Round Hole. Square Peg.

It would seem that living in, and not on the edge of a pandemic is a square peg existence. We yearn for purist 2019 smooth round-hole living, and we can’t have it. We want to abandon masks, sit too close beside friends and loved ones, and we want to travel as we used to – anywhere, anytime, without restriction. We don’t want to use RATs or PCRs or be holed up in isolation for seven days.

It’s a little like parenting at times, isn’t it – we want to drive that square peg into the smooth round hole and wonder why there’s resistance. We want our children to be a reflection of the best of us, or the best of who we have dreamed them to be, and, instead, they are themselves. Beautifully themselves. Along with our young adult children, we often muse at the square peg attempts of my husband and me, to create them into people other than themselves. There were ballet lessons for seven years and Speech and Drama lessons for at least as long, all this for a girl who wanted to surf, play every team sport on offer, and ride her push bike at top speed around a velodrome. And there were trumpet lessons for a boy who had the musicality of his mother, and tennis lessons when he would rather have been playing cricket or reading voraciously. 

There is, of course, that subtle difference between encouraging our children to test out new limits and unashamed persistence at driving this uniquely shaped child into a different shape, someone’s else’s shape or a perfect shape we have imagined since before their birth. A poignantly penned text entitled ‘Welcome to Holland’ is the story of a mother, Perl Kingsley, whose child was born with unexpected complexities. She describes her pregnancy as akin to planning a trip to Italy but finding yourself in Holland when the baby arrives. Yet, she adds, at the end of the piece, her greatest wisdom - ‘But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to go to Italy, you will never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.’

2022 looms a little like that for us all. We want school to be exactly the same. We want all the things that happen in a school year to be unchanged. Exactly as we have imagined them – for many this imagining has been for a lifetime. But things are not as they have always been – not for us at Fairholme, and not for any other child at any school in the world, it would seem. Things have shifted. Things are not as they always have been. They’re not. All the wishing in the world will not direct our flightpath that is unerringly destined for Holland, back to where we imagine we should be – in Italy. 

And thus, we inhale, we pray for strength and perspective, and look for the great things that are held in the palm of 2022. Let us not spend this year mourning for what might have been or should have been, rather, let’s enjoy the special, very lovely things about the year ahead. Let’s stop forcing a square peg into a round hole.

Dr Linda Evans | Principal

REFERENCE

‘Welcome to Holland’