I gave it a thorough cleaning, in which I blindly dumped every drawer and toy bin in the center of the room and carefully weighed the consequences of throwing each item out. I held every single crayon, rubber ball, and McDonald’s happy meal toy in my hand and made an internal pros and cons list. I asked the hard questions like, does this Minions figurine bring my family joy? This is all quite unusual for me, since I’m a sentimental hoarder who is married to an even more sentimental hoarder. We have Christopher Pike books and personalized mixed tapes lined up neatly in the basement and have no desire to give any of these 30-year old items away in the near future.

But our living room, like much of 2020, resembled a dumpster fire of emotions and cheese string wrappers (yes, we had actual garbage on the floor) and my husband and I had absolutely no choice but to start picking away and putting that fire out.

The living room table, a gorgeous walnut heirloom inherited from my grandmother, had a pile of items approximately 1.5 feet high. By “items” I am referring to markers with no lids, Math worksheets (most untouched), several binders, and no fewer than 50 half-filled Hilroy notebooks, the ones with the map of Canada on the front just in case you forgot what country you live in. These are, of course, fossils of the past 6 months, the remains of attempting to homeschool two children under the age of 8.

Before working in tech, I was a teacher and I adored it. I loved the last week of August, where I would walk into an empty classroom and begin to prepare for the school year. I loved putting the students’ names on everything and fastidiously crafting that first introductory email to parents. It was never easy, but it always felt good to have a fresh start.

And now, as we prepare our living room for homeschooling and a few scary rounds of math worksheets and tears, I am wondering how we got here. I mean, I know how it all happened, but I am wondering why and how we came to the conclusion that children’s lives were not worth keeping, you know, alive and shit. Deciding to homeschool our children was by no means a choice – we were forced to do it, forced by an educational system that does the absolute bare minimum to support children with disabilities.

My son has chronic lung disease and I’m no scientist, but I’m pretty sure that the novel Coronavirus loves to prey on shitty lungs. The BiPAP machine he has been using at night for the past 6 years is there to inflate and deflate his alveoli, something most of us take for granted, but it can only do so much. Twice he has been intubated; twice he has been extubated. Twice we have listened to “the talk” from a doctor explaining how intubation not only saved his life but also likely damaged his lungs in the process, so please take care he doesn’t ever get sick again in the future. Sure.

We have always done our best to keep him safe, and that’s part of the problem. We assumed others would too. His school is currently not prepared to support children with life-threatening illnesses during a worldwide pandemic. And sadly, they never will be. Even prior to March of this year, he was barely able to get to gym class on time due to line-ups at the school elevator (and let me tell you, there is ALWAYS a line-up at the elevator, which is no fewer than 76 years old and which I have been trapped in myself; another story for another time). I mean, of course the children with disabilities are the ones left behind here, the ones with no escape plan.

My son’s school has no plan in place to keep him safe, like not even a tiny, teensy bit.  They can’t guarantee he would have the same EA (Educational Assistant) each day, the person responsible for pushing his wheelchair and working the elevator, amongst other things. This reminds me of a similar situation earlier in the year, when Ontario’s nursing homes were hit with a staggering number of Covid-related deaths, attributed to the fact that employees were forced to work in multiple homes due to budget cuts (next blog post title: Dear Doug Ford, why can’t you learn once from your past mistakes? And why do you suck so hard at everything?)

Over the past few days, several people have referred to our decision to keep the kids at home as a choice. I find this incredibly offensive: we have no choice. Choice implies that both options were viable, and in-person schooling is simply not a viable option. This is definitely not a choice; there is no decision-making process or pros/cons list involved when it comes to my son’s life. Our only job is to keep him (and his lungs) safe. And please don’t lecture me on the potential impact on his mental health and social skills, because guess what? MY mental health tends to plummet whenever I have to watch him being resuscitated or intubated, so please check your health privilege at the door before we start a conversation.

As I toiled in the living room amongst a vast pile of Hilroy notebooks (so many! but all are half-blank? why!) I realized that none of this matters. Keep it all! Burn it down! Who cares! Will my son learn how to divide fractions this year? Will my grade 1 daughter actually learn to read a sentence? Will they spend more time playing Animal Crossing than doing work? Probably, yes, definitely,  maybe. I decided, last-minute, to pull some old toddler toys from the donation box. Because I can. And because it felt good to actually choose.