About a week after our school building closed, I stared over Zoom at the exhausted faces of some mom friends, commiserating over the complete loss of order in our homes.
Then it hit me: This is like having a newborn again.
Suddenly I saw so many similarities between our current state of quarantine chaos and those early days of parenthood. Being homebound, struggling to adjust to a new reality, the dread and uncertainty weighing on me like a flannel blanket. We’re all creating unattainable schedules, this time for kids’ classwork, not feeding and napping. There’s so much unfamiliar gear to reckon with — now it’s Chromebooks and educational software, not baby swings and co-sleepers. We fret endlessly about whether we have enough supplies, we don’t remember when we last showered, we Google our worst fears late into the night.
And the backdrop now feels similar to what it was when we were keeping a tiny infant alive: a constant awareness of life’s fragility.
But of course, for most of us, this is no traditional newborn period. It’s the fourth trimester on steroids. No cavalry of relatives can come to help, no friends can arrive with pans of lasagna. There aren’t any milestones to mark the passage of time or best-selling advice books to tell us what will unfold during Week 5 or 6. If we are lucky enough not to be on the front lines of this disaster and able to work from home, we must complete our day jobs while educating children who perhaps have never needed us more.
As my friend texted me a few days in, “It feels like a bizarro maternity leave.”
This framing — that this is a brand new experience, that I’m just getting my sea legs — has helped me be a little kinder to myself during this stretch. For once, I’m trying to suspend judgment, just as I would for a mom wearing a baby carrier askew or a dad who forgot to pull down the sunshade on his stroller. They aren’t hopeless parents. They’re just new at this. And so are all of us.
Yet I’ve never seen my parent friends so hard on themselves. Just like the baby brain we suffered from postpartum, every parent I know has some degree of quarantine brain. We all seem to be screwing up online orders; I am, for instance, the proud owner of a container of peanut butter as big as a snare drum. The most competent people I know forget basic passwords or become undone over Zoom issues. Numerous folks nearly forgot about Passover or neglected to order Easter candy. Instead of laughing it off, I see many parents criticizing themselves. Most days, I get texts insisting, “I’m a wreck,” “I’ve lost my mind,” or, simply, “This is a lot.”
And of course some parents are facing even larger obstacles. Parents grappling with illness, staring down pay cuts, struggling to home-school children who typically require special services in school. Parents second-guessing decisions about where to ride out the pandemic, questioning the choice to get groceries delivered, worrying about the steep spike in screen time. Every decision feels monumental, and all the conflicting advice makes it even harder.
But some advice feels universal — the advice we got as new parents. Ask for help when you need it. Leave the room when you need a break. Do something for yourself every day, even if it’s just a shower. Sleep when they sleep.
While giving my youngest son a bath a week into the quarantine, I asked how he thought our family was handling the situation. He replied, “I think you’re doing okay, Mom.” His words took me back to a Johnson’s commercial that was in regular rotation when my older son was a baby, an ad I hadn’t thought about in years. In it, a voice-over assures a new mom that her baby knows she is doing her best, that she is appreciated and loved. “You’re not perfect,” the commercial says, “but you’re trying. … You’re doing okay, Mom.” I found the ad so comforting as a hapless new mother, and watching it recently gave me some comfort again. We’re making mistakes. We’re not going to win awards for our home schooling. We’re falling behind at work. But we’re doing okay.
Carrie Melago is a journalist and mother of two boys living in Brooklyn. She’s an editor at Chalkbeat, the education news network, and has worked at the Wall Street Journal and New York Daily News. Follow her on Twitter @carriemelago.
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