On Loneliness and Pandemic Parenting
After a year of social distancing, my children are starved for human contact
I phone into a video conference for work so I can keep an eye on my two toddlers who are watching TV. My husband is in the bathroom. I plug in my headphones, mute my microphone, and jot down notes between unloading the dishwasher and whisking eggs.
Halfway through the call, my daughter pulls at my clothes. “Mama, look at my mustache! Mama!” She has drawn all over herself with Magic Marker.
I nod.
Unsatisfied with my nonverbal response, she grabs at my phone. I pull it away, fumbling, and drop it.
My husband arrives five minutes before the call ends. By then our two-year-old son is crying from hunger. He won’t stop even after Ezra picks him up.
“This is so hard,” Ezra says.
At the start of the pandemic, my husband and I pulled our children out of daycare and I began working from home. The kids loved it — watching TV, having no routine. But it didn’t take long for the monotony to wear on them, for them to miss the things they’d swiftly lost: weekend playdates, carefree dinners with family friends, library story hours and birthday parties that abruptly came to a halt.
“Dada, how long is it going to be day after day after day?” our daughter asked one night as Ezra put her to bed.
Our lives became more stressful, more mundane, and lonelier than ever. When my husband and I realized how rarely we left the house, we sold our second car. So on days when the children were wild with pent-up energy and I, too, felt the need to escape, if the car was in use, I loaded our kids into their double stroller and walked to the elementary school playground in our neighborhood.
At the playground, massive oil tanks and piles of debris lie just beyond the chain-link fence. The oil tanks, painted a shade of turquoise brighter than the sky, hold crude oil to be transported to Montreal, Quebec. From our home in South Portland, Maine, we could have easily driven to a playground on the beach or a park overlooking lighthouses and sailboats. But our neighborhood playground is walkable, and my children do not care or notice that it is ugly.
One day, a boy runs up to greet us as soon as we pass through the gate.
“What’s your name?” he asks. My 2- and 3-year-olds, still strapped into their seats, don’t respond.
“This is Aurora — we call her Ro,” I say. “And this is Arlo. What’s your name?”
“Guess. You can pick a letter.”
I prompt my kids to play his game, but they are shy or confused or taken aback by his forwardness. The boy looks to be about seven. He’s lanky with dark brown hair and pale skin. He could be named anything.
“M?” I guess.
“Mm-hm.”
“Really?”
“That’s the first letter. Guess the next one.”
I consider common boys’ names. “I?”
He shakes his head.
“A?”
He nods.
I strike out on Matt and Mark. Then a gray-haired woman walks by. “Hi, Maddox!” she calls.
Our game is foiled, but the fun has just begun. Maddox runs to the swings and my children follow.
Arlo wants to sit on the “big-kid swing” next to Ro. I push them both, reminding my son to hold on tight, but he is used to the security of baby swings. When he loses his grip and falls, Maddox comes over.
“Are you ok?” he asks. “Land on your feet next time,” he advises over Arlo’s cries. “And hang on tight.” He points to the swing’s chains. “Here.”
Arlo continues to cry in my arms, and Maddox turns to Ro. “Want to play on the playground?” he asks.
“You can go,” I say and follow with Arlo.
“Don’t fall in the lava, Ro!” Maddox calls. They’re playing a game on the balance beam.
“It’s not lava,” she says. “It’s wood chips.”
My daughter is happiest when she’s around people. One summer evening we invited our friends and their daughter to eat pizza outside and lounge around the fire pit. I still remember how her laugh rang out as she ran around the yard. She sounded like a cartoon character, her giggle carrying on and on. I had not heard her laugh so much in months.
When a maintenance man came over to clean our furnace, Ro begged to go to the basement while he worked.
“Can I go in the basement? Please, can I go to the basement and ride my tricycle?” she asked, but it wasn’t the tricycle she wanted.
My son, too, was desperate for human contact. One day we drove past a crowded downtown street on our way to hike in the woods. Masked pedestrians wandered among storefronts. “Let me out!” Arlo cried from his car seat. “I want to talk to those guys!”
“What guys?” my husband said, and we laughed. But we knew. He wanted to talk to someone, anyone, but us.
Ro runs around the playground with Maddox and Arlo, and my children’s loneliness is quelled. But only for a moment.
“I’m so sad,” Arlo says when Maddox and his family leave. “I’m so sad we can’t play with the kid.”
Ro echoes the sentiment. “Mama, too bad that nobody is here now,” she says when we are back at the swings. “Mama, can you play what that boy was playing with me?”
“Oh, that the ground is lava? Ok.”
I leave Arlo nestled in the baby swing and chase my daughter across the playground, up the chain ladder, through a tunnel, and across the bridge.
“It’s safe up here, Mama!” she says at the highest point on the playset. I stand with her and survey our surroundings.
Orange trees are losing their leaves. The huge oil tanks rise up from the earth like spaceships. An excavator sits on a gravel road next to a pile of waste and a shipping container. Against the industrial backdrop, the vacant playground appears apocalyptic. The only human in sight is my son across the wasteland, swinging alone.
“We have to save Arlo!” Ro says and we race back over the wood chip lava. When we reach the swings, she drapes her belly over the one next to her brother. I give him a push. It is quiet, just the three of us together and alone.
“Mama, I love you buv you,” Ro says. She has recently discovered rhyming.
“I love you buv you!” My words come out louder than necessary. Maybe there’s a tension in my vocal cords from chronic stress. Or maybe it’s the bubbly way I speak to my children, an attempt to hide my sadness. Either way, my voice sounds strange as it echoes against the brick walls of the school and rises over the empty playground, its high pitch cutting through the distant, mechanical hum of the world that churns just out of view.
