Parenting During a Pandemic: Not Vanquishing Joy

It can feel strange--maybe even indulgent--to express joy, satisfaction, contentment and the like during a pandemic.  After all, there's been a pretty steady parade of grim news.  Yes, there have been bright spots too, but still.  Millions are suffering and so many have died.  And yet...

As I sat around the Friday night dinner table with my family, I felt fine. More than fine, even.  I felt a kind of calmness and happiness I haven't felt in a while.  And it wasn't triggered by much.  In fact, the scene was really quite ordinary, though we all haven't been together this much in literally years. The clinking of forks against plates, the drinking of wine, the kiddush that preceded the meal, the blessing of our kids--these are all familiar parts of our family narrative.  But there was something extra sweet about this last Friday night dinner.  Maybe it was that my eldest hadn't been home at that point for long, and hadn't been home for an extended period of time in nearly ten years.  That's a long time for a family not to be whole.

The thing that most struck me though, was the laughter.  There was something light and joyous in our gathering.  That's probably extra noteworthy because we're a pretty serious bunch.  We can be silly--even ridiculous, at times--but our default is to be a pretty serious, thinking, sometimes arguing crew.  So the laughter was especially delicious.  I can't even remember what we were laughing about, and it certainly doesn't matter.  The fact of the laughter was the thing.

I reminded myself to appreciate the sounds around our dinner table because I know better than to take them for granted.  And lo and behold, the very next day, I found myself in a deep, dark funk.  I couldn't tell you why, but I was just so down.  Sunday was better, and I couldn't tell you why that was the case either.  That rollercoaster of emotion can be so exhausting.  Maybe it's all pandemic-driven, but I honestly don't think so. This up/down thing has long been a feature for me, not a bug.  I'm almost used to it.  But not quite.  Maybe that's why episodes of joy and lightness matter so much.  And maybe that's why I was determined not to feel guilty about not feeling guilty about feeling joy smack in the middle of a pandemic.

Parenting During a Pandemic: Crossing Finish Lines

'Tis the season of graduations of all kinds--high school, college, graduate school.  Like millions of other American students, my eldest graduated--just this week--from his graduate school.  I sat with him in my bedroom at 3p.m., both of us curled up with his laptop, as he tried to activate the link for his law school graduation "ceremony."  Truth be told, it wasn't much of one.

First, the law school dean offered his words of congratulation and encouragement.  Then individual photos of graduates scrolled by, interspersed with offers of congratulation from faculty and administrators.  Several pointed to their hope and expectation of celebrating graduates in person, one day soon, when it is safe.  Anthony Kennedy popped up on the screen.  I listened to him blather on about the Constitution and freedom, all while thinking, you're the schmuck who voted to gut the Voting Rights Act.  And you're the jerk who gave us Brett Kavanaugh.  Keep blathering.  Hopefully history will write an accurate portrait of the damage you've done.  And couldn't this "elite" law school have found someone who didn't shit on democracy to offer words of congratulation and encouragement to these soon-to-be upholders (we hope!) of the law, these defenders of justice (we hope!)  And like an answered prayer, Elizabeth Warren popped up on the screen.  Praise the Lord!  Someone at the law school had sense and decency.

My son looked handsome in his photo.  Maybe it was from his college days?  He was clean-shaven (making his mom very happy), and wore a pale blue button-down shirt.  He looked healthy and happy.  Sadly, he seemed the very opposite of happy throughout this event.  Not sure what it was.  He's not one for these kinds of things in any form, but even for him, a remote graduation, after weeks of quarantining with the virus, then quarantining without it because there was basically nothing else to do, followed by not being able to see friends in person, or being able to celebrate this milestone, say goodbye, wish each other luck, give each other high-fives and hugs, make promises to stay in touch, etc. etc., must have taken their toll.

