Schrödinger’s Indecision Matrix

Hi. Happy August. I’m re-sending this post from two years ago, because it’s back-to-school season and I have my ten thousand hours in “back-to-school” angst, which makes me qualified to tell you… you don’t need to kick yourself about all of the things you didn’t know. Seriously. Stop right now. This includes the things that will happen later this year that might make you think “IF ONLY I HAD KNOWN” — it’s okay. You DIDN’T know. You are doing the best you can.

We switched schools this year, from one K-12 public charter school to the K-12 public charter school where my husband teaches. I’ll tell that saga in one run on sentence: my son started kindergarten two years after Jonny left his teaching job for a research & development gig, so we chose the school that was 1. closer to our house and 2. full of church friends—at the end of his kindergarten year, PLOT TWIST, Jonny decided to resume teaching at the other school, and I labored over the decision to switch our kids to his school for a full calendar year.

The same thing happened that often happens when I need to choose from two or more good options. I wound up in the quantum state of indecision where I have both decided and not decided.

Here’s a visual: Schrödinger’s Indecision Matrix (Jonny says this is extra fitting because matrix math was not commonly used in physics until quantum mechanics came on the scene, ironically with Heisenberg [me: “How’s that name spelled?”— him: “I don’t know, Google it.”]. For further verisimilitude, you could change the name to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Matrix and Schrödinger’s Quantum State of Indecision, because Schrodinger goes with superposition.)

I finally settled on the kids attending Jonny’s school. The option of having all three of them in the same place was worth a shot. When we told our son and daughter that they would be switching schools in the fall, I promised them that they would get to drive with their dad and be in the same building with him every day.

Well. Well, well well….

Right at the end of June, I received an email which informed me that the kids had been assigned to a different campus. Jonny’s school has three campuses. All three have elementary schools, Jonny teaches secondary students at one of these campuses. This decidedly complicated the “transportation” element, and really messed with the “be with dad” element.

Several emails confirmed that this was not a mistake, either on my part or the registrar’s, there simply was not room in the second grade for my son at the campus where my husband teaches. They could squeeze my daughter into first grade at his campus, though. Did I want to try that? What I really want to try is to superposition myself in the Schrödinger-Heisenberg Quantum Indecision Matrix for the rest of my life. I kept that to myself.

We decided to send our daughter with Jonny and hope that maybe before the year started they’d find a spot for our son. And if they didn’t, well… maybe the year after that?

Here’s the reel of images that accompany that paragraph:

He’s 18 months old, curled up in an umbrella stroller at gym daycare, crying and clutching a teddy bear, staring at the door for the whole 28 minutes it will take me to do a speed workout.

He’s almost five, and it’s his first day at preschool. His three-year-old sister is dragging him into the classroom, shushing him, saying, “It’ll be alright in a minute. It’ll be alright.”

He’s wearing a uniform and staring straight ahead—it’s his first day of kindergarten, and I watch him decide that he’s not going to cry today.

I kept waiting for the news that he was going to get to attend the campus where his dad teaches. Because it just didn’t feel fair. I felt somewhat betrayed by my Schrödinger-Copenhagen Interpretation Wave Matrix—don’t you know we had to leave good things behind to go forward with this? In the middle of July, I met with my spiritual director at a coffee shop and laid out the situation. I was drinking a hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and may have been lying sideways on my armchair.

“Well,” she said, after taking a sip of her blueberry iced tea, “maybe your son will have an incredible teacher at that campus. And it’s going to be really good for your daughter to get to spend some alone time with her dad.”

And, reader—that’s exactly what happened. Once I had given my original plan a proper burial (it took a while), I realized that the real problem was that there are too many good elementary schools within driving distance of my house. Too much time in the Schrodinger-Bohr-Pauli-Jordan-Planck-Heisenberg Indecision Wave Box Matrix1 can have the unpleasant result of focusing on the negatives—because how else are you supposed to decide? It would be easy to leave something that’s clearly inferior for a better option.

The email telling me that he could go to the same building as Jonny never came. As it turns out, his second-grade teacher is an avid mountain biker and a reading interventionist with 20 years of experience. When he got home after school on his first day, my son announced, “My teacher is cool. I think I got lucky.” After a snack, he asked to go biking in the cul-de-sac. I dragged a camp chair out to the sidewalk and sat in the afternoon sun, watching him and his siblings glide back and forth on their bikes like fish in an asphalt aquarium. He zoomed by, standing on his pedals. He pulled up hard on his handlebars, and the front wheel lifted a few inches off the ground.

(p.s. from the future — he did get into the same campus as his dad and sisters for third grade. He continues to roll with the punches. Or, more accurately, the kickballs to the face. He got a bloody nose during recess yesterday, but, “I still caught it!” )

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