It’s July 12th 2021. My daughter is in preschool. My son is at day camp.
It’s strange that such small acts can feel so profound. But, let’s face it: it’s been a weird 16 months…
As a parent with two young children, in the Before Times, daycare was just part of the routine—an expected service like water and electricity.
Just to get it out of the way, I fully acknowledge my privilege in making a statement like that. I had both the access and monetary stability to pay someone else to watch my kids—a luxury that, over a year ago, I didn’t fully comprehend. The social contract dictated that I be a “good” parent in the mornings, evenings, and weekends. And, it was someone else’s job to take care of them during those crucial working hours. That’s just how the system functioned.
But, if anything, 2020 proved how fragile the system really is—how we’re all just sort of teetering along on the precipice of disaster without realizing it, never fully appreciating (or at least willing to accept) the existential dread that always looms in the chasm below. If it’s not daycare, it’s job security or mental health, or relationships or human connection. We’re all just an inch away from slipping into the void.
I already know too much has been written about the pandemic. It defined 2020 (and 2021) and it will continue to define the years to come. It has forever changed all of us. I remember flying on a plane in January 2020 (coming from a film festival no less where I sat in a movie theater with strangers all day and watched movies...hah! The hubris!) and my seat mate was wearing a face mask. It was an odd visual at the time, something that seemed foreign and out of place. How ironic that seems now…how naive I was…
Schools closed on March 15th 2020. Our six-year-old switched to Zoom kindergarten (remember when we all didn’t know what Zoom was?). We pulled our two-year-old out of her in-home daycare run by an El Salvadorian mother and daughter who had become family to us. And, then, we waited. Like everyone else with the privilege to do so, we hunkered down.
“It’s just two weeks,” I told myself. “I can handle that.”
The bartering began by week 3. If we can just get through April…
Then, if we can just get through Spring….
And, then, if we can just get through Summer…
By fall, I stopped making ultimatums. This was just life now. My six-year-old would attend first grade virtually, never stepping foot into the building for the school year. My daughter was home permanently—her early memories of her in-home daycare faded into the ether.
I struggled to somehow maintain a functioning freelance business, working weird hours…turning down work….stressing out about taking on too much or not enough. My time was spent either working or watching kids, which soon became abundantly clear, our society refuses to acknowledge, is also work.
I realize “pandemic fatigue” is not an original experience, and I know that loneliness is its own form of hell. But, I don’t think there is anything quite like quarantining with children under 6. In becoming a parent, you don’t prepare yourself for this idea that they will always just be there. In your head, there are play dates and camps and babysitters and, of course, school. But, COVID stripped all that away, laying bare just how many hours in a day there are to fill.
The thing about taking care of kids is that it’s not necessarily “hard”…it’s just spectacularly boring most of the time, which in turn, makes it hard. You struggle to find activities to fill 15 minute windows of time until you just can’t take it anymore and, frustrated, you give in and let them watch TV. And, then, of course, you feel guilty when their little eyes glaze over and they go comatose while watching Wild Kratts.
The great irony of pandemic boredom with kids is that, as an adult, there is so much you want to be doing that you can’t (in 2020, every time I read a tweet from someone saying they were tired of binging Netflix I wanted to headbutt a brick wall).
Throughout the year, I yelled more than I should have and I feel guilty for that. I let them watch too much TV and eat too much dessert and play too much Minecraft. I feel guilty about that too.
But, there was beauty in it too. In the summer, which is my wife’s busy time at work, I became the primary child care provider. And, in the freeing absence of no online school requirements, I found activities for us to do…hikes to go on…stuff that took us away from people but brought us closer together. I cherish that time, even if something really crummy is what caused us to have it.
The old cliché is that you watch your kids grow before our eyes. But, for modern working parents, that’s not really true. So much of that growth is spent under the watchful gaze of someone else. But, COVID forced so many of us to flip the script.
I saw my kids…really saw them. Saw them grow and develop in a way that is altogether foreign to most working parents. I literally knew what they were doing at every moment of the day. I watched my daughter learn how to talk…in real time…each day a new word being attempted or becoming more understandable. I knew what my son was learning, my knowledge of his schooling no longer relegated to a hurried parent-teacher’s conference during some stolen lunch break.
