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How Widowed Parenting Prepared Me for Coronavirus Parenting
I looked over at Tommy as he ate breakfast yesterday and realized that he looked just like an advertisement for bad parenting. He was shirtless, watching a Captain Underpants movie on an iPad and eating Eggo waffles that he was liberally dipping in syrup. He wasn’t even using a fork. I thought about taking a photo of him and texting a few friends with the headline, “mother of the year!” Of course, that text would have been seeping in irony. No way have I been mother of the year at any point during this pandemic. My kids have eaten more sugar than ever and they are in front of screens…
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Mother’s Day, Year 3
I am spending a lot of time with my children right now. I guess we all are. It’s one of the blessings and curses of this pandemic. Every day is family day. Anyway, since I rarely leave my children, they’ve become even more attached to me than usual. It’s meant that bedtime takes longer because no one wants me to leave, and that Claire insists we talk about all sorts of intense subjects at the end of the day. Almost every night as I’m leaving her room she says something like, “don’t die, mama, okay? In case you do, I want you to know that I love you so much.…
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Teacher Appreciation
The day that I took my husband to the hospital for surgery, we walked our children to school together. I mean, we didn’t really walk, since Shawn couldn’t do that anymore. We drove the car to the school parking lot and then we slowly made our way to the drop off point for the kids. Tommy was still in preschool, so I carried him as we took Austin to his first grade line and then Claire to her third grade line. The night before I had emailed the kids’ teachers and told them that Shawn had stage 4 cancer. “We told our children tonight,” I wrote, “and Austin didn’t seem…
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The Bookshelf
I stood there staring at the bookshelf for a long time before I started. I’m not quite sure why. The bookshelf stood in an infrequently used part of the basement, next to the printer and the filing cabinet and bins of old magna-tiles. I could delay organizing it because I didn’t need access to it on a daily basis, and so that is what I had done. It stood there, crammed with books and memorabilia and all sort of other things that Shawn had once owned. And I let it collect dust over the months – and then years – since his death. I’m not totally sure why I waited…
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I Wanna Dance With Somebody
When I was a new widow, one of the things I hated most was ending up on the dance floor alone. It’s not like I’d never danced without Shawn. I mean, I’m a decently confident person, and I never needed him in order to dance at a party or a bar or a wedding. It’s just that I was so used to dancing with him after 15 years together. I dated men before Shawn who didn’t like to dance, so when we met and I realized he had no insecurities about getting out on the dance floor, I happily joined him at any chance I could get. When he was…
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Eleven
My sweet Claire, today is your birthday. You are eleven. This one seems different than the others, somehow. You are so much older and wiser, so much more aware of the world around you. Maybe it’s how all 11-year-olds are. But something makes me think you have just a bit more insight than many kids your age. The light in your eyes is bright, but you have wisdom in them too. That, I think, is something that’s special about you. Life hasn’t always been easy on you, but you have made the best lemonade out of the lemons you’e been dealt. Yes, you lost your father when you were just…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
