Parenting Tip: Don't Get COVID

The pandemic finally caught me at the worst possible time

NIAID-RML (https://www.niaid.nih.gov/ & https://www.niaid.nih.gov/about/rocky-mountain-laboratories), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

One of the follies of being in college and one’s twenties seems to be going out to bars with enormous groups of people. This is almost always a bad idea; it takes forever to get out the door, large groups are terrible at making collective decisions unless one person steps up to be the leader/dictator, you always end up at some stupid bar, and there’s always one person who gets way too drunk and out of control. Then, god forbid, you might end up being the person who gets stuck looking after them and making sure they don’t run into traffic or throw a glass bottle at the side of the police station or go home with one of the dangerous weirdos who stands on the edge of the dance floor and just watches the girls for the drunkest one. The other people in your reveler group of unfortunate size back away, leaving you to the night’s most unpleasant task. 

Once you are The Caretaker For The Messy One, that’s the rest of your night. You’re apologizing to the bouncer as you escort The Messy One out of the bar. You’re chasing The Messy One down the sidewalk, you’re trying to keep The Messy One from grabbing your cell phone out of your hands and calling their ex, you’re trying to figure out why The Messy One is crying or randomly starting a fight with a group of strangers. You’re trying to solve the mystery of where The Messy One might have left their debit card. Eventually, you trick The Messy One into getting into a car, help them find their keys, get them into their apartment, maybe hold their hair back while they puke, force them to drink some water, and get them into bed. The feeling of being the caretaker of the totally out of control drunk tangential friend is closest that I’ve felt to taking care of a toddler, before I became a mother. 

Toddler wrangling is challenging under ideal circumstances, when I’m well-rested and well-fed and my love for my child is enough to overcome the fact that her default mode is “person about to get kicked out of McFaddens.” But when I’m sick with an extra-spicy virus? This has been one of the worst weeks in recent memory. 

I thought I was such hot shit. For more than three years, as COVID-19 burned through friends, frenemies, and attendees of Amy Coney Barrett’s White House swearing in ceremony, I remained COVID-free. We never tested positive and nobody tested positive in a manner that suggested they’d caught it from us. I was starting to think that maybe I was immune– truly immune– and that the same scary government officials who came after E. T. would eventually roll up to my house and demand a sample of my blood for study. 

But on Thanksgiving, in the middle of the night, I woke up in agony. My bones hurt and my face felt like it was going to explode. My husband had been feeling sick for the past couple days, but testing negative. I knew something was very wrong. It was a new kind of sick I hadn’t felt, and before I’d even swabbed my nostrils, I had a feeling that COVID had finally gotten me. I wasn’t hot shit. I wasn’t immune. It had finally caught me. Sure enough, the positive line showed up on the test before even a minute was up. Josh was positive, too. He’d got it from a friend and helpfully shared it with the rest of the family. 

Now, if it was just two adults dealing with being whallopped with COVID at the same time, it would have sucked, but we could have handled it by laying around and eating takeout and watching A Murder at the End of the World and putting our responsibilities aside until we felt better. But there’s no putting the responsibility of having a two-year-old aside. And there’s no quarantining when both adults in the house have COVID and the kid doesn’t. You can’t call a babysitter or send the kid to daycare; having COVID in the home means that all childcare options dry up. And so Josh and I had to take turns sort of dragging our carcasses after our energetic and then-uninfected two-year-old, watching her face register disappointment over how incredibly boring her sick parents were. 

I spoke to a friend through my closed front window, like Bubble Boy, as she dropped off a cooler of soup. I tried to sleep but could never get comfortable. At night I wake up haunted by intrusive thoughts of spike proteins. I feel like my limbs are moving heavy through water. We couldn’t do anything or go anywhere, not even take our kid to the playground, because we didn’t want to be the assholes responsible for an outbreak in our neighborhood. 

On day four, I completely lost my sense of smell and taste. I feel spacey and disconnected and unable to focus. All of the hit symptoms were lining up in my body. I’m on an epidemiological tour bus, finally experiencing things I’d only read about. 

Juniper did end up getting sick, but the virus made its way through her tiny body in just a few days. Josh is already testing negative and basically going about his business like nothing happened. I’m still stuck at home, unable to go anywhere, bored out of my skull but also depressed, so hungry I’m dizzy but not interested in eating because everything tastes like clay. I’ve completely given up on trying to moderate Juniper’s screen time; Ms. Rachel is her mother now. She’d probably do a better job of wrestling her into an Uber, anyway.