So what should have been a happy occasion was turned into something quite downbeat.  I'm sure not all graduates processed it the way my son did.  But so be it.  Some will be upbeat no matter what.  Others will be more downbeat, no matter what.  I do hope my son takes some pride in having finished.  I know that he didn't seem to like law school much.  A professor here and there, sure.  But overall, he found it boring.  He spent more of his time and treasure on all kinds of non-classroom-related activities, like working with immigrants, with military veterans, with undocumented and unaccompanied minors, with those seeking to have their records expunged.  He co-taught a high school civics class, and worked on the cases of death row inmates.  So he did the stuff that spoke to his essence, to his soul, while doing what he had to do to earn a degree. Other mothers might browbeat their kids over their grades, over their performance.  I honestly couldn't care less.  Do your best or don't.  That's on you.  But no matter how you perform, always be the person I can be proud of and even more important, be the person you can be proud of.  If my son came out of law school with his values intact, with his soul unsullied, with his moral compass in working order, then that's success.  It doesn't depend on an in-person celebration, on good or bad speakers, or on class rank.  It might for some; it never will for me.  Or, I think, for my son.

Parenting During a Pandemic: The Ties That Bind

My eldest came home from school this week, with a few suitcases, his cello, two big bags of dirty laundry, and his soccer cleats in tow.  Wanting to get a jump start on getting organized--and desperately trying to stay ahead of the chaos of having all of us and all of our stuff under one apartment roof--I got the laundry going and started to unpack the smaller suitcases in the room he's going back to sharing with his brother.

In the course of unpacking, I found the usual stuff--clothing, books--but also something that brought me such joy.  My son had brought home a whole slew of framed photos that I'd forgotten he'd been toting around since college.  There was the one of him, his sister and me, taken in a friend's backyard after his college graduation.  There was the one of him and his siblings that is probably fifteen years old.  There was the one of me and him, from where I can't remember.  But I paused at that one and thought, What a beautiful photo of the two of us.  I looked young once. Time does take its toll.

I have no idea how many kids tote around family photos from place to place, but I am so touched that my son does.  To me it says that however far out into the world he goes, he remains tethered to us, in the best sense of that word.  Not forcibly connected, but linked by choice, by desire, by love.

Ours is not an uncomplicated family, so this connectedness is even more important, and not at all guaranteed.  Yes, my husband and I have worked doggedly to build family bonds.  Not didactically, but experientially.  My approach has been to use the opportunity of travel to get us out of our normal routine, and away from the stresses of home.  I consider it the greatest gift we've given each other.  Sometimes, those trips have meant leaving our autistic son home, and while it initially troubled me to do that, seeing the ways in which my eldest and youngest could connect without the extra stresses of dealing with their brother convinced me that there was a clear upside. And that upside was heightened by knowing that my autistic son was spending his time away from us with a loving aunt and uncle.

My son has been away from home for nine years, counting college, work, and graduate school.  His presence at home aligned mostly with school vacations, but not even always then.  He'd been a quiet, steadying presence at home, so his absence made a difference.  It meant there was no buffer between my autistic son and my daughter.  While she missed the very early years--which encompassed some of her brother's worst and most challenging behaviors--she grew up in a home distorted by disability, a home in which things were stretched and pulled in ways that were radically different from how things are in families that aren't living and wrestling with the challenges of disability.

Having my son home now is welcome, of course, but tinged with a little bit of sadness.  After all, his life, like the lives of so many of his peers, has been upended by the restrictions imposed by COVID-19.  The way forward for him is delayed, if not derailed.  Time will tell how his future unfolds, as it will for all of us.  But his being back, for however long, completes us. We've not all been together for any length of time since before my son left for college, so I'm selfishly relishing having him with us, even if his extended time at home is not by his choice.

I recall visiting my son at his last place of residence in college.  He lived on the top floor of a house, in a space decrepit enough that I asked one of his roommates if anyone in the house was a biology major.  He said he thought so, at which point I suggested he might be able to tell them what was growing in their bathroom.

My son's room was sparse.  He travels lightly, which might be unintended preparation for a life in the Navy.  On the wall above his desk, he had taped a copy of the letter my father, z'l, had sent to Yad Vashem, vouching for the righteousness of the Polish farmer who had hidden my father toward the end of World War II, saving his life.  I was so struck by that, and so touched.  I've never told my children what to value, what to prioritize.  That's a fool's errand.  Children watch and listen.  They see and hear what their parents prioritize.  And they mimic.  Not all kids.  And not all in the same way.  But still.

