Help! This Quarantine Is Turning Me Into My Mother

For most of my adult life, I have been known as my father’s daughter. I am the third of four children (the second daughter), and while we have all been close to our parents, my dad and I seemed to have a certain kinship that never ebbed over time.

We both loved a good party (particularly giving them), travel (to almost anywhere), and trying new things (in the ’60s he opened a French restaurant, with zero experience, that failed within a year). But mostly we both just enjoyed creating memorable experiences for family and friends whether near or far. He rented a pontoon boat for us to explore a lake 10 minutes from our house. Five years later, I organized a cruise in Egypt for us to float up the Nile.

That closeness grew over the last 10 years, after my husband, Daniel, and I, along with two of our three children, moved back to my hometown after 20 years living abroad and established a multigenerational household that not only included my parents but also my older brother. It was quite the set-up. (Think You Can’t Take it With You set in the 21st century.)

My father died October 27, an event that devastated all of us, but was softened by the fact that we knew he had lived such a full and rewarding life. Yet, it also left my 86-year-old mother a widow after 63 years of marriage.

I worried how she would spend her days. She and my father loved to go out for lunch, see a matinee movie, and take a Sunday drive any day of the week. The holidays occupied her the first two months, but the next two — complete with freezing weather and icy walkways — were mostly spent inside (her biggest fear being a fall). . Then came the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown. Daniel and I started working from home, and our two youngest children, ages 23 and 24, decided to come home as well to work remotely for the indefinite future.

And then, slowly over the last eight weeks and almost without my realizing it, I began to turn into my mother — or at least someone who has begun to more deeply appreciate (and sometimes share) the things that give her pleasure: reading, writing poetry, and sipping a cup of tea with a biscuit sitting in the sunroom.

Now Daniel jokes that he is the widow. Before the pandemic, he and I would commute to and from work together, often grabbing a drink or dinner with friends at the end of the day before returning to my mother. Now that we all are working remotely, that time alone together is gone. Instead, at 5 p.m. each day, when the laptops are stowed away, the cocktails mixed, and dinner made, our new routine is to find a family activity for the evening, which often involves a Zoom date, a board game, or watching something on television.

But as the weeks go by, my mother and I seem to be more in sync than the rest of the clan, and not just on the subject of hair color (we both refuse to go grey). While Dan and the kids watch The Last Dance, the Michael Jordan documentary, on ESPN. Mom and I cozy up in another room and watch Belgravia on Epix. While the rest of the group plays darts in the basement, Mom and I are upstairs, singing along to the Stephen Sondheim 90th birthday celebration. While they play basketball outside, we read our books (both set in World War II Europe) inside. And every Monday, when I set her up for what is now her remote Zoom book club, I join for the first few minutes and wave enthusiastically to her elderly lady friends (one of whom I recently started dog walking with at a social distance twice a week).

And though my father’s storytelling over a glass of wine always left me laughing hysterically, my once-quiet mother is now regaling me with her own anecdotes. Recently, she told me for the first time how my father proposed to her at a Howard Johnson's. Though my father always loved a Michelin-starred restaurant, his favorite place was always a good diner. Picturing my elegant mother (when I moved to New York City after college she bought me a “little black dress for dates”) being asked her hand in marriage over Frankforter sausages and potato salad in an orange-colored booth, made me choke on my Chardonnay.

To be fair, my mother and I are joining the others to play Scrabble every Saturday night, though after the first two weeks of quarantine we were told we could no longer be on the same team (not because we were too good to play together but because we like turning tiles into lovely words, not high points).

I don’t know how this will end when we are no longer sheltering in place. I have told Dan I might not want to go out quite as much — it was not unusual, pre-quarantine, to have social plans five or six times a week — having experienced the joys of being more sedentary in old age. But he suspects my Dad’s spirit will kick back in and I will be back on the town, in whatever form is allowed.

Time will tell, but I do know I have enjoyed this pandemic pause with my mother so soon after losing my father. I have a new appreciation for these quiet moments with her given all the heartbreaking losses of COVID-19, particularly when they involve afternoon tea and biscuits in the sunroom.

Originally Appeared on Vogue