Remember that moment?

That moment when it seemed kids would get to return to classes in the fall, carrying with them only their normal nervousness and school supplies.

That moment when it seemed parents would get to pack lunches, zip up backpacks and send their kids off without worrying too much about what they might bring home.

That moment when it seemed we’d get to move on from all the adult failures that cost so many of the country’s children more than a year of in-person learning and, with it, much more.

My 8-year-old son hasn’t seen his best friend in so long that I’m not even sure if we can call him his “best friend” anymore.

At the beginning of the pandemic, they tried to keep in touch over the phone. But if you’ve ever heard two young boys attempt a phone conversation, you know what it feels like to watch someone try to bicycle through a bog.

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“What’s your favorite color?”

“It’s still blue. What’s yours?”

As painful as it was to witness those exchanges, it hurt even more to see my gregarious 6-year-old unable to make any friends in his first-grade class, because how do you connect with a single person when 24 people are on your screen?

And yet, even on their most challenging days, I knew they were among the lucky. Other kids sacrificed so much more.

When I had to decide whether to let my kids endure another year of virtual learning or return to their elementary school in the fall, I picked the latter out of optimism. I chose it during that hopeful, too-brief moment when we were seeing COVID-19 cases go down, vaccination rates go up and people start to act as if everything was back to normal.

I chose it, figuring that we, adults, were finally getting our act together.

But, nope. Here we are, watching grown-ups blow it again for the nation’s youngest.

Not enough adults took precautions at the beginning of the pandemic. Then, not enough adults got vaccinated. And now, as the highly contagious delta variant poses a renewed threat, not enough adults are doing what is needed to make sure schools are as safe as possible when children return to them in the coming months.

The vaccine-resistant remain vaccine resistant. The anti-maskers remain anti-masks. And now, the shouting, name-calling and political posturing over face coverings that has played out since the beginning of the pandemic has placed children who are too young to get the vaccine at the center of a high-stakes tug of war.

On Tuesday, CDC officials recommended that all teachers, staff members and children older than 2, whether vaccinated or not, wear masks in schools. That guideline falls in line with what the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended earlier this month.

It also comes after a lot of debating, sign-waving and obscenity-flinging by parents, and a dizzying display of divergent responses from state and local officials.

This week, the governor of Texas — one of at least nine Republican-led states that bar school districts from issuing mask mandates — tweeted this: “The time for government mask mandates is over — now is the time for personal responsibility. . . . Every Texan has the right to choose whether they will wear a mask or have their children wear masks.”

Allowing parents to choose whether students wear masks would make sense if adults had consistently shown a willingness during the pandemic to put kids — their own and those of others — before politics. In the absence of that, giving people that choice essentially makes one for everyone: Some children will catch a deadly virus and pass it on, possibly to more vulnerable classmates or family members.

Children don’t tend to be made as sick by the virus as adults, and child deaths of COVID-19 are rare, but children still stand to lose a lot if an outbreak ripples through their schools — and it will ripple without any protections in place.

Consider the unfair math of a case of lice or a cold. Every parent of young children knows it. One itchy head turns into two and, if left untreated, turns into multiple families having to comb countless tiny bugs from their kids’ hair. Just as one fever, if hidden with a dose of well-timed medicine, can lead to multiple classmates and their relatives getting sick and missing days or weeks of school and work.

I hate that when school starts my children will have to wear masks.

I hope that when school starts my children will have to wear masks.

Those may seem contradictory statements, but they are not. They are an acknowledgment that it will be hard on kids to have to sit through classes with masks pulling at their attention, but that we haven’t yet created a safe enough situation for them to go unprotected.

They are a lament that teachers won’t get to see the full range of emotions on their students’ faces, parents with health vulnerabilities will have to fear their children bringing home more than lice, and little boys who are eager to rebuild old friendships and make new ones will have to learn how to hold conversations — boring and giggle-inducing — through a strip of cloth.

We all want school to feel normal again for our children. We want them to be able to read books aloud in class without their voices sounding muffled. We want them to be able to smile at friends across the cafeteria or make silly faces that crack up their classmates.

But we’re not yet in that moment. We’re in the one where children are being forced to wear masks in school, even though it’s adults who should be hiding their faces.