Dad at home with Covid and no headphones

It’s been a year since I last posted something on my blog. Almost a year ago is when I last left my office in New York City on March 13, 2020. 3 days earlier, very hesitantly I attended the last live event I’ve been to at Madison Square Garden, a 50th anniversary tribute to The Allman Brothers Band. Working from home was anticipated for maybe a month or two at that point. It would be a challenge with a 5- and 3-year-old at home while my wife, a teacher, was also working remotely from home. Fortunately, our 9-month-old was not yet walking. I found my hours at home erratic yet productive, I was no longer missing as much time with my family, we were fully immersed in each other’s lives, on our own private island in our home. It was almost a dream for us, time standing still during some of our kids’ most innocent and exuberant moments in their lives, with the exception of the other tumult happening in the world and our country over the past year.

Then the weeks became months, my temporary workspace on the dining room table then moved to a more permanent space in the basement. We went to “concerts” at home, watching performances in our living room, giving our kids fake tickets and refreshments. Our youngest son celebrated his first birthday in our isolation, we made signs and shirts, and drove by family members bringing his party to them that day. We were doing well and doing our part, and most importantly staying healthy. We were hoping, but not necessarily hopeful by the end of summer 2020 school might be back to some semblance of normalcy at least for my wife and our oldest son heading to kindergarten that fall. Time at least seemed to be on our side, our kids were still young, at least they weren’t in high school or college in a struggle so many other parents and kids were navigating.

That July my grandmother passed away from natural causes in an unnatural time. My kids understand death more now, it’s heartbreaking and breathtaking all the same. Sometimes they can talk about it less hesitantly than I can, and I wonder if it’s a natural stage in their development, or the break in the road they’re now on from the pre-Covid to post-Covid era. Reality’s version of kids adapting remarkably during a zombie apocalypse, this is what times of bewilderment feel like, when you see your kids growing up in a series of moments.

Our 5-year-old turned 6 and our 3-year-old turned 4 at the end of August, no parties but kids can mostly handle such odd birthdays well with the always popular cake and gifts. We took them on camping trips throughout summer and fall. They were adapting, having breakdowns along the way, usually parallel to our breakdowns. Having a young kid get used to wearing a face covering every time they leave the house at first seemed traumatic and unfair, but the reality is, it was harder when we had to get them to sit on the toilet to take a dump consistently. This was no different than getting them to wear a seat belt and certainly less traumatic than whatever explaining the purpose of lockdown drills to them will be like.

By September the walls started closing in. Our son would be going to kindergarten 5 days a week in person, but part-time from 9AM-1PM. Our 4-year-old would go to pre-school from 1pm-3pm, 5 days a week. My wife was given no choice in having to return to teaching in-person, so we would have someone watch our youngest now 1-year-old, and I would take our older sons to school everyday while working from home. We were as vigilant as possible in our situation, a close-knit family both figuratively and literally.

As a parent one thing you always want more of is time. You think of all the things you can do with it, all the minutes you get to spend with your kids while they’re growing at a rapid and exponential rate, and also what you could do for yourself. This is what this pandemic gave to our family. We knew our youngest would be our last child, and we got all of this time from 9-months-old to now over a year and a half at home with him, time we didn’t have with our 2 older sons. Now it was like an episode of the Twilight Zone, real life’s most exorbitant example in fact, a family in their prime given all this time together. Sometimes, especially once fall started to turn colder and daylight was gone before 5pm, our days felt like Beetlejuice, when stepping out of the house to the threat of Mars and the ravenous Sandworm. You stay indoors and start to feel like Jack Torrance in The Shining while your kids grow accustom to life during Covid.

Kids are resilient that way, they adapt quickly and figure things out. Adults, we’re more like huge barges or cruise ships, we have a lot of baggage, a lot on board, it’s a slow process to change direction or adapt. Life was getting harder from overexposure with each other inside our walls and from the lack of exposure outside of them. Mentally, running my kids to and from school, being stuck in the house all day every day for 7 days a week was taking its toll on me. I forgot how old I was as my birthday approached, but it felt like the past year had been several years.