What I took away from seeing the inside of my son's college bedroom, and what I learned from unpacking his suitcases, is that we are with him. Wherever he is, and wherever we are, we are together.  As a parent, I'm not sure I could ever hope for anything more.

Parenting During a Pandemic: The Pain of Not Being Able to Fix It

My husband was reminding me the other day that when we were dating and he talked about wanting to have kids (we were pretty serious, pretty quickly), my response was something like, "I can't have children.  I have no idea what to do with them, how to raise them."  Clearly, we passed that hurdle, and have a trio of young adults who share our DNA as evidence.

I never read a parenting book, never subscribed to following the advice of complete strangers hawking their so-called "expertise" about how to raise kids.  So I did what turned out to come naturally:  I followed my compass. That meant letting my values guide my parenting.  And in that, I had a partner with whom I was radically, beautifully in synch.

We raised our kids in a community full of what I would call hysterical strivers, people who thought the most important thing in life was having your child ace his or her AP classes and matriculate at Harvard.  I knew that sort of striving was a special kind of bullshit, and I always chuckled over how the parents chasing that outcome were not parents who themselves had ever been to an Ivy League school.  And I knew that Harvard graduates as many jackasses as any other place, because having a high IQ, or being able to play the ukulele with your toes while scoring in a lacrosse game and installing fresh water in an African village doesn't make you better than anyone else.  It says nothing about your values and everything about what you were willing to do to impress the admissions committee.

So avoiding that nonsense in the community in which we lived was easy. Why?  Because our kids drank our family kool-aid, not the communal poison.  So my eldest, one of those honors classes, talented athlete, great musician kids, just didn't care about that poison.  In fact, when we talked with him once about how competitive high school was and asked how he thought about his GPA in light of that, he calmly told us that he wasn't willing to kill himself for another point on his GPA.  We told him that that might, because of how crazy college competition was, somewhat limit his choices.  He didn't care.  And we didn't either.  He applied to six schools--far fewer than most kids--and even with his stellar stats, got rejected by three.  Didn't rattle him at all.  Went to a perfectly fine school.  And when I asked him about his experience there, he pointed out that he could take the classes he'd taken anywhere; it was the friendships he'd made that mattered most.  Bingo.  Lesson learned.  And boy did he learn it.  Having just finished his studies at law school, he's the only one in his class who chose the military.  Schools like this one tout their bona fides with respect to public service, but 95+% of grads go into corporate settings.  Same is actually true of Harvard.  Kids kill themselves to get in, then chase money on their way out.

With my autistic son, there was no path to college.  He just got to stay in high school longer.  That gave some kids a chance to use him as resume fodder, as when they signed up to be his buddy in an after school club but routinely failed to show up because they had cheerleading practice or some other activity they actually wanted to do.  When the speech therapist who ran the club told me about these absences, I told her that it was obscene that they were using my son as a pawn in their college applications, and that she should under no circumstances endorse their behavior with any kind of recommendation.  It pained me to have to tell her that, but it was one of many occasions in the years of my dealing with a school system deluded by its own "excellence" that I had to remind faculty and administrators of the right thing to do.  Frankly, it was exhausting.

Then there was my daughter, an outspoken, fiercely passionate child who collided with a school system and a community of conformists.  Cliques were a thing not only among students, but among their parents.  Mean girls learn what they learn from somewhere, after all.

I couldn't wait to leave that community, and my autistic son's exit from high school was my chance.  He would have no life to speak of in the suburbs, given its car-based culture, parochialism, and social isolation.  Sure, I could drive him to and from the one vocational program he was in that had any value, but that would be it.  And that just wasn't good enough.  All credit to my husband, who went along with me even though he's not a fan of change, and loved the home in which we'd raised our kids.

