I was working from my home office, watching a recent clip of coronavirus oracle Anthony Fauci, when the crying roared from the downstairs living room. I instantly jolted out of my chair and pounded down the stairwell. Did one of my two children seriously injure themselves? Did we need to go to the hospital — the last place anyone wants to be nowadays — because someone broke a leg in a dumb fight?
My daughters — standing by a coffee table smothered in markers, our old iPad and printouts of “distance learning” classwork — were crying so hard their cheeks were puffy and red. Just minutes before, they’d been playing with a walkie-talkie, trying to interview another kid in the alley for our home “newspaper.” But tears were gushing down the cheeks of my younger daughter, Hilary, 6, a kindergartner. My second-grader, Margot, nearly 8, has a lazy eye and wears dark pink and purple bifocals, which were fogging up. She took them off and rubbed the lenses with the bottom part of her red-and-white striped Santa’s Helper pyjamas.
“Margot said she wanted a new sister,” Hilary said.
“Did you say that Margot?” I asked.
“I can’t remember. Maybe,” she said.
I sat down in a chair. Hilary climbed on top of me and shoved her head into the crook of my neck, her tears smearing my cheeks. Margot kissed me, apologising and saying over and over, “It’s all my fault.”
My desire to flee
I sat quietly with uncertainty, torn between my impulse to investigate and keep soothing and my desire to flee. Did my daughter’s tears contain trillions of coronavirus particles that might somehow seep through my skin? Were stealth droplets heading like poison darts?
Normally, I love a good cuddle. Every night, my wife, Caroline, and I lie next to the girls in their beds. Sometimes, we tickle them. Other times, we play thumb wars. Or I hold up bunny fingers and dart them around their heads until they can catch them with their hands. Or I whisper serious questions into their ears, inquiring if anything made them sad or happy that day, as though they were in a confessional.
But the hatches needed battening down. In our living room chair, I slowly pushed both of my daughters off me. Wait right there, I said. Inside a cabinet, a green-and-white canister of disinfecting wipes stood at attention, ready for service. Its label promised: “Kills 99.9% of bacteria in 15 seconds.” I grabbed two wipes and slathered them on my neck and face, a process that might have satisfied the left part of my brain but also filled me with shame, as it does now in this confession.
What kind of paranoiacs have we become? How could I cut short the cuddling of my children in their time of need to tend to my anxieties, which may or may not have been grounded in any facts? How could I halt my own happiness? The hugs, the hand grips, the crazy number of kisses on the cheek — these are the loving embraces between parents and small kids that give me so much pleasure, the kind of contact that won’t last much longer as they grow older.
There is perhaps no greater time for this kind of touch than now, when they are this age, when their parents are in their early 40s, and when we are trying to shield them from a global pandemic. And yet there I was, denying myself and my offspring. It’s one thing to constantly monitor myself whenever I touch the kitchen sink or Amazon boxes. But it’s absolutely wrenching every time I find myself constantly wondering whether I need to run to the hand soap after my kids, who come back after playing in the park, embrace me.
What kind of mental torture would overtake me if at some point I am quarantined in our downstairs basement? How would I cope if I heard my daughters bawling but was powerless to hold and assure them, and could speak only through the bottom slat of the basement door?
Ian Shapira is a lifestyle columnist
Washington Post