In early December we got sick. Our sons’ school went virtual after Thanksgiving and they were staying virtual until after the holiday break. Our 6-year-old had cold symptoms at the end of November for a few days, he may have had Covid, that’s what our doctors thought after we caught it. My wife then got very sick over the first weekend of December, bedridden and worse from one day to the next. I was feeling fine with no symptoms. That Tuesday, she got tested. The next morning our 4-year-old started complaining of leg pains and being tired, among the myriad of odd and unpredictable symptoms kids with Covid might have. I took him to get tested that morning, by early afternoon my throat started to feel scratchy. I went for a rapid test that afternoon and was the first to test positive. The next day my wife’s positive test results came back. We continued our isolation as our symptoms got worse, trying to care for our kids while caring for ourselves. The kids enjoyed my birthday cake which helped make it a little better. Having Covid was daunting, probably worsened by having 3 young children to care for simultaneously, but we were very lucky in that we’re sitting here to talk about it now.

My whole body hurt, my bones hurt, it felt like I ran a marathon or had worked out lifting heavy weights for consecutive days, clearly two things I hadn’t been doing. The inside of my ear canals burned, the top of my brain felt like someone poured hot sauce over it. I never got a fever, then my smell and taste left. My eyes burned, I tried drinking a beer out of curiosity and it might as well have been a frothy seltzer water. Our kids probably watched as much TV in those weeks as they had the entire 3 months before. Help was not on the way, not now. Every night after the sun went down and the kids ate dinner, we’d load into the car and do the only thing we could do to fill out the rest of the night, drive around looking at Christmas lights listening to music. It was what we could do.

We started 2021 with some movie marathons, watching the Back to the Future trilogy and all 5 Jurassic Park movies. We drank more coffee than we had since the newborn phase, even though we couldn’t taste it half the time. Snow was dumped on the northeast in heaps which also gave us a winter wonderland to bide our time in.

Doing all we could to stay away from Covid it still made it onto our island and somehow took our will to further depths than the last 9 months before it. Our kids carry on with their days and adjust like they’ve always been dealing with this. Breakdowns happen and seem to happen more than they did before all of this, but we also had never spent as much time with our kids before this. It’s an exhausting blessing with no end in sight. Our kids don’t ask when they’ll have to stop wearing masks, it’s like any other routine now. Our youngest isn’t 2 yet, and he’s gotten used to trips around the supermarket bringing joy to people that can see him smiling at them. He’s learned how to smile back or picked up on the friendly tone of their voice as a welcoming greeting even though he can’t see the smile on their face. He’s gotten used to it; it seems kids are built for upheaval so much more than we are sometimes.

We’ll probably remember the minutiae of these days more traumatically than they will, at least that’s what I hope for. I hope for them to take from these days the time we had together, and not the means by which we got it or the moments we finally seemed to break. When you think about it, that’s not much different from a parent’s overall idyllic hope for their kids’ upbringing: to remember more of the good than the bad.

Listening to this Playlist:

Nine Inch Nails, “Every Day Is Exactly The Same”

U2, “A Sort of Homecoming”

Talking Heads “Road To Nowhere”

The Strokes, “Ize of the World”

Johnny Cash, “Rusty Cage”

Pearl Jam, “In Hiding”

The Supremes, “You Keep Me Hanging On”

Bruce Springsteen, “Trapped”

John Lennon, “Isolation”

Harry Nilsson, “Gotta Get Up”

The Temptations, “I Can’t Get Next To You”

Pink Floyd, “Time”

The Rolling Stones, “Moonlight Mile”

Warren Zevon “Splendid Isolation”

Kid Cudi, “All Along”

Bob Dylan, “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”

The Cure, “Close to Me”

Bee Gees, “Lonely Days”

Lou Reed, “Satellite of Love”

A Tribe Called Quest feat. Faith Evans, “Stressed Out”

Pavement, “Cut Your Hair”

Tommy James & The Shondells, “I Think We’re Alone Now”

Genesis, “Land of Confusion”

The Killers, “Caution”

Queen, “Leaving Home Ain’t Easy”

Brandi Carlile, "The Eye"

Sly & The Family Stone, “You Can Make It If You Try”

Beck, “Go It Alone”

The White Stripes, “My Doorbell”

The Animals, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”

Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, “Teach Your Children”

Childish Gambino feat. Ariana Grande, “Time”

Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Throw Away Your Television”

Soundgarden, “The Day I Tried to Live”

Frank Sinatra, “It’s Nice to Go Trav’ling”

Cat Stevens, “Where Do the Children Play?”

#dadonbuswithheadphones #dadblog #parenting #covidparenting #parentingblog