“Fuck,” said Karen Polowski, ‘P21. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.” After two days of distracting herself with heartwarming family sentiments, Polowski had finally realized that her son, Jackson Polowski, really intended to remain at the family house for several months.
“We really love Jackson, and it breaks our hearts every time we have to drop him off at Williams,” Mrs. Polowski told our reporter. “But, like, we still drop him off. And for good reason.”
Mrs. Poloski began scratching her head, as if she couldn’t come up with words she thought appropriate. “He’s our pride and joy, the apple of our eye,” she said of her son, slowly. “It absolutely broke our heart when he chose to go to college far away from home, after we took him on all those visits to schools that happened to be really far from our home.” Then, she gave our reporter a look like “was that good?” Our reporter nodded. “Help,” she mouthed.
Jackson recalls returning home Monday evening to find half of his bedroom filled with his mother’s exercise equipment, his father’s new drum set, and a lazily erased whiteboard that still clearly read “goodbye happiness.”
“Coming home, as in, to our house, where we live? Where your father and I live, usually without you?” Mrs. Polowski recalls saying to her son last Wednesday afternoon when he called with the news that Williams was transitioning to online classes. She describes the day as one of the worst of her life, “Because of the virus and all of the bad things it’s going to do to the world. Not because of anything else.”
The news that Williams was sending students home was heartbreaking to Jackson, but he reports being very grateful to have a loving family that’s happy to have him back home. “Every time they slow down the car at the airport for me to get out and go back to school, they always say, ‘we love you, come home any time at all!’”
“People say a lot of things,” said Jackson’s father, in an interview with The Haystack. He then opened his mouth as if to continue but instead just shrugged and walked away.
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