It’s nice to sit down and write again. The story of my pause is like millions of others over the past two years, with added variations. But what I do want to focus on is a theme I’ve discerned during this time, one that still continues.

I’ve seen several articles over the last two years, like “The Parents Are Not Ok” and other such things. The title is low-hanging fruit, but inevitably they’re vague, sound whiney, and in the end turn people that don’t have kids (and ones that do), off.

Articles like this throw us into a war of being mad at people for getting to the end of their Netflix watchlists and every puzzle known to man, when the “other half” can barely work or sleep because of their little tiny humans. But it’s not really about that even though media would prompt us to believe it, that’s just the easy-argue-point fluff that tired and stressed brains latch to, kids or no.

For me, the real issue is before covid, I was a yes parent.

When I take those words in, it’s the intense loss of control that gets to me the most and winds it’s tendrils around the sane part of my brain. This is why the last two years have been devastatingly challenging (from a parental perspective, there are other reasons of course but that’s not my focus in today’s writing); I’ve basically been parenting with one arm and both feet tied behind my back. Said another way–

My word is no longer good, or merely iffy at best.

In a universe where parental word has firmly been doctrine since the beginning of time, the doctrine has now become a schizophrenic drunk riding a tricycle on a tightrope.

I can tell my kid that we are going to do something or go somewhere, and it’s Russian roulette. Will I be a liar today? Or no? Will my word survive a system I have no control over? If I’m planning something should I even tell my kid, with the knowledge I might yet again be backed into the corner of delivering disappointing news? So we now live in a world of surprises as a result? I guess it depends on what my sanity, and our relationship, can weather.

As a quick aside, I have no issue delivering disappointing news in either normal or stressful situations… I’m not simply wanting to avoid confrontation here. What I’m talking about is constantly having to do it, when I have no control over the circumstances of the situation. Basically Chinese water torture for your soul that wears you down to the bone.

So a very recent example among maaaaany– we had our first snow day a few weekends ago. My kiddo, who’s almost 7, made highly parent-encouraged plans to play the *whole* day with neighbor best friend, complete with all the goods like movies and hot chocolate when it got too cold. The night before the snowstorm, we find out neighbor friend’s little brother was a very close contact at his school.

Shit. My husband and I had an important conference to go to the following week, one we both *really* wanted and needed to attend in our various roles, and one that was vaccine and mask mandated (aka you can’t show up with a cough). We’ll touch on vaccine mandates later on, but in this snow day situation even if I didn’t mind that my completely vaccinated family is playing with the completely vaccinated family next door, with no actual positive test, I now became a “no parent” because the risk at this one point in time was too high.

Not the risk of getting sick, but the risk of sounding sick. Of having a cough. Of not being able to fly. Of missing this important thing we needed to attend.

Because no one is allowed to cough anymore, even if it’s not covid.

We did play outside that weekend and just stayed 6 feet apart, which is really hard for kids and I felt like the overlord jerk having to watch and mediate the distances (thankfully neighbor friend’s parents totally understood and were super helpful too), but man, really??

Every day is a new day of, I wonder what we’re going to be able to do today. The additional challenge here, which I think has been pivotal in wide-spread feelings of depression and isolation, isn’t the physical inability to see others when everyone is on lockdown; it’s that everyone’s lives are slightly different and each family has a slightly different level of risk.

I’ve written about that before, but with time I’m starting to truly see the deep effect it’s had on people. In previous writings, my point in bringing it up was to be like hey, be nice to other people and stop treating each other like shitheads cause we’re all angry about this. And that still holds true, we must always uphold freedom of opinion and patience in allowing others to express that freedom.

However people are pack animals; we like living in herds and for the people in our herds to have something in common with us. Parents are a particular subset that can really laugh with each other about all the stages of childhood and the crazy stuff our kids did “during the 3-yr-old terror years” (I knew a friend who’s kid lost it because said child was being forced to walk over the cracks on a sidewalk hahahahaha) or the “wow my teenager is an asshole” phase. In our herd, we feel as though we are not alone during these challenging stages, and know we have other people with similar experiences in our corner to vent to.

But covid is different because every little detail about a family dynamic suddenly matters, where it didn’t necessarily before in our herds. Job types, how the home is set up, kids age, area of the country you live in, (unfortunately) political views, having older family members, having family members who are immunocompromised, and on and on and on– each of these tiny factory makes you just one chord off of your neighbor, and even best friends. Zero harmony. You can do things they can’t, they can do things you can’t. Some people can work from home, some can’t.

Oh and let’s talk about that for a second because it does need to be briefly touched on. Working from home with young children is damn near impossible. Are people that *can* work from home because of their job-type lucky? Absolutely, compared to someone who can’t and has that fiscal avenue cut off from them. Absolutely, and that is not in question. However we also need to start acknowledging that that opportunity is also a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and comes with its own myriad of mind-bending hardships. As a society, instead of stopping at, “You’re lucky you can even work,” complete with shove off and eye-roll, we need to get past ourselves and start asking, “I know you can technically work, but are you ok?”