Fast forward 2.5 years, and we're living in what seems to be the global epicenter of a pandemic.  While I remain strangely calm in spite of that, I do find myself worrying greatly about my children's futures--and frankly all young people's futures--in light of what I think is going to be a long-term catastrophe, both economically and in terms of the kind of undemocratic, fascistic country we are now living in.  I raised my children to cherish knowledge, ideas, curiosity, kindness, seeing, listening, and questioning. Maybe above all, questioning.  Not for the sake of playing "gotcha" but because it's only by posing questions that matter that we can arrive at answers that matter.  It's an effort, in fact, to vaccinate my kids against ignorance and against the moral blindness and cognitive deafness that shake an accusing finger at facts and truth, and at the thinkers and do-ers trying to find a better way forward.

My greatest joy is when my kids are out in the world and I get feedback about how they've behaved.  The mother who thanked my daughter profusely for getting her selectively mute child to speak.  The judge who noted that my eldest was uniformly liked and respected by all the courthouse staff, and that that was not commonplace among interns, given class and other tensions between college-level interns and those staff members.  The elementary school aide who told me that my autistic son was the reason she was so happy to come to work each day.  And so on and so on and so on.

For these reasons and more, it is both heartbreaking and infuriating to see so many dark clouds on the horizon of my children's futures.  What does it mean to pursue something meaningful through school and work, and find that both the floor and the ceiling are likely to collapse under you?  What parental guidance matters in a country undone by lies, by corruption, by cruelty, by incompetence?  I can applaud the goodness in people--and strive to be one of those people--but the larger forces of a virus that doesn't care and a President and his allies who care even less--is beyond catastrophic.

Prognosticators--who multiply in times of crisis, it seems--have made all kinds of predictions.  We'll be past the worst of it in months.  No, it'll be a year or eighteen months until we get a vaccine.  Might take three years for the economy to right itself.  We might never get a vaccine. My prediction, for what it's worth, is decades of struggle, of chaos, of suffering.  There's not just the public health wreckage; there's the deep, corrosive economic destruction.  And surrounding, undergirding, and suffusing all of that is the political destruction wrought by a lawless, corrupt, incompetent administration whose viciousness and self-serving lies rot the soul of this country in ways that might never be repairable.

So on the heels of what was a lovely, love-filled Mother's Day, I am heartbroken over what I cannot offer my children, of what I cannot promise them, and of what they--and millions and millions of other young people--have been robbed of.  The only thing I can promise them is that I will love them, hold them, console them, laugh with them, cry with them, and remind them that however out of control the world spins, I will try my damnedest to be their ballast, to be the mother they can cling to however vast and furious the storm.  I have no idea if that will be enough, but it's all I have to give.  And who more worthy to give it to than the beings I was once afraid to bring into the world, the ones who convinced me that love can conquer fear, that hope can conquer pessimism, and that fighting for what you care about, what you treasure, what you value, is always worth it.  

Parenting During a Pandemic: Tick Tock

Another week's gone by.  Or is it a month?  Or a year?  Or is it just a single day that won't quite wind down, instead just ebbing from night to day and back again, but with no fixed beginning or end?  And does it even matter?

I can hear a chorus in my ears of "kids need structure."  And while my kids technically count as adults, they need it too.  I think I might need it more. Even so, it seems just out of reach, my best intentions notwithstanding. But therein might lie the problem; my intentions are not enough.  It's as if I think I can think myself into structure, rather than actually creating the structure I think I need.

I suppose the same goes for my kids.  My daughter has classes on line, but when those end, then what?  What does a twenty year old's day look like, without the rhythms of school or work?  And what of my autistic son? His days were fully defined by school before he "graduated" from high school at age twenty-one.  Then he went off the famous cliff of aging out of school.  I worked doggedly to build something for him from scratch, including moving him to an entirely new community.  And things were looking pretty good.  Not perfect, but pretty good, considering all that wasn't available to him.  But pandemics don't care how hard you've tried, what your intentions are, and how much or little structure your kids might require to enable them to have a life that isn't just about some kind of terminal stasis.

I consider a day a kind of triumph when there is something akin to forward motion in it.  For each of us that might mean something different, and it might mean moving only one ball down the field.  Maybe that's not much, but there's an awful lot these days that feels like it's not enough, that it's inadequate to the growing list of things that need tending to, correcting, repairing, healing, holding up, and so on.

