The Only New Friends I Made This Year Were My Children

The nurse giving me my blood draw for the vaccine trial tells me that in a few years America will be run by kids who were homeschooled in a pandemic by a bunch of drunks.

She has three teen boys, and I tell her about my kids, 10 and 7. This will be the only person I talk to all day except for my phone call with my kids later that night, from their dad’s house, so my conversation with the nurse has an intensity I don’t intend, but I cannot help.

I tell her how I’m a single parent and my kids have been sleeping in my bed since last March. She says she thinks single parents have it worse, but I don’t know. I have joint custody. At least I can get a weekend alone sometimes. But honestly, the alone times without them are the hardest.

In the pandemic year my relationship with my children has changed. We don’t live near our extended family, so our bubble has just been us and some of our close friends. As a result, the space between us as parent and child has collapsed. I still tell them to sit on their butt and remind them to practice piano. They still roll their eyes at me. But it’s different now. My daughter sits with me and my adult friends and weighs in on topics like voting rights and storage solutions for the garage. My son reminds me to pick my clothes up off the floor and shut the kitchen cupboard doors.

On March 8, 2020, Iowa reported its first cases of COVID-19. My kids went on spring break the next week, and I panicked, sending texts about case counts, hoping they were staying safe. I bought bleach and cleaned my house, top to bottom, and was suddenly happy I’d been raised as one of eight kids and homeschooled. My house had food stores, and I already bought toilet paper in bulk.

When they came back, there was no school. I didn’t have enough computers, so my kindergartener just read Dog Man books on the couch. My job at a local newspaper became almost unsustainable, but then it got even busier when I started a kid’s page to fill the empty pages from the sudden loss of sports. I worked in the guest room (at least I had a guest room), popping out to learn how to do long division all over again, or shout, “I don’t know! Just make mac and cheese!” before diving back into work. My son showed up in his underwear on Zoom calls with my bosses. My daughter wailed over the incomprehensible expectations of Zoom gym class, while I interviewed epidemiologists.

In search of a moment of calm or even just a dependable ritual, my daughter and I began having nightly tea time, where we’d sip from steaming mugs (mostly lukewarm honey water for her) and talk about anything. Her fears about the pandemic, TikTok videos, cats; other times she’d interrogate what she’d overheard me asking people in phone calls. My son and I began learning chess together, and it wasn’t long before he started beating me almost every game. I learned to play Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze and Just Dance. We were together all the time. They began sleeping in my bed. My therapist told me it was okay: “They need reassurance,” she said. But the thing was, I did too.

In August what little grasp I had on my life completely blew away, when an inland hurricane with gusts of over 120 miles per hour destroyed our town and blew off part of my roof, leaving us without power for two weeks and without internet for 19 days. Now I was doing everything I had been doing before, but this time with no power and no internet, shuttling from hotels, to friends’ homes, and twice even to the corner of a work conference room. I published a book then too, and my kids crawled across the ground in the background during my virtual book events. I assured them we’d be fine, but on the nights they were with their dad, I’d sit on the porch and sob. Grief, loss, worry, relief, fear, pouring out of me, until I had to drive to their father’s house and smile.

Then I lost my job, which created several problems but solved one: I now had time to start the podcast with my daughter that she’d been campaigning for. I began learning audio editing. A month later we had a podcast. My daughter was my child, my charge, and now a collaborator and quasi business partner.

She and her brother have assumed other roles as well. I’ve forced them to make their own food. We started with scrambled eggs and instant noodles. We’ve had too many nacho nights. Too many nights of pancakes and takeout. My son cleans the bathroom. My daughter folds laundry. They’ve had too much screen time. I’ve yelled too much and so have they. I’ve cried too much. They are still in my bed most nights. It’s not as it was before, with “parent” and “child” fulfilling their usual roles.

The blur is not unique to us. I spoke to 20 different types of mothers about how their relationship to their children has changed in the pandemic; no answer was the same.

My friend Evie wrote to me, “I love my kids more than anything, but I didn't sign up to be their teacher, best friend, coach, and camp counselor in addition to their parent. None of us were prepared for this intensity of interaction, especially on top of what all of us are individually dealing with in regard to work, school, and socialization during the pandemic. There are more fights, more standoffs, more long, serious talks. At the same time, since both my kids are fairly young (nine and six a year into COVID), being able to actually witness their intellectual and creative development in real time has been a revelation. I feel like I know them better as people now than I ever did, and when we're having a good day, I know I interact with them more like friends than I would have without that.”

