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Parenting in Quarantine: We Are All Going Crazy

My daughter disappeared into a room yesterday. My wife and I noticed—of course we noticed. We’ve never been more aware of the whereabouts of our children: Vivian, seven; William, five. They are omnipresent, clamoring for our attention. Who else are they going to clamor for? We are all confined to our home, like most of you. We are all going crazy.

Also: My wife and I are healthy. We are safe. We are in a house outside New York City, not in our cramped Brooklyn apartment. Gratitude and perspective have never been more important than right now, and, reading the news, seeing pictures of overwhelmed hospitals, I am aware of how much I have to be grateful for.

But I don’t want to sugar coat this: We are going crazy. And not just us. It’s fascinating to see the ways confined people are cracking up, from Anthony Hopkins, to that Israeli mom, to Layla who can’t get her Nando’s. You may suspect you’re sick, or be suffering from isolation, or fearful for a loved one, or you may be crazy for the simple reason that my wife and I are crazy. You’re working from home and you have young children.

That’s a recipe for insanity, my friends. My job at Vogue keeps me hopping between Zoom meetings, connecting with colleagues and writers, editing stories, keeping up with email. My wife is a high school teacher conducting Zoom classes with her students at least twice a day, prepping for said classes, joining faculty Zoom meetings, grading papers. Meanwhile my daughter is in second grade and my son is in preschool. Can they teach themselves to read and do subtraction and build stuffed-animal homes from recycled materials and construct obstacle courses and learn about change-makers all on their own? They cannot. Did I mention that we have a dog who needs to be walked?

My wife and I have held it together through steely will and daily schedules composed with military precision and taped to the kitchen counter every morning at 7 a.m. And no, we are not shy with screen time. After a certain hour of the day, the kids are allowed to sit two inches from a big TV. Later in the evenings there is Love Island: Australia and knitting; there is Better Call Saul and gin.

How are the kids coping? That’s what my relatives want to know. And they’re right to wonder. The emotional life of a child during a crisis like this is so hard to fathom. My son had a Zoom with his preschool class and the teacher asked them all to say how they were feeling. I listened attentively but they all basically said the same thing: Happy! They were happy. I smiled, profoundly relieved. William seems okay. He talks wistfully to me about when he will see his friends again; he burst into tears thinking of the stuffed animals left in our Brooklyn apartment; and he complained just this morning that mom and dad are working too much. But basically, he’s five. He plows ahead, searching for the next snack.

A seven-year-old is a more complicated case. The other day, without warning or any preparation from us, Vivian used the word coronavirus in a sentence. A sweet-hearted girl, she has recently been boiling with feeling: bouts of manic energy, displays of hyper-competitiveness, hysterical tears at irrational moments, all while maintaining a prevailing cool-girl pose that feels like attitude but I suspect is a kind of sublimated anger. Her birthday is Sunday. We were going to take her and three friends to a Korean spa. Instead we will be making her a sheet cake. If there’s any cake mix left at the supermarket.

She’s going through something, in other words.

And as I said, the other day she disappeared into a room.

Here’s what she emerged with: a small, hand-made book (five pages, stapled together). The title: The Very Grumpy Baby. It’s a parable of madness.

<cite class="credit">Photo: Courtesy of Taylor Antrim</cite>
Photo: Courtesy of Taylor Antrim

In it, a couple gives birth to a grumpy baby. A baby who never smiles. A baby, she writes, who says, “I want to be evil.” On page two the parents consult a doctor. The baby is not sick, the doctor says. The baby simply doesn’t smile. But the parents continue to worry about their baby. By page three they have come up with a plan. They will themselves refrain from smiling. They will be as grumpy as their grumpy baby. After a week of this, the baby smiles. The end.

Do you find this as chilling as I do? My wife and I maintain that we will all look back on this period with rose colored glasses, remembering the family time, the craft projects, the jolly dinners. We will laugh about it and reminisce and long for more togetherness. But that is not where we are. Right now we are here. Together. Wondering just how much longer this is going to last.

Originally Appeared on Vogue