So whatever day, month, or year it is, I'm going to hold fast to the notion that getting something done that needs to get done needs to be enough. For that day, month, year, or whatever the heck time period I can no longer keep track of because trying to keep track feels like piling rebuke upon disappointment upon expectation upon hope upon need upon urgency and back again...

Parenting During a Pandemic: Girlfriends Who Make You Go "Grrrrrrrr"

This is likely to be a very brief post.  I'll just note that I never make a big deal of Hallmark holidays like Mother's Day.  As my mother-in-law has said, "Every day should be Mother's Day."  In fact, when my eldest said that he wanted to be home in time for Mother's Day, I suggested that maybe he should stay in Philly through the end of the month, since his rent is paid up, and being home would mean being sequestered with all of us for who knows how long.  If he wanted some space and freedom for a bit longer, I wasn't going to object.  In fact, I encouraged it.

But he didn't jump at that, and the plan was for him to come home this weekend, in time for Mother's Day.  Until the plan changed.  Now it seems that he wants to come home instead on Tuesday, two days after Mother's Day.  My husband didn't bother asking why, but I did.  Turns out he's staying to help his girlfriend pack.  "When's she leaving Philly?" I texted him.  "Monday."

When my husband came home, I unloaded a big bag of hurt, telling him that while I didn't make a big deal of Mother's Day, the fact that my son's giving up being home for it to help his very needy, always-stressed-out-girlfriend pack really stuck in my craw.  And that's largely because as a young man headed to the Navy, who the hell knows how many years it'll be before he can be home for Mother's Day.

So yeah, I'm kind of way less than liking his girlfriend right now.  Not only is she not supportive of his joining the Navy, she's now the reason I can't have all my kids home with me for Mother's Day.  Yes, I know it's a made-up holiday.  I get that.  I also know that I packed up a three-story house by myself and this girl can't manage a one-bedroom apartment.  Good luck with the real world, where young men willing to be at her beck and call might not be so easy to come by.  And here's hoping that someday--with some other guy--she learns the cardinal rule my father, z'l taught his daughters:  never come between a son and his mother...

Parenting During a Pandemic: Hair Tearing and Radical Amazement

I'm not an extraordinary mom, though I hope my kids think I'm at least above average.  Whatever their assessment, I consider myself a dedicated mom, one who tries to get better, to be better, to do better.  How I get there has been complicated by the circumstances of this pandemic, but in some ways, those same circumstances have made the role of parenting that much more urgent.  Essential, even.

There's the stuff of parenting that continues as a through line, even in a pandemic.  There's the nurturing, the supporting, the encouraging, the providing of boundaries and guardrails.  There's also the haranguing, the prodding, the reminding.  There's appreciating your kids when they're helpful, and wanting to murder them when they are not.  In our home, there's the familiar aggravation of providing three different dinners for four people, because we've utterly failed to enforce meal conformity for so long (primary thanks to our uber-picky autistic son) that there's no way we're going to slay that dragon now.

There is wanting to murder my daughter for keeping her room in a perpetual pigsty state, as if she's trying to drive me mad.  And no, closing her door so I won't see, as she unhelpfully suggests, won't diminish my aggravation.  But I also know that having a messy room is not--and never has been--a life and death issue.  So I try to move on.  My husband reminds me that she's been attending all of her online classes and seminars, and following up as needed regarding summer work or classes, if work falls through.  And yes, that matters.  Especially for a child for whom that kind of follow through hasn't always been a given.

The days when I'm tempted to rip my not-graying hair out (that's just how it is for most redheads), are counter-balanced by my daughter's reporting that she got her autistic brother to go on a three mile walk with her.  "Did you threaten him?" my husband and I asked in unison.  She gets him to do things we never seem able to.  We often chalk it up to his being afraid of her, but maybe she just has a better technique, drawn from growing up with him, and her experiences working with disabled kids at summer camp.  Whatever the reason, we're grateful for that kind of outcome.  Not so grateful when she argues with him, gets in his face, or provokes him with a word or a flick of some sort.  Brings me right back to wanting to murder her.

