In Search Of Middle Ground

My children shouldn’t be friends. Before the pandemic, I could see them growing apart. Born four-years-and-four-days apart, my older son turned eleven and had slowly started drifting away from my daughter, who had just turned seven. It was natural. Normal. He was into his video games, and his friends, and baseball, and his little sister was decidedly not into those things. She was into her Beanie Boos, and creating elaborate stories involving her Littlest Pet Shop, and tea parties. At school, she and her friends took great delight in following him and his older friends around at recess, begging them to play tag, while all he and his friends wanted to do was play soccer or talk about Fortnite. Playing games together at home was a frustration because their development levels were different.

And then, one week after their birthdays in March of last year, everything came to a halt. He turned eleven and she turned seven. While their dad worked outside our home through the pandemic, my kids were trapped with only me and each other for company. Gone were the friends, the extended family, the activities outside our home. It was just us. And them.

At first, it was a push and pull of emotions. My son was hitting puberty and found himself angry at the situation we were in, all the time. He would get mad at the smallest things and cry like the world was, in fact, ending. My daughter lost focus, floating from one activity to another in minutes, unable to concentrate. Both kids dealt with the anxiety that their dad would catch Covid -- hearing that they had to stay inside to keep safe, but watching him still head into the vast emptiness to work every morning. They were both sad and frustrated to be separated from their friends and from the loss of routine. We tried to connect via Google Classrooms and Kids Messenger, but both found that it wasn’t the same and actually increased their agitation with the situation, reminding them of their new, lonely existence without their compadres.

I just hung on. Went on autopilot. Tried not to think about the fact that I had to shelve plans for my new business. Attempted to continue to write while processing the sadness that my career re-start was on indefinite hold again. Deal with my own fear that if my husband did, in fact, contract Covid at work that I could lose him forever. Every morning, I affixed my mask to keep my own anxiety from my children, but it still vibrated underneath my skin.

Pandemic homeschooling was the crescendo. My son was agitated that most of my time needed to be spent helping his little sister because she couldn’t work independently like he could. My daughter fought to keep focused when her brain wouldn’t allow her to concentrate and my son interrupted us constantly.

Then, one day, it all fell apart. I was frustrated that my daughter was having trouble reading, and my son was angry because he didn’t want to work by himself anymore, and my daughter was upset because she couldn’t read the words on the page, and we all just cracked open and raged at one another. There were words and tears and toys thrown as we all just let everything out. When the dust settled, and we gathered ourselves, I realized that somewhere in the midst of all these unfulfilled needs, we needed to find a middle ground. If this was going to work with everyone so close, there needed to be a rebuilding of relationships, from the bottom, up.

So, we stopped what we were doing and I told them to build a Hot Wheels track together. It was science. It was physics! It was something that would just distract us from the misery of our current existence. I spelunked into our storage room and pulled out the bin of tracks that hadn’t been used in over a year, and told them if they didn’t want to do schoolwork, they had to work together on this project. They spent the entire rest of the morning creating an elaborate track that covered our basement. They worked together. They didn’t fight! It was a miracle.

After they were done, we sat down and talked about the common ground we found. My daughter created dioramas in between the tracks with her Littlest Pet Shop; my son created elaborate jumps and turns in between. Both of them raced the cars and categorized them by which cars worked best. My son told my daughter stories about where many of his favourite cars were from (he has a memory like an elephant) and my daughter delighted in hearing stories from before she was born. From there, we came up with a list of things where we could find mutual interests. Toys that were put away to be sold at the next garage sale—blocks, train tracks, cars—were dug out of storage and found new life with them both, in different ways. My daughter asked if my son could teach her how to play Minecraft, and he agreed. Inexpensive art supplies were ordered from Amazon that both could use, at their different levels of abilities. Even just brainstorming that they both wanted to walk to Tim Horton’s to grab donuts and hot chocolate seemed like a milestone in finding this new shared mutual understanding.

And bit by bit, the fighting lessened. My son decided he liked the role of ‘teacher’ and took pride in the things he would show his sister, so much so that he started to talk about becoming an elementary school teacher one day. My daughter delighted in having his attention and would bring him along with her immense imagination in the stories she told, extracting my son from his comfortable linear-thinking brain.

Common ground is a difficult place to find. It means we have to bend. We have to listen to people's needs. We need to shift our thinking based on new knowledge. It is not martyrdom. It is not yielding to the will of another. It is finding a togetherness and in that togetherness, finding our personal contenment. There are adults that cannot accomplish this feat, no matter how many management/leadership books they read. Teaching my children to find the middle ground is something powerful because it's a skill they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Now that they’re back in the same school, it’s different. They are separated—no longer seeing each other at recess or in the hallways or assemblies—safely negotiating their days with the help of their teachers. But when we were sent into quarantine because of a case in a classroom this time, it felt easier as they slipped back into their relationship at home.

That was a year ago. Another round of birthdays have come and gone, however this time, they went into their new ages with a better relationship and a new understanding of each other. And, as a parent, it makes my heart happy to see their resilience, brought about in the worst of situations. It is by no means perfect, but the comradery makes it feel ever so slightly easier for everyone. Under all the pressure of the world around them, it seemed that a tiny diamond formed as they grew and changed, together.

(c) Elvira Berezowsky