What is love if not the willingness to share our finite time with someone?
As modern “basic” parents, how much of our interaction with our kids is simply shepherding them off to someone else? We talk a lot about wanting the best for them—good schools, fun activities, the nicest stuff…the most organic of organic foods. But, if the pandemic taught me anything, it’s realizing how much they benefit from simply spending time with them. In an attention-starved world, attention is very much a resource, and we are too often wasting it on shit that doesn’t deserve it: what is love if not the willingness to share our finite time with someone? If our children are truly the most important thing in our lives, why do we spend so much money to not be around them? I’ve thought about that question a lot over the past year.
I exercised more. With “going to the gym” now a literal impossibility, I found myself devoid of my primary excuse not to work out. We subscribed to an online exercise service (no, not that one). I didn’t get buff, but I started to form the initial stages of abs: if you squinted at my torso that blurry image would look like something almost hot was there. I started to take sad and pathetic shirtless selfies in the mirror out of vanity. I imagined a world where I was attractive and it felt good to live in that fantasy. I did this for myself and nobody else.
I cooked a lot. Dinner prep became “my time.” I’d slip in my earbuds and chop away while listening to podcasts with people who weren’t my friends but I pretended were my friends because the pandemic revealed to me that I actually don’t have very many friends . I know more about strangers’ lives than I do my own extended family. I didn’t order take out as much as everyone else in the world seemed to.
I bought a skateboard because I’m an idiot. I fell and decided maybe I actually didn’t want to learn how to skateboard anymore.
I played video games, a hobby I abandoned in college. I’d wake up before dawn so my kids wouldn’t discover me decapitating demons with an axe or disintegrating zombies with a shotgun
As things went on and on and on, I became enraged by how quickly the rest of the world decided to move on. How quickly the deaths became statistics…how quickly capitalism tried to sell me shit in response…how it was suddenly no longer cute when my two-year-old would be screaming in the background of video calls.
“Seriously, you don’t have childcare yet?”
When we hit the one year anniversary in March 2021, I didn’t share the optimism that so many felt. Vaccines were here, yes, (a legit miracle), but it felt like we were doing the dance before entering the end zone…pulling an Oberyn Martell.
Just be patient you assholes! Wait a few more weeks…numbers are still ridiculously high…
I learned that work is fundamentally broken in our country. I learned that we are expected to work all the time and people think it’s weird when you don’t. I learned most Zoom calls could have been phone calls. I learned people who don’t have kids have no clue what taking care of them actually entails. I learned that people find solutions out of everything…that those with means or higher risk tolerance formed “COVID safe” (e.g. not totally safe, but f-ck it, we’re tired of watching our kids) teaching bubbles with nannies or au pairs or other foreign words for nannies. I learned that everyone’s definition of “safe” varied so widely that it often made me feel like I was living in some Dogtooth reality where the meanings of words were different
But, after 484 days…after bouts with depression and panic attacks and rage …we’re here…I made it to the other side. I think.
My kids are under someone else’s care and I’m typing this alone in my office. The “end” of the pandemic is a relative statement, I realize (some people gave up months ago and others are still struggling through it…there are variants…kids still can’t vaccinated, etc.), but this is my finish line. Marathon done. Give me a cheap medal
I’m honestly not sure where we go from here. The pandemic left me irrevocably changed, yet everything is still the same. We’re back to “normal”, but, also, we’re not. At least, I know I’m not
Life is broken. I’m broken. But, I realize that humans are resilient and I hope that the anxiety of this past year will fade with time…I hope I will start to repair myself. I long for when all this becomes a “remember when” anecdote that is accompanied with a knowing nod. Years later, I’ll turn to my son and say, “remember when you went to first grade on a computer? Remember when you went to birthday parties on Zoom…remember when we hung out every day?”
And, he’ll shrug and smile with performative recognition. And, we’ll laugh. And, inside I’ll want to cry because, deep down, I’ll know he’s probably already forgotten all that time we spent together.
But, I never will.
