Reality TV, Ice Cream, and a Family in Flux: How Ali Wentworth Survived a Pandemic
I spent more time with my husband and daughters during the height of the pandemic than I have with any other group of people in my life, and that includes my siblings, my tent mates at Camp Treetops, and my conjoined twin. Well, if I had one. I’m #Grateful, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help but wonder what the long-term ramifications will be on two teenage girls who were locked down with their parents for such an excruciatingly long period of time. Teenagers are not meant to spend that amount of condensed time with their creators, let alone themselves. They should be kissing and getting their hearts broken, battling bullies and getting caught throwing parties when the parents are away for the weekend. But my kids knew that a rager was not in the future for a very long time. Because we weren’t going anywhere for a very long time. Not that I wanted them out in the woods dropping molly and giving hand jobs, but they were starting to live too chaste a life in our de facto monastery.
It’s kind of a miracle when you consider that we all made it through intact. Well, with the exception of the Freaky Friday episode where my husband and I turned into teenagers.
It began the first day I had finished my three-week Covid quarantine and descended the stairs. Like a monk leaving the monastery after a long monastic practice.
Or more accurately, like a prisoner emerging from solitary confinement to discover that all hell had broken loose in the prison yard. I wasn’t prepared for the state of our home. And it wasn’t just dishes stacked in the sink, clothes strewn all over the floor, and bathroom trash bins overflowing. No. It was on par with a frat house after March Madness. I’m talking about cereal bowls with the milk hardened like glue on the sides and spoons standing upright. Under the sofa. Empty bags of chips left on the mantel. Dog urine sprayed in a paisley motif across the carpet. It was Animal House. Literally and figuratively. As of that moment I wanted to put my family on double secret probation.
The next day, I had a vacuum hose around my neck and a bucket of Windex and Soft Scrub hanging off my wrist. I was going to scour the degradation and polish the layers of neglect. But 30 minutes into a rigorous session, I collapsed on the couch. Sure, remnants of Covid. But more a sense of Who gives a shit? Just exactly who or what was I cleaning for? I was flitting around like Emma Thompson in Remains of the Day. As if Meghan and Harry were coming over for vichyssoise and tomato aspic. It occurred to me that during a pandemic, one could be a little lax when it came to domestic perfection. So I yanked the vacuum cord out of the wall and settled in for a pint of mint Oreo cookie ice cream. That’s called breakfast in pandemic-speak. And then I left the empty, dripping container on the coffee table next to a dried piece of spaghetti.
Family dinner used to be twenty minutes. At most. Because of homework and extracurricular academic commitments, baked ziti was shoveled in, dishes thrown in the sink followed by the sound of my girls’ doors closing in unison. My husband would go walk the dogs, and I would be alone in the kitchen cleaning up. That is our contract. The girls clear the table. George walks the dogs, and I shine the kitchen. And by the time I am finished, you could eat off my floor.
That was before the plague hit.
Dinners during lockdown lasted between 45 minutes and two hours. Suddenly, there was no lacrosse, no homework, no bedtime, and a very foggy future. And food became the main source of hope and optimism. Our family group chat was filled with screenshots from Instagram or some random person’s blog about baking bread as the means to preserving our sanity. At breakfast, we discussed what we would have for dinner. Even though we dreamt big, it was based on what we had in the fridge—we ventured out as little as possible, and the market required gloves, a mask, bags, hand sanitizer, and a strong sense of physical boundaries. Chicken tacos became the thing that got us through many months. Our freezer looked like it belonged to a poultry serial killer.
During dinner, we had rabid discussions about equality and social injustice. We debated the death penalty, the environmental crisis, and the lack of medical research for women. And as the parental units we ignited debates and, sometimes in a very didactic tone, educated them on historic context.
And then, sometime in late spring, it all changed. We changed. Not in the sense of an evolution. Actually, the opposite: my husband and I started Benjamin Buttoning into the same emotional maturity as our teenage daughters. I fell into a vernacular that mirrored my Gen Z offspring’s, starting most of my sentences with What the fuck?s and sucks to sucks. And I allowed my youngest to use the same language and, at times, even worse. Family dinners in which we handed down parental wisdom were a thing of the past; we no longer prefaced our opinions with “You know, when I was a young person...” We were four teenagers shooting the shit about how disgusting the popular alcoholic seltzer White Claw was. And why Black Cherry White Claw provokes vomiting. We had discussions about QAnon and conspiracy theories. I’d had no idea Katy Perry is really Jon-Benét Ramsey! We forgot to put our napkins in our laps. Hell, we forgot napkins, period. We threw scraps right at Cooper, who caught them like a shark. We blared Taylor Swift. A few times we even brought our phones to the table—a rule that had been etched in stone. And much like with the vacuum, I gave up and just let things get dirty.
