Pandemic parenting agony

In my first posts I described this space as somewhere to put my rants so I could stop alienating my friends. And… I haven’t been writing at all, nor alienating my friends with anti-lockdown tirades (much). Yeah ok, a big reason for my absence is a crushing workload unrelated to COVID, the high holidays, and a kidney stone that required an ER visit and two additional surgeries. But the poltergeist that possessed me in the spring — the one that led me to unleash uncontrolled tirades at people who disagree with me — is gone. While the world remains far from normal, spiraling and spiking and sensationalizing and restricting, I feel remarkably normal under the circumstances. Why?

Because my kids go to in-person school.

Among families parenting school-age children, we —the two adults in the household —have remarkable flexibility to shoulder any flavor of COVID restrictions. My husband is a self-employed musician who has always been the “primary parent,” and can step back on his work as needed for childcare. We have a modicum financial stress (house-poor, student-loan-debt-saddled, poor financial management), but I make a stable and substantial income. We are able to live on it even if my husband earns nothing, without noticeable lifestyle changes. My home office’s location by the front door? An inconvenience, in the balance.

Even with our extraordinary situation, for which I was at the time and remain now grateful, I spent the entire spring agitated and depressed. We all experienced that to a degree, of course, and it certainly could have been worse for me. But everyone around me seemed to be accepting and coping (I can sense the objections here, but trust me), while I spent my time in a blind rage, or working 16 hours a day / cutting people out of my life to avoid inflicting my blind rage on everyone with whom I interacted.

With the benefit of hindsight, I now believe that it was in reaction to school closures that I lost my dang mind. I wanted, needed my kids to be in school, and waged primal war on anything that got in the way of that goal, anytime, anywhere. This meant I waged war on everyone.

My pandemic policies might look something like this:

• Masks required at all times in public places, including outdoors
• Tie shutdowns and restrictions to hospital capacity concerns, not case numbers
• Very low threshold for mandating remote work
• Very low threshold for gathering restrictions above 50
• Low threshold for closing public venues
• Gathering restrictions (I had a major problem with forbidding religious services at the beginning, and I still think Jewish prayer needs to have a minyan in person w/zoom for the rest, but this is lower priority)
• I don’t think temp checks are useful at all, but sure, knock yourself out
• High threshold for “stay-at-home” orders — but if there were a “stay at home except for schools” order I’d be pretty much fine with that
• Support vulnerable essential workers (e.g. pay them but give them remote tasks / etc.) while keeping nonessential workers employed in essential jobs
• Schools considered essential; very high threshold for closing schools (outside of an outbreak within that school), and (again) tied to hospital capacity, not case numbers

The absolutism with which my “anti-school-closures” priority drove my COVID views literally got me called an ambulance protestor, anti-science, pro “herd immunity” (perhaps to be discussed in another post), and of course, accused of wanting teachers and grandparent caregivers to die.

In polarized America, all individuals opining on policy may select one of exactly two boxes. If there were ever an issue on which the country might divert from this pattern, perhaps a pandemic would have presented a decent opportunity. But true to form, (after an initial period of absolute wtaf chaos for lack of precedent) we ran immediately to our battle stations, to the great detriment of, oh… everyone in the entire world.

On any given situation, most Americans opt — lunge even — for one of the boxes promptly and without protest. This is the sensible thing to do. It is obvious that (1) there is no such thing as a third box or a space outside the two boxes, and (2) attempts to conjure such things are not only futile, but surrender any choice one has about their box designation. A person who refuses or neglects to choose Box A or Box B is, in essence, refusing a bunker during a tornado. Yeah, maybe it smells down there and the company isn’t your first choice, but would you rather be swept up in a funnel cloud of assumptions (e.g., she’s a Box A girl on everything else, so she’s obviously Box A)? A twister of judgment (she voiced material disagreement with Box A, and is therefore Box B)?

The Two Boxes adopt special and heightened status during hotly-contested presidential elections. Americans who vote for a third-party candidate or do not vote at all can expect heavy scorn no matter what reasons they give for their choice. Those who consistently demonstrate politics avoidance may evade the worst of the attacks, but COVID even obliterated that loophole, because we all had to alter our daily behaviors in a way we could not hide from anyone we interacted with).

There are some issues on which I enjoy a nice warm box — voting rights, civil rights, the criminal justice system. And I can get in that box on many other issues I don’t feel as strongly about — abortion, economic policy, etc. But I have a track record of fighting the boxes on some issues, probably more out of stubbornness than principle, and I can rarely keep my mouth shut enough to avoid others boxing me.

For COVID, though, I was outside in the tornado and didn’t feel like the bunkers would even let me in.

To be continued…