, but this year has taught me that, if nothing else, plans have to be flexible. I don’t have to worry about what the school might think about me or what the other parents are doing—I just have to focus on doing the best I can for my family with what I have available to me right now. As long as I can learn to adapt, my kids will too.

In the last few weeks, our school district has been having regular, isolated cases of COVID-19. Thus far, they seem to be well-controlled, but as I typed this story, another school email came through confirming a case in an elementary school teacher. Deep down, I feel like I’m just waiting for a full-blown outbreak to happen. But for now, I’m living in a type of limbo, trying to navigate my family through the crisis, ever watchful of new updates and temperatures as I take my kids to school every day.

I don’t know if I will ever feel confident that the choices I am making for our family are the right ones. But I do know one thing for certain: I’ll be hanging on to all of our homeschool supplies for a while.

Chaunie Marie Brusie is a writer and a mom of five from Michigan. Find her on Twitter at @ChaunieBrusie.

Originally Appeared on Glamour