Parents are the pandemic version of ringmasters. We’re doing the impossible juggling act of caring for our children while keeping house, playing professional, and trying to stay sane.
In a recent opinion piece for The New York Times, journalist Jessica Grose writes, “I’ve been talking to parents about pandemic stress for nearly two years, and I haven’t heard the level of despair that I’ve heard over the past week since the spring of 2020. Some of the words parents used to describe their January 2022: ‘devastating,’ ‘disgusting’ and ‘at a breaking point.’ The difference with the Omicron surge is that the upset is more concentrated among parents of children under the age of 5.”
My son is one and a half years old and I am at a breaking point.
A few days into 2022, I walked out of a Walgreens one evening carrying a box of generic Tylenol and a receipt. My husband was still sick in bed two weeks after testing positive for COVID-19. He needed something for a headache. I had barely emotionally survived the holidays. Taking care of him while trying to keep my toddler safe and happy while working—and all without community support—is not a reasonable endeavor.
Once I sat down in my car and closed the door, I removed my mask and squirted my left palm with hand sanitizer. The song “California Stars” by Wilco started playing through my car speakers. As I drove through Logan Square north on Kimball Avenue toward Wrightwood Avenue, I felt a lump in my throat and a stinging in my eyes. I was sobbing and all I wanted was to be younger so I could make different decisions that would not have led me here: living in a city without family during a pandemic. I wanted to be home and with my mom. I wanted to be mothered like I was mothering everyone around me but myself. I don’t have the space to mother myself.
So I started screaming.
I am not the only one. Nearly two years into the pandemic, parents are screaming at the tops of their lungs and we can’t catch our breath. Work goes on, as do politics and commerce. We are supposed to be strong, but we are screaming. We are screaming at ourselves, at our partners, and at our kids.
A 2021 study by The National Center for Biotechnology Information titled Parenting During COVID‐19: A Study of Parents’ Experiences Across Gender and Income Levels states, “Since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been discussion and theorizing around how the pandemic might differentially affect women (Collins et al., 2020; Kantamneni, 2020), and this was evident in the data. Women reported more symptoms of anxiety and parental burnout as well as greater worries or anxiety specific to parenting. In general, more women tend to have anxiety disorders than men (McLean et al., 2011), but there are not established gender differences in rates of parental burnout (Roskam et al., 2017; Roskam & Mikolajczak, 2020).”
When my husband tested positive for covid five days before Christmas he immediately went into isolation in our spare bedroom. I left lemon and honey tea and daily meals outside of his door. As I’d walk past his door in our dark hallways I’d notice the subtle light leaking out from underneath his door. We continued like this until the new year.
The weight of work deadlines, no childcare, and the emotional burden of planning my son’s second Christmas was quickly heavying. On a nondescript afternoon a few days following my husband’s positive covid test, my son kept climbing onto our living room couch and grabbing the large painting that hangs on the wall. If it fell off and onto his head, it would severely hurt him—there’s no question. Gentle redirections didn’t work. He wouldn’t stop. Patiently, I removed him from the couch and tried to explain why he shouldn’t grab the painting.
Tenth time. Eleventh time. Twelfth time.
“Stopppppp it! Stoppppppp it!”
I screamed at my baby as his little hands were snug around the bottom of the frame in a voice I didn’t recognize. The corners of his lips turned down and he burst into tears. I removed his hand from the painting and picked up his little body into my chest.
“I am so sorry for yelling at you like that,” I quietly murmur.
The insurmountable weight of the world came barreling out through me and projected itself onto my innocent son. I had lost my patience. I snapped.
Parents around the country as well as internationally are feeling the burden of neverending school closures and childcare complexities. We are tired of playing Tetris with our lives, and our hearts are heavy making space for tough decisions, sensory overload, and extreme burnout. Working from home with a toddler while simultaneously taking care of a sick partner without any external support feels insurmountable. The juggling act that so many of us are attempting with work, school, childcare, play, public safety, and our mental health is turning our lives into a circus.
Being a parent in non-pandemic circumstances, I hear, is beautiful chaos. You love so hard and true and are also tested at every moment of confusion and clarity. All of your faults get lifted to the surface daily. They are tried and tried again. You are forced to deal with your traumas and idiosyncrasies until you understand enough about yourself to pause and not dump them onto your child. Sometimes you can’t help it but at least you try. Awareness is the first step.
Is there any space left for emotional awareness two years into this pandemic? Some days I feel strong enough to say yes, I can do this, over and over again, while other days feel like a tornado and I have a hard time putting on new underwear and fresh socks in the morning.
My husband began to recover from COVID about a week into January. I remember sitting together on our son’s bedroom floor during our bedtime routine. Our toddler was trying to rip off his diaper. Exhausted, I drew my weary eyes over to his and said, “Two years. It’ll be two years of the pandemic this March.”
“It feels like it was yesterday we were going into lockdown,” he responded.
“These have been the longest two years as well as the shortest two years. I’ve never been so burned out. I’m exhausted,” I said.
At bedtime, the hard days fade away. After my husband said goodnight and my son pushed the light switch off with his tiny pointer finger, my son crawled into my arms and latched onto my breast. “Goodnight, babe. I love you so much. Sweet dreams. I’ll see you in the morning,” I whisper. Soon after, I began to feel his lips soften and his breathing slow. His little hand rests on my stomach and nothing else matters. Tomorrow is a blank slate.
