The Fischbowl: Change

Here I am on a February Friday morning, 2022, sick with something-not-covid. So much has changed since the last time I was here... writing, thinking, surfing, sharing. Today I'm thinking about change. The constant it is, the opportunities it brings, the problems it causes.

We're in the midst of "school choice season," where we need to tell our public school district which school we want our child(ren) to attend for the upcoming year. For the past five years, we have pretty much ignored this choice season because we love our K-5 community school and my daughters have thrived there. But this time we are fully engulfed. Change is imminent.

Riloh is headed to 6th grade so we need to find a middle school that is "the best fit for her and our family." I put that in quotes because it feels like the directive that someone has said... me? Our school leaders? Parent friends? I don't know, and I struggle to put applicable criteria to its meaning.

Complicating things further during our first active choice season in six years, our beloved elementary school is changing start times in the fall. The change is significant -- from 9:30am to 7:30am -- and we are pretty certain that means we'll need to find another option for Daphne. But as a rising 4th grader who has endured so much change and uncertainty in her elementary school career, this seems incredibly unfair to her. Getting Daphne to school by 7:15am, however, also seems incredibly unfair to her. And me.

I'm mostly a positive-outlook person for most things. I'm excited for Riloh to become a middle schooler, stretch her wings and watch her practice her take-off to independence. I'm excited for Daphne to become the older kid in her school and feel the confidence she has earned in knowing her way around without the help of her big sister.

I guess change requires risk. Leaps of faith. Expectation that change could bring more change. These are all things I've long been okay with but for some reason it's much harder to make changes now. Do I blame this on the pandemic? Don't we blame all the hard, bad, frustrating, unpredictable things on the pandemic? I definitely want to blame something.

I thought maybe writing this out could be helpful with processing change. It hasn't been, not today. Let's talk about butterflies, the ultimate experts of change.

Monarchs are making a hearty comeback!