Hi, it’s me, the mom of an eight-year-old child who is currently picking off small pieces of coloured tape I put on the floor because some Montessori Mom’s Instagram account said this would distract him long enough for me to take a break and read. Well, it didn’t. What else am I supposed to do? Oh yeah, go to work.
I still have my job, (lucky these days!) and worked different hours through different lockdowns with the schools sometimes open, sometimes closed. I developed plans to hot-air-balloon myself to Germany without getting shot down, and binge-watched YouTube tutorials on how to sew a mask that is no longer allowed to wear. I planned parties and disinvited people again because of another lockdown. Then regulations were about to get a little less discriminatory only to end up right back to Omicron’s venom-style takeover and a collective system-wide shrug of “Well, I guess we are all gonna get this thing anyway” attitude while keeping the mandatory vaccination law in mind just to get angry again.
So, here’s where I am at: I am building a boat, stocking it with teachers and principles, putting my child on it, and floating it out to shark-infested waters. Once it sets sail, I am taking a 50-hour nap, reading and writing for hours while drinking nerve-calming herbal tea all day.
Honestly, I should have thought of this style of “distance learning” years ago. What mom wouldn’t ship their child to be normally educated without lockdown and these dumb COVID measurements (mask while playing with friends at the gym, 15 minutes mask break outdoors and all this bullshit) from sunrise to sunset? It is better than waiting for schools to shut down for widely unpredictable timeframes that force me to discuss with my boss if I can take Monday off again (how this will look… there might be a pattern) like an FBI hostage negotiator. All these problems could be easily solved with my “distance learning solution”.
So, back to my boat. There will be reliable around-the-clock childcare that isn’t some au pair who keeps eating your expensive chocolate and drinks all your booze! Now, you may think, a standard boat that serves as a classroom isn’t protection again COVID, and that’s where the sharks come in. Sharks! A school on a boat surrounded by sharks means nobody goes in or out. No more random indoor playdates with asymptotic siblings that set off frantic contact K1 tracing phone insanity. No more teachers showing up on Monday after someone sneezed on them at the grocery store on Friday afternoon and this person may have had COVID but had a negative test and no symptoms. Schools closed again, all classes dismissed. No! This won’t happen. Have you ever heard of a shark getting COVID? NO! Sharks will eat COVID for freaking breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Yes, that also means any visiting parents risk being eaten alive by sharks, but when you start missing your kid really badly and get the urge to take a swim, just remember the time he walked in on you in the bathroom and was so upset you wouldn’t come to play that he knocked your phone into the toilet and YOU fished it out realizing he didn’t flush after peeing. Hey, let’s be honest here: You can hug him when he is seventeen, and finished with puberty because that is how long this monkey-bred, bat-spit-festering, lab-grown virus “plandemic” will be most likely around.
Plus, he will be floating somewhere in nature without Wi-Fi. Real wildlife! I mean, some sharks, but mostly nature. No more screens! No more begging to re-watch Sing, Shrek 1-4, or all the episodes of Hotel Transylvania. No more shoving an iPad into his Nutella paws and being relieved but also alarmed at his tech fluency. Instead, he will be surrounded by a permanent network of teachers he can touch, hug, and tag. He will never again have to wonder why he cannot have playdates with his friends. He won’t have to throw tantrums because he is also sick of watching your exhausted face alternate between crying, laughing, yelling, and then crying again. He won’t have the small normalcy of his little life disrupted over and over again in an unceasing unpredictable spiral.
Okay, you would never send your kid on this boat, I get it. The idea is still kinda cool for some “tough” days though. So, take a deep breath and after you have taken your child to bed, swallowed your fifth glass of wine, and read this essay while worrying about whether boat distance learning would hurt him, whether your marriage is failing, whether your seven-day headache is cancer, whether you are drinking enough water, whether you are enough for all the people that need you to be something – know that everyone, everywhere, on this entire burnt-out planet, feels exactly the same way. And despite the massive raging shitstorm we are facing, we are still in this thing, but if you can watch my kid so I can listen to this mandatory vaccination talk on Austrian TV without losing my mind, I swear to god, I will build this motherfucking boat for all of us.