That emotional parenting seesaw is nothing new, I suppose.  It's just that there's no real relief for it during a lockdown.  No one's going anywhere, so we can't create the distance that might allow us to decompress, to walk away from and walk off the tension, the anger, the disappointment that bubbles up in families, however frequently or infrequently.

But something else--somewhat unique to families like ours--that this pandemic has made space for and allowed me to see, is its impact on my autistic son.  When his face-to-face programs shut down--including the work training program at Invictus that he absolutely loved--I wasn't at all sure how that would turn out.  What happened for the most part was that for the first six weeks or so, from mid-March on, my son slept.  And I mean slept...as in 18-20 hours a day.  He would get up, have his breakfast and take his meds, announce that he was tired, and promptly go back to bed.  Many nights, I had to bring him his anti-seizure meds in bed, because I couldn't get him up for dinner, or to come to the kitchen to take his pills.

I also couldn't get my son to go outside, not even for a short walk with the dogs.  He remained housebound, and nothing seemed able to change that.  But he also didn't seem unhappy or distressed. When he was awake, he did what he's always done when he's had nothing else to do, or was unwilling to do anything else--he spent time on his computer.  He was either noodling with the spreadsheets he's made about construction equipment or restaurants, or watching age-inappropriate videos from Sesame Street or Barney.  But then my daughter encouraged him to do puzzles.

We had a bunch in our apartment that were just too difficult, at 1,000 pieces each.  Not sure why my husband ever got those, but so be it.  My daughter was able to find a 300-piece puzzle online and when it arrived, my son spent hours completing it, with his sister.  Hours.  That was a revelation.  Both to see the two of them deeply immersed in a meaningful activity together, but also to see my son emerge from his near-hibernation to engage with something that held his attention as nothing had for months.  It was a magical, nearly miraculous thing to observe.  And it reminded me that, for all the challenges of cohabiting during a crisis, there might still be some bright spots.

Some of that, I think, might derive from lowering expectations.  I've done some of that myself.  I've thought: I should use this time to learn a new language, to learn to knit, to learn to play guitar, to try out new recipes.  I've failed to do any of that, though I did spend a few minutes with a language program on my phone.  I think it's my increasing distractibility that's been an issue, but it's also the fact that I actually hate online learning.  It just doesn't hold me.  I have enjoyed some online classes, where I basically just listen.  But the "interactive" stuff, where you put your questions into a chatbox on Zoom and wait to see if your question will be answered, leaves me feeling a weird kind of disembodied numbness, like I'm having an experience, but not really having it.

But back to my children.  So after the triumph with the 300-piece puzzle, my daughter decided to up the ante.  She managed to snap up a 500-piece puzzle for her brother.  The day it arrived, he spent 5.5 hours working on and finishing it.  Did I mention that he spent 5.5 hours on it???  Did I mention that for weeks prior, he'd been sleeping 18-20 hours a day?  Did I mention that he's autistic, that I couldn't get him to go outside, to be off his computer for the few hours he was awake?  His engagement with puzzles has been a revelation.  It taught me something about him that I'm not sure I ever really knew.  And this learning has coincided with a kind of miraculous flowering of his speech.  The kinds of questions he's been asking, the words he's been using, the curiosity he's shown, have been revelatory.  Sure, all of that has coexisted with some familiar, perseverative behaviors and speech, but the overall trajectory has been kind of stunning.  And I'm not sure if I would have appreciated it if I'd been out and about, distracted by all the shiny objects of daily life.  Instead, I've been inside with him, hunkered down, with ample time to look, to see, to listen, to hear.  I've been able, during the awfulness that is this pandemic, to experience something wondrous, something that might or might not last, but that has acquainted me--in the close confines of living with my quirky kids--with the gift of radical amazement.

Parenting During a Pandemic: The Milestones That Aren't

Yesterday, my eldest took his last law school exam.  I thought he said it was today, so I was late congratulating him.  But really, does it matter?  He seemed just to want to get it over with.  He always belittles these kind of milestone occasions--high school graduation, college graduation, culminating concerts, sports events.  Every. Single. One.  So the things that many if not most parents look forward to, I kind of dread.  Because they're just another opportunity to feel that another opportunity to celebrate something has slipped away.  Or been tossed away.

