Pandemic Parenting From Hell
Right now, I’m not wearing pants.
I’ve completely given up and now just wear pajamas. My day jammies, however, should not be confused with my night jammies. They are two totally different pieces of apparel. You see, my night pajamas have a little tomato sauce stain from when my husband, David, and I were binge-watching Tiger King, and there’s that moment when Joe Exotic takes his third, hot, completely straight, hillbilly husband, and I go to dip my mozzarella stick into the tomato sauce, but I’m screaming at the TV, and I hit the sauce dish with my foot, and it splatters all over my leg.
I only wear those pajamas at night now. But that could change if I wash them and adopt semi-normal cleanliness standards. But let’s be real: Probably not gonna happen.
My day pajamas are not stained. I wear them, with a cleanish, oversized gray sweater when I Zoom with my colleagues. My colleagues are probably naked from the waist down, anyway. This is what it means to be in this together — pretending shit isn’t happening…as a group.
If my coworkers could see my day pajamas, they’d see how dusty white they are. This is where I wipe my hands while baking sourdough. It is very trendy right now to bake the sourdough. All the cool kids in quarantine are doing it. My neighbor brought me a jar with some starter in it, and I have been feeding it like a newborn baby, making sure it is in a warm place, carefully opening the top to see if the little holes are forming, which tells me that Geraldo is happy. That’s right, I named a jar of fermenting bacteria Geraldo. He is my weird-smelling little friend.
Don’t judge. Geraldo is getting me through self-isolation.
There’s that term again: self-isolation. That’s confusing. See, David and I have four kids. We are never isolated. We have not really been alone since 2005. Isolation is more like a dream than a state-imposed condition. In fact, in the weeks we’ve been quarantined together, David and I have not said one complete sentence that hasn’t been viciously interrupted by a child demanding toast or quesadillas or explaining the intricacies of their poop.
“It looks like a giant brown worm but with pieces of corn in it!”
Obviously, we are homeschoolers now. Yesterday, I spent three hours creating an elaborate scavenger hunt, featuring Pinterest-inspired, hand-lettered cards and objects that I shaped out of clay, stashed through the neighborhood. I Instagrammed it. “You are the coolest mom!” someone wrote in the comments. It took the kids 10 minutes to find everything, and then they were bored again. I am thinking about burning Pinterest to the ground.
But things recently took a turn for the better. Our 4-year-old, Desi, found a dead rat in the backyard. Time for Science Class! She carried it around in a Ziploc all day. His name is also Geraldo. This experience allowed us to work on important pre-K vocabulary concepts like “rigor mortis” and “blood pooling.”
The unlikely hero of the quarantine is our 15-year-old daughter, Lucy. In the absence of her friends, she has taken to her room to watch a solid 15 seasons of Criminal Minds. We try to lure her out with vegan dinners and threats of dinner table conversation, but she is unfazed.
“Total. Isolation. That’s what the governor told us,” she says, her hair freshly washed every day and her nails manicured, as if she might get a date to the quarantine. “I’m saving the planet,” she scoffs without cracking a smile and then locks herself back in her room. I hear the Criminal Minds theme song again, and I know we’ve lost her.
Which brings me to our son, Raffi, who could basically ride out this thing in his socks and underwear, on the couch, eating giant Costco bags of cheese sticks and letting Fortnite be his mommy. He is in this for the long haul. To save water, he has given up bathing or brushing his teeth, and could weather any pandemic as long as he has his Nintendo Switch, an internet connection, and a supply of cheddar cheese cubes. I fear he might have coronavirus because he can no longer smell the stench of his own feet. We stay six feet from him at all times. He hasn’t noticed.
But I am mostly proud of David for how he’s used his time. He has stood over the coffee-maker, morning after morning, painstakingly making and remaking 13-year-old Edie’s coffee to her exacting specifications, since she can no longer go to Starbucks. Finally he nailed it — an Iced Grande Vanilla Latte with whole milk and exactly 18 grams of vanilla, which we think might be two pumps.
“Ummmm, yeah, it’s okay,” she says.
Next week, he’ll watch 100 YouTube videos and learn how to make the little heart swirl on top.
