In Defense of Snow days

When we moved to the Northeast 12 years ago, people’s concern for us was specific: How will they handle the winters? After our first year in Maine, however, my concern for people everywhere else we had lived — California, Florida, Virginia — was equally specific: How do they exist without the promise of snow days?

Sure, it snowed occasionally in Virginia, but in California and Florida, the only time our family had an unexpected day off was in the aftermath of a natural disaster. It’s not a true “family day” if your roof has been blown off and you have no air conditioning in Florida in August. 

Snow days, it turns out, are the best part of winter. They are the north’s best kept secret, a perk for adults, children — families. They are Christmas morning, Thanksgiving and the first day of summer rolled into one. Even when snow days delay the start of summer by a day or two, nothing compares to going to bed to the sound of snow plows and dreaming of an early-morning call from the school department. And when the call does come, the house is alive at 5 a.m. with the promise of pancakes, board games and sledding with friends. 

Snow days are some of our kids’ best childhood memories. As a mother, they are some of my fondest memories, too. So I was concerned when school departments began announcing plans to eliminate snow daysnow that everyone has figured out remote learning (thanks, COVID). 

But I’m not concerned just for sentimentality’s sake. I’m also concerned about the message we are sending our children. Ever since I got my first email address and, later, a smartphone, my work life has seeped into my home life. Beginning around 2009, I was suddenly available not just during work hours, but also while making dinner or watching a movie before bed. For adults, the phones in our back pockets have allowed constant work intrusion, a disruption to the work-life balance.

And in recent years, mental health experts have begun warning against it. Getting your “life in balance” never had more application than after electronics allowed our work life into our home life.

So why are we starting kids on this path in kindergarten? Why have we decided to tell them that just because the school is closed and the roads are impassable it doesn’t mean you can’t continue to burn the midnight oil? 

Our children have a whole lifetime ahead of them wrestling with work-life balance. They have a lifetime of being pinged at dinner or feeling obligated to check email before bed. Shouldn’t we begin teaching them now that sometimes work — and school — can wait? Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. And there is nothing wrong with taking a day off for family. 

We’re on the tip of a slippery slope now that remote learning has entered our lives. We adults have lived with the crushing reality of work-from-home life since the early 2000s. Let’s allow our kids to escape it while they can, and maybe, through our example, teach them to lead more balanced lives as adults in the future. 

Instead of telling our children that one missed day of school is a waste, let’s tell them that snow days are an important reminder to slow down, relax, and connect with family. In a pandemic era, we need those reminders — those snow days — more than ever.

Hanging on to a Thin Hanging File

This is where I am. This is how motherhood is going right now. 

One son, my oldest, Ford, has a file in the family cabinet that is full. His SAT scores, class rank, and future plans — ones that don’t include me or his father — are tucked away behind a label that has had his name on it for more that 17 years. It’s a file that is busting at the seams; it takes up more room than even our bank statements. 

In less than a year, Ford leaves home to go to college. 

My youngest son, Lindell, has a file that can still hold its contents. Its accordion bottom is not stretched by years of report cards and reading scores. His most recent file is a contract with his best friend, a hand-written, photo-copied promise that they will never to live more than 20 minutes away from each other. 

Somewhere mashed in the middle is Owen, who will be 16 soon. I know what that means: Soon he will drive. Soon he will have test scores and college applications. Soon Owen will set his sights on someplace that isn’t home. 

Owen’s file has room for 3 more report cards and a couple mid-year assessments. His kindergarten reports, the ones where teachers made handwritten notes in cursive, are stuffed in the back, behind GPAs, reading scores and the log of his driving hours. 

It’s as if 17 years of motherhood are contained in three files. And when I saw them this past week, I sat down and cried. 

Ford’s bountiful file looms there like a clock that is ticking too loud when you are trying to sleep. I don’t even need to go through its content. I know what’s there. It’s college invitations, yet fulfilled, and transcripts that in just a few month’s time someone will need. The early notes home — the ones where he was Student of the Month or had raised the most money for Jump Rope for Heart — are stuffed and wrinkled in the back. But I can still remember the face. I remember the dark brown eyes and smile that filled his face as he ran from the bus to the front door with a certificate from his teacher. I remember the doctor’s notes I brought home with his weight, height and percentiles. 

They are all stuffed into a file folder from Staples that has seen better days. 

But Lindell’s file…his has room. Lindell’s teachers still send hand-written notes. College is somewhere he doesn’t want to go. Not yet. And the photocopied contract with his friend lies on its side, in the front of the file, like a marker of time. 

This too shall pass. 

I remember the month that Owen’s voice changed. One day he came home from school, and before he slammed his bedroom door, he told me that I had packed the wrong thing for lunch. His soft voice was scratchy and high. 

I texted my husband at work and said, “Owen’s doing something really weird with his voice.”

“Maybe it’s changing,” Dustin said. 

“No, I think he’s just trying to annoy me.”

And sure enough, two weeks later, the soft, child-like sound of Owen’s voice was gone. In another month, he’d come through the door looking so much like a man, Adam’s apple and all, that it would cause me to catch my breath. 

I no longer knew his skin, his face, his hair, his voice. When I reached out to hug him, he recoiled. His fingers and toes were foreign to me. 

And the folder in his file upstairs was getting fatter. 

I know I’m on borrowed time with Lindell. He still holds my hand as we walk into the grocery store. I’m still the first person he asks for in the morning. And when he scrapes his knee, he still wants a Band-Aid His favorite toys are Legos. He watches cartoons. He wants his peanut butter and jelly cut into funny shapes. 

But soon he won’t. His file is expanding, too. 

Next month, Lindell begins middle school. It’s hard to believe. I remember him running down the sidewalk screaming “Mommy” as his backpack bounced up and down on his back and his older brothers sauntered behind, trying to be cool. 

Lindell still gets on his knees when he comes home to greet the dog. 

Lindell still wants waffles shaped like the Death Star. 

Lindell still thinks staying up past 9 p.m. is a treat and that falling asleep in a sleeping bag is only surpassed in awesomeness by picking out the theme for one’s birthday cake.

He is amused by the back of a cereal box.

He thinks girls are strange.

He hangs his Little League hat from a hook each night.

And he keeps his Lego creations on a special shelf. 

Yet soon, he will change, too. His file will be consumed by everything official, like test scores and applications. He will set his sights on someplace that isn’t home. 

But for now, he’s my baby, the last one with a soft voice and quick tears. And I am clinging to every day, until his file expands just like his brothers’ and he leaves a man that I only know because of the glimmer of the child in his smile and the fattened folder upstairs that tells me he once was a baby I held in my arms and whispered, “I can’t wait to see who you become.”