Parenting in the Age of Corona

You wake beneath the weight of a urine-drenched diaper. A tiny finger creeps into your nose.

It is 6 AM, day 42 of lockdown.

You stagger to the kitchen and dump half a can of Bustelo into your French press while your children splash water and milk across the kitchen table. You wait for the first spill. Today, it is Cheerios. You remain in a stupor longer than acceptable, watching your girls eat them off the floor.

If you’re lucky, there’s time for a shower before the “workday” begins. But more often, you are unlucky, and you conduct the first session of “Mommy School” in a button-down shirt and snowflake pajama pants. For once, you have a real craft: toilet paper tube crowns. The girls are unenthusiastic about making “butt crowns.” All your 3-year-old wants to do is cut things with the scissors. You don’t blame her, for you, too, fantasize about sitting with your colorful stack of face masks and shredding.

You become so engrossed in talking up how much fun it is to stick sparkle hearts on cardboard speckled with toilet water, you don’t notice that your children are sitting behind you, snipping away your split ends.

Cutting your hair holds their attention for approximately 12 minutes. Which is fine because you have to teach a class in 20 and could use those extra 480 seconds to brush your teeth.

On the days you and your partner have simultaneous Zoom meetings, you stick your children behind a screen, hand them a bowl of Goldfish and hope no one chokes or runs in to moon your boss.

Of course, this a day in the life of the privileged. If you’re one of the 22 million Americans filing for unemployment, you can join your children in living the American dream: simultaneously consuming processed snacks and mind-numbing TV.

When your children start whining that they’ve run out of Goldfish, you entice them to the kitchen by claiming you need their help to prepare lunch.

Fifteen minutes later, you are on your hands and knees, sweeping up cheese dust (your 3-year-old “missed” the pot) while she sings her latest rendition of “Let It Go.” It wasn’t real cheese, anyway.

Part of you thinks it’s funny when the baby runs over, sticks her hands in the cheese-product, claps and shouts “boom” as the fine orange grains dust her face because in many ways, these are the best moments of the day, these minutes when you are consumed by the present rather than your phone and the death tolls and the never-ending stream of shitty news. Another part of you wants to cry thinking about all of the work you should be doing, but aren’t doing, because you are washing a screaming baby’s face so she doesn’t look like a bloated Cheeto (you can’t bear to make the other, more obvious comparison).

Afternoon exercise can look like a lot of things. Singing muffled, masked lullabies as you push the baby around for a stroller nap. Four to seven minutes of yoga before your 3-year-old starts screaming, “Why can’t I be the teacher? I studied yoga!” Doing more squats than you’d ever consciously agree to do in a single day as you peel stickers off the floor.

When it’s time for “Daddy School,” you type with one hand as you nurse the baby and try to block out the conversation your 3-year-old is having with your partner.

“Is Daddy Cuomo my daddy, too?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

You accidentally smear an overlooked smudge of poop that had been festering under your fingernail onto your keyboard, and underneath your frustration you feel relieved, even triumphant, to have located the source of the mild fecal stench that has been following you all day.

Your 3-year-old runs in to sing “Donald Trump doot-doot” to the tune of “Baby Shark” loudly, in your face. At some point, probably this point, you switch from coffee to wine.

When the clock strikes seven. You stand outside clapping and shaking tambourines for all the first responders and health care workers, all the delivery people, sanitation workers, grocery store clerks, the transit employees, the laundromat employees, the exhausted men who stand behind the counter at your corner bodega for 12 hours every day. Your children wail that they hear the ice-cream man, but don’t see him. You shake your tambourine harder.

At bedtime, your children’s bodies curl around you, flushed with love and trust, and you feel grateful and sad and anxious and very, very tired. As your daughters command you tell them a story about witches with hairy, stinky feet, you wonder what kind of world your children, all children, will inherit. You succumb to sleep before they do, completely, helplessly.