The days are looking pretty much the same around here. Is it 2 p.m. already? Wednesday? Where’s the relief of a Friday? No matter. It’s wine o’clock every damned day. And no need to wait until we all get home from work — it’s always cocktail hour in a crisis! Twenty years from now our kids will tell their therapists about how they were educated by day drinkers.
One big plus is that I no longer have to pack lunches for my kids. On the other hand, they want snacks and home-cooked meals pretty much all the time. And they get hungry at different times, so basically I’m running a short-order diner. For breakfast, the baby wants three sausage patties with a lot of ketchup. Raffi wants eggs, scrambled in butter. Edie, hater of all breakfast food, will eat ramen or quesadillas, and Lucy, who is vegan, wants avocado toast. David is scrambled eggs with a little labneh mixed in, some scallions, and a big ol’ dollop of Spicy Chili Crisp. This doesn’t include midmorning snacks, prelunch bites, postlunch bingeing, a proper British tea, sit-down dinner with all the fixin’s, or evening munchies. After social distancing is called off, I plan to work as a short-order cook in one of those busy diners, where the sassy waitress clacks her gum and hollers, “Gimme an Adam and Eve on a raft and wreck ’em, will ya?”
Now that I have all this free time, I’m working on one of my great aspirations — becoming a viral Tik Tok mom. I’ve been practicing my moves in the mirror, picking out my favorite songs, working on my choreo. Of course, I couldn’t care less about Tik Tok, but my teenagers will be mortified. I’m nearly giddy thinking about how much their friends will love it.
I know it’s hard to be in isolation, and we all share the anxiety about what will happen as we move forward. And, you know, our livelihoods are all going to hell, and we might die hooked up to ventilators, so there’s that — but I have developed some tips for getting through social-distancing at home. I call this list, “Things I Am Going to Be FINE With During the #Coronapocalypse”:
• It’s FINE to wake up feeling completely paralyzed, because the world actually is falling apart. Don’t look at Twitter until you’ve had a few belts of coffee and an SSRI. And maybe whiskey. Morning booze helps.
• Feel free to Instagram that you are about to do yoga, lift weights, finish writing your true-crime novel, and then make sushi. We know it’s a lie. It’s FINE. No one will know you took a preservation-nap on the couch instead. Addendum: It’s okay to watch a video of a chipper 22-year-old blonde Marie-Kondo-ing her bedroom closet, then silently wish her dead. You do not have to get shit done. Resist.
• Be mildly amused by videos of folks fighting over toilet paper, but maintain perspective. Connect to that part of you that would wrestle a lady to the ground for the last box of Playtex tampons. Accept that animal part of yourself. It will help you survive. The animal in you is FINE.
• Eat that pound of Whole Foods dark chocolate that you thought would last the whole quarantine. Forgive yourself. The #Corona15 is real, and it’s FINE.
• Let yourself become super-existential in the shower — if you do, in fact, decide to shower — and ask a lot of questions that can never be answered. Like, Why didn’t our government prepare for this? Can I make a face mask out of my underpants? Can it be the apocalypse without zombies? Why is my apocalypse wardrobe flannel pajamas? Acknowledge that you would be so much more bad-ass wielding a katana and wearing a leather bustier. But stick with the pajamas. This is FINE, too.
• If you are a parent, it’s FINE to turn on Pink Panther so you can have 20 minutes of uninterrupted sex on the bathroom floor. The sex will make a whole lot of everything better, so just do it. If the kids bust through the lock and walk in, pretend you both are searching for a lost contact, coincidentally while naked.
In the end, we are all in this together. Let’s check on each other, barter for goods, be nice to cashiers, bank tellers, mail carriers, medical folks, and gas station attendants, and send little gifts of food and wine to brighten each other’s day. I appreciate every little gift and sweetness that has been given to us.
Still, if you happen by my house and you see my kids in the street, kindly don’t worry about making them come back inside. We are having a fire drill. A long one.
Because #PandemicLife is the new normal, at least for now, we just have to buck up and deal as best we can. Meanwhile, Geraldo sends their best.