Other mothers told me how the time with their kids made them understand their kids in a new ways—their anxieties and learning disorders and their gender identities. Others have let go of so many things they once held precious, like bedtimes, screen-time limits, and restrictions on junk food. It’s a parenting wilderness. We are all just doing our best to stay alive.

At my lowest point, I screamed at my son in between Zoom calls, telling him to “stop being so needy!” At my best, I got a trampoline and watched as they painted stars on the roof of their playhouse. Parenting now means to be caught in a world of contradictions. I am happy that they had so much freedom, so many unattended moments of imagination. And I am also afraid that they have gotten the worst parts of me—the rawest most irritated sums of who I am.

Not everyone is struggling. My friend Sofia works for a nonprofit and is the mother to two teenagers and a kindergartner. In the pandemic she divorced her husband. She told me that in so many ways she’s a better parent in the pandemic, because she’s a better person. “I left a bad relationship. I am finally financially secure. My skin looks better!” she tells me. She is worried that while she can now provide materially for her kids better, she doesn’t have as much time to spend with them. She remembers what it was like being a single mom and food insecure. She knows firsthand what the fear and anxiety of not being able to provide for your kids does. “When we talk about parents and kids in the pandemic, we need to talk about that,” she says.

Dr. Mini Tandon is an associate professor of child psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. She stressed that when it comes to how the pandemic has impacted parent-child relationships, the only right answer is: “It depends.”

“Two people handle things in different ways,” Tandon says. “People’s stressors are different. No two people are the same, and you take those people and put them in a relationship, no relationship is going to be the same.”

What we do know is that the pandemic has revealed the cracks in all of us. Our experiences haven’t been colored by just our relationships, but race, class, gender, how many kids are in a home, and how acutely COVID was felt in the family environment. Did someone they know die? Did they get COVID-19? “There is no universalization of reactions, especially when it comes to families,” says Tandon, and there is no right or wrong way to process what’s happening. She encourages parents to keep an open dialogue within their family, even after we’ve returned to a new sort of world. We will all be dealing with the effects from this time for the rest of our lives, so we have to keep talking about it.

I tell her that I think my kids are okay, but I am not. She gently pushes back, reminding me about the adage from airline emergencies: “Secure your own mask first.” It has double resonance in the pandemic era. What she means is mothers as martyrs are no good to their children.

Six weeks ago I broke my wrist by slipping on the ice after attempting to build a massive snow fort with my kids. For an hour I scooped up snow and dumped it on my wrist. “I’m okay,” I told them. “It’s probably a little sprain.” I thought I was going to throw up. Finally I faced the facts and called a friend for help. This year has taught me how much help I need.

Later, after our friend picked them up and drove me to the hospital, where it was confirmed that this was not just “a little sprain.” I told my kids how impressed I was with them. How kind they’d been in that emergency.

“We didn’t know it was bad, because you seemed okay,” my daughter said. “And if you are okay, then everything else is.” I held them with my arm in a splint and cried. Before the pandemic I would have hidden my tears. Now there was nowhere to hide.

Parenting in this pandemic has felt like I am the only barrier between my children and the cliff’s edge of the world. I’m tired and I am literally broken and I am so worn down. I worry I’ve relied on them to become independent adults too soon. I’m worried I infantilized them. I worry that I didn’t tell them the reality of the horror facing the world. I’m worried they’ve seen too much. I worry I was too lenient with pandemic rules and allowing them to play with a friend. I worry I was too strict and alienated my kids from their friends whose parents are more lenient.

I worry my kids and I have become too close. My daughter talks to me like she’s 47. In our podcast, my perfectionism takes a back seat to the whims of her 10-year-old impulses and she calls herself the CEO. My son swears and calls me bro, does all the math when we play games, and often makes me coffee. They empty out the dishwasher without asking. They whine when they can’t find the ketchup. I’m not sure how I’ll ever enforce screen-time limits again. I’m so worried that somehow I’ve broken them. But I’m also amazed at the humans they’ve become. And we are still here. And in the middle of this profoundly broken time, I’m so grateful that at least they are in this with me.

Lyz Lenz is the author of Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women and God Land. She lives in Iowa with her two kids.

Originally Appeared on Glamour