This ties into the central theme, because even people that can work from home all have slightly different situations and set-ups, and factors to worry about or that impact their daily decisions. As a result it becomes very challenging for people to band together like we are driven to as the societal-loving creatures we are. There is no work-from-home crowd, no parenting-from-home crowd, no both of those crowds, no fill-in-anything-here crowd, because all of these subcategories approach covid a slightly different way driven by individual risk factors and environmental needs.

AND those factors ebb and flow for each family too! Physical safety may have started out as a key driving factor in some families, but after seeing how constantly being pushed into the “no parent” land affects us and our kiddos psychologically, maybe that factor drops off or down, and mental safety temporarily becomes the lead. A family that had one view/approach a month ago might have another one now as circumstances change, so let’s add that onto the shifting quicksand of why banding together and maintaining those connections and friendships has become so difficult. If you found a group to be a part of, but then your family covid priorities shift… hahahah well, good luck staying in that group. This isn’t pessimism, this is honesty.

That definitely happened to us last year. My example here is a big one, but there can be tiny driving forces that cause these shifts as well. In May of 2020, my father-in-law (let’s call him Burt), was diagnosed with an acute form of leukemia. Yes this was right in the initial height of the pandemic, and it was incredibly hard on our family. We lived across the country from my in-laws at the time, and tracked their progress remotely. But it was when we were planning to come see them in November 2020, and then I later went to their house to help with a bone-marrow transplant in January of 2021, that the effects were felt on our immediately family.

Because Burt was severely immunocompromised, in order for us/myself to go out to the house we basically had to isolate in November, and again for almost all of January. This was before the vaccine was available, but even if it had been it wouldn’t have changed our approach because we couldn’t carry anything to him. This isolation period, after a year of on and off isolation, testing, fear, “no parenting,” and basically being yanked around, was incredibly hard on our then 5-yr-old. And frankly, on us too. My heart cracked in half every time we had to tell her no, because even though it was for the greater good of our family, from her young point of view it didn’t directly affect her and it was hard for her to understand the bigger picture. I started having an extra glass of wine to deal with the stress, and ended up gaining 10 lbs that I’m still working off. My pants don’t fit. Even that small thing is enough to stress me out now, because it reminds me of that time and those feelings.

Burt passed away in July of 2021 from a complication of the transplant. We were fortunate enough to have temporarily moved closer to be with my mother-in-law (let’s call her Betty), so as a small silver-lining at least we had that short time with Burt, and still now with Betty, until our move this summer. I won’t speak much about that time here, both because it still brings me great pain in loss and because those details won’t further my point.

What *did* change is what we could do as an immediate family. Whereas before we had to be exceedingly careful, now we could allow our kiddo to do things we couldn’t before. We had to break back into events and circles who were used to us saying no and had just stopped asking, because our risk level had now, very sadly, changed.

It’s hugely bittersweet for me. I would do almost anything for Burt to still be with us; he was an amazing man who’s loss is still tangibly felt daily, however I also know that wish would have come at a cost to my kiddo in that Burt would have been so immunocompromised during the lengthy recovery, we would have had to have been phenomenally restrictive in what our family could do. For a kid who can barely remember life before masks and has been dealing with this shit a third of her life, that would have been crushingly challenging to the point where I’m not sure we would have been able to handle that by ourselves, and probably would have needed to seek help. (Which is a GOOD thing, but also would have been hard because that’s just another potential exposure. Not sure what my thoughts are on virtual counseling, but I’d imagine it’s also a pretty amazing tool).

That’s a large example of how our family’s outlook shifted around and what drove some of our decisions, but it happens daily with smaller shifts too. Even going to a kid’s birthday party or a game day now is walking into a minefield. Do we talk about covid? Do we talk about masks? Do we talk about vaccines? Even the small talk is always somehow related to these topics, so you just end up talking about paint colors (and hoping they don’t somehow relate back to covid) and neither making nor rekindling these relationships that fuel our souls, because we are all just slightly one chord off.

It’s very isolating.

So that’s why the parents really aren’t ok, and why no one is. I’m focusing on the additional element of being constantly forced into being a liar as a parent here, but most of this applies evenly across the board. Ha. Inconsistency is the only consistent thing we have had to latch on to, that’s hilariously ironic.

Part two will be published tomorrow–

** At the time I was working on this we still had most of the mask mandates. Some are being lifted now, which I can only imagine is throwing another layer of both relief and uncertainly onto family decisions. What I want to point out here is that even with a mandate lifted, the scar tissue of the last two years still runs deep, and we need to start addressing and acknowledging these things.