A Short Car Ride with My Son Reminded Me How Difficult This Past Year Has Been for All of Us

 One recent Saturday morning, I escaped the house with my 6-year-old son to pick up coffee from a drive thru. It was a bit more mundane than some of our weekend outings pre-2020, but grading on the pandemic curve, it was probably one of the most exciting things we did all month.

Before we rolled out of the driveway, my son said “Daddy, wanna know something?”

I was like, “Absolutely I do,” thus opening the door for the dropping of some knowledge the likes of which the world has never seen.

The bits of information that followed this question that my precocious middle child repeated throughout our little caffeine quest weren’t particularly earth shattering — although I did learn lots of fun facts about our neighbors’ dogs — but the eagerness with which he delivered his pronouncements did make me sit up and take notice.

It struck me right away just how starved he must’ve been for some one-on-one time so he could share literally everything on his mind with me.

At first glance it was counterintuitive. I mean, the two of us have been together constantly for close to a year. We’re barely even apart at night because he comes and gets me around one in the morning, and I sleep the rest of the night beside him in his race car bed.

But I guess it’s not always the amount of time we spend together, it’s the quality of that time. My 6-year-old has an older and younger sibling so he’s used to having to share my attention, but at least prior to last March, we would have more regular outings together where it was just him and me. We would go to basketball games at the local university or I would drive him to and from his soccer or basketball practice.

All of that ended last March and it still hasn’t really come back. I recently noticed my camera roll from the last several months is quite sparse. It’s easy to forget to document your days when every day feels the same. How many photos can one person take of their child falling asleep in a cute position?

What has replaced the activities that used to structure our days and weeks is an endless torrent of time with no clear lines of demarcation, but plenty of frustration to keep everyone on edge. There are very few significant outings or events that require a note on the calendar or photo evidence. Instead, there is work at home, play at home, breakfast, lunch, and dinner at home, and perhaps most difficult of all, school at home.

And with school at home comes arguments five days a week. Instead of an annoying half hour every evening when my wife and I used to team up to force the children to write three words on a single homework worksheet, the entirety of every weekday is now like a protracted, physically grueling tennis match. I hit every spin, pace, and angle to cajole my kids into staying on task and they deftly swat every shot right back at me until we all give up from sheer exhaustion.

I hate to say it, but we do get a little sick of each other. And since we can’t physically escape, we tend to mentally detach. I retreat to my computer or phone to do some writing, or more realistically, to scroll through some memes, and the kids take to their YouTube videos and Roblox.

Although we are practically on top of each other every minute of every day, it often feels like we’re very far apart.

So, is there a solution to this paradox other than trying to run out the clock until things get “back to normal” later this year or next year or the year after that?

Clinging to small bits of pre-pandemic routines has helped us cope at least a little. Many mainstays of our usual schedule have slipped into the abyss, but there are two traditions we’ve mostly maintained. We eat dinner at the dinner table together almost every night, and I read to my older two children while my wife puts our 4-year-old to bed. We’ve been working our way through long series by Rick Riordan and similar authors since before the pandemic began so that small slice of the day still feels familiar.

Like my son’s car-ride pronouncements, coping strategies like maintaining rituals and small elements of pre-pandemic life certainly aren’t novel, but sometimes the most valuable truths are hiding in plain sight. We just can’t see them because dusk descended so quickly when we weren’t looking.

Family dinner, bedtime reading sessions, and now, drives to the coffee shop. These are what help us get through our days. Because even the smallest things can help us stay connected.

As we rounded the corner toward home on this short Saturday morning break from the relentless routine, I heard “Daddy, wanna know something?” for the 78th time in fifteen minutes.

This time, I realized I really did want to know something. Not so much because of what I was going to learn, but because of who I was going to learn it from.

The pandemic has taken away many things we have no control over. But if we’re lucky enough to find space for small slivers of normalcy, perhaps we can reclaim what’s most important.

Oh yeah, what was that last thing I needed to know before we got home? It was about the dogs, of course. Zola and Oscar are a good girl and good boy and it’s important we remember that, too. They’re probably digging at our fence right now. Desperate to get in. At least someone or something wants to get into our house instead of out of it.

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