I can't blame any of this on the coronavirus, though I suppose we can blame the virus for the missed chance at least to attend law school graduation in person.  I think they're planning some sort of online something or other, involving photos of every member of the graduating class.  If my son remains true to his taciturn approach to such things, he'll probably just neglect to tell us when this online event takes place.  And it'll be just another opportunity to celebrate something that slips away.

I don't blame my son; he's wired how he's wired.  I can't change him.  I do feel sad that the things other families seem to look forward to celebrating, we rarely do.  Maybe the one exception was when my autistic son graduated from his high school transitions program.  There was a potluck lunch after the ceremony, and a bus driver came up and told me that she remembered driving my son to preschool years and years ago.  Someone had made a favorite dish of his.  And I cried.  I'm good at that, it seems.

But the boisterous, celebratory stuff that other families seem to take for granted?  Doesn't seem to be in the cards for us.  Certainly hasn't been yet.  I'm not counting on it ever being, frankly.  It would just be too painful to be disappointed, yet again, when another opportunity to celebrate something has slipped away.  Or been tossed away.

I thought it might be nice to have a virtual toast of sorts with my son this evening.  He readily agreed.  He suggested 3p.m., and I replied that that seemed a bit early, but not if we were in Denmark, so why not?  A short while later he texted back, saying he'd changed his mind.  And this became just another opportunity to celebrate something that slipped away.

There's the challenge of quarantining.  There's the managing of illness.  There's the anguish of knowing how much pain and loss there is all around us.  Then there is the stuff we inflict on ourselves.  I think for me, at a moment when our choices are so very, very limited, that might be the worst thing of all.

Parenting During a Pandemic: The Blessing of Blessings

Each Friday, when we usher in the Sabbath, is an opportunity to offer blessings to our children.  We do this after we recite kiddush, sanctifying the Sabbath.  This involves not only the aural transmission of words of blessing, but the tactile conveyance of those blessings through our laying our hands on our children's heads.  One of those "children" is taller than I am, so I either reach the top of his head on my tip toes, or he leans down toward me.  Either way, we make it work.  My husband and I take turns, blessing each of our kids, using the blessing for males for our sons, and the blessing for females for our daughter.

It might seem quaint, even odd, to pause one evening each week to offer a blessing to one's children.  I recall vividly, fondly, achingly, the sound and touch of my father's blessing me each new year, for the year ahead.  It is one of the most cherished memories I have of my entire childhood and adulthood.  I've no idea how my children will process or memorialize for themselves the experience of being blessed by my husband and me, but it's deeply meaningful to us as parents that we give them this experience, that we communicate our hopes that they will live lives of goodness, of peace, of security, sheltered and protected by God.

It may seem strange or even irrelevant to focus on such things at a moment of global struggle, in the midst of a crisis born of an illness that is beyond humans to control fully, much less banish.  And yet, it is precisely in these times of chaos and loss of control that slowing down, that leaning in to that which is aspirational and hopeful in the best ways, matters most.  I cannot promise anything to my children with more fidelity than that I will love them, that I will cherish and support them.  What is a blessing, more than a commitment to those very things?  It is through blessing my children that I convey to them that what binds us is not things, it is not the materiality of life.  It is the connective tissue of hopes, dreams, love, and the solidarity of family.  In the moment I speak the words of blessing, and in the moment in which I lay my hands on my children, that connective tissue is strengthened.  

The possibility of offering a blessing is itself a kind of freedom.  It represents a choice about how to express hopefulness and gratitude.  At a time when choices are so deeply, painfully constrained, that freedom is exquisite.  I cannot go where I want. I cannot be with others.  I cannot meander in the physical world as I've been used to doing.  But sequestered with my family, I am able to talk, and to touch, and to be in ways unmarred by the dreadful pandemic that is COVID-19.  That in and of itself is its own kind of blessing.