At some point during Covid, we ran out of things to watch on TV. Netflix? Done. Amazon? Done. Hulu? Done. National Geographic? Done. And then one day our youngest discovered Love Island Australia. The show features a group of single contestants, known as “islanders,” who live together in a villa that is isolated from the outside world, in an attempt to find love. The islanders are continuously monitored during their stay in the house by live television cameras as well as personal audio microphones. Throughout the series, the contestants “couple up” to avoid being dumped from the villa. At various points in the series, Australians vote for their favorite islanders; as old islanders are dumped, new islanders enter the villa. A revolving door of barely dressed singles. Not exactly a Ken Burns film or My Octopus Teacher. A raunchy show about super-toned, spray-tanned people hooking up.
When my daughter first invited me to join her in exploring this nude frontier, I rolled my eyes. I’ve never watched The Bachelor or any insta-couple reality shows. Only because it makes me too anxious. Oh, and it’s completely misogynistic. But little by little, I got sucked in. The way a person rubbernecks on a highway. I would watch a scene here or there. Sometimes it was just a couple having sex in a room with six other couples surrounding them. Gross. And I would scream. It advanced to the point where I would watch a scene, scream, and then actually pull up a chair. Then, soon enough, it evolved into a family ritual. Love Island time meant claiming your chair in the living room with a throw, a bowl of ice cream, and elated anticipation. As much as I cursed at the screen about indecent shorts and sex based on committee (I sounded like Anita Bryant or some Christian evangelist’s wife), we kept watching season after season. Until we knew all their names, who they had hooked up with, and every catchphrase from the show. If you watch Love Island, you will understand why we walked around our house yelling, “I got a text!”
You may or may not be familiar with Cameo, the app that allows you to request custom videos for a few hundred bucks from celebrities like Chuck Norris, Bethenny Frankel, or Blac Chyna. Imagine my youngest daughter’s surprise when we bought a cameo from a cast member on Love Island! A blond woman in a thong bikini wishing my girl a happy birthday (or hoppy bathday, mate)! We used to give her aspirational books or complicated craft kits for her birthday. But not during quarantine! We gave her the once-in-a-lifetime gift of an iPhone video of a woman in a bikini who was voted off an island for not being fuckable enough.
One night we were watching some inappropriate movie that six months before we would not have even allowed our 14-year-old to see the trailer for, and one of the characters in the film mentioned a blow job. I froze, then tried to slyly turn around and catch a glimpse of her expression. “I know what that is, Mom!” I slumped into my chair, my hand across my mouth. I wanted to put her back in the BabyBjörn. But it was too late. There were no secrets anymore, no nuance. We were just a crew of teenagers draped around the furniture watching R-rated films. Whatevs.
Little by little, all the old rules evaporated. Bedtimes were up to the individual, because who cares when you don’t have something definitive to wake up for? Sleep all day, look at memes all night. Nothing matters. If you went to the kitchen in the middle of the night for raw frozen cookie dough, undoubtedly, you would run into one of us eating cold spaghetti.
My daughters and I started rotating the same outfit. Our clothes became communal. A few sets of cozy fleece pajama pants and sweatshirts. We walked around like gigantic babies in onesies. You could only tell I was the parent because of the wrinkles and age spots.
All of this came to a head one March night. My youngest decided we should have a theme dinner. Just like any fraternity or stunted-growth-adult birthday party—it’s as if we were all competing for who would go insane first. And the theme of the soiree? Love Island Australia. Even my husband participated. He wore his bathing trunks. I wore a bikini (I was so pale my skin was light blue) and heels. My daughters wore bikinis, heels, and enough eye shadow to paint a house. And there the four of us stood in our kitchen. Like a group of carnies that had been on the road way too long. Or a Diane Arbus photo that never sold.
We gobbled our chicken tacos. Nothing like chowing down on melted cheese in a bikini to give yourself a little ego boost. After we had fully stuffed ourselves and the lipstick had faded, the girls decamped to their rooms, phones in hand. Cooper jumped up onto the table and started eating remnants off the plates. We had become completely unglued. No sense of decorum. Our dignity being lapped up like the bits of tortilla going into our dog’s mouth. I froze, my bloated belly quivering over my bikini bottoms. And then I lost it.
I stomped my heels. Standing there pulling the bikini ruffle out of my butt crack, I was hardly the image of parental authority, but I had outrage on my side. “Hey! This has gotten completely out of hand!” I recall throwing a spoon at the sink. “You two are doing the dishes!” My eldest daughter came back into the kitchen. “Why are you yelling?” I stomped a heel again. “I’m not cleaning up! You hear me? I am not doing the dishes again!” My daughter looked at me calmly. “Fine. You don’t have to scream. Just get out of here. Go to your room!”
My husband and I slunk off to our bedroom, whispering to each other as we closed the door and tried to process what had just happened. “So, do we just stay here until they say we can come out?”
“I guess.”
“Well, what are we supposed to do now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Want to watch Love Island UK?”
“Fuck yeah!”
Excerpted from the book ALI’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL by Ali Wentworth Copyright © 2022 by Ali Wentworth Reprinted by permission of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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