Seeing Other People

After a year inside, I'm ready to parent in a community.

Watching other kids through the playground fence.

What is my kid like around other people? 

He’s 16 months old, so he was just 3 months old when the pandemic took hold here. Months and months passed without him seeing anyone but me and my husband, save the pediatrician and masked strangers outside. In November, he started daycare, but we can only guess and gently interrogate his teachers about what he’s like there (from what we can gather, he does share his blocks but he doesn’t like to share the head teacher’s attention with any of the other kids). 

With the exception of two painstakingly planned visits with my in-laws over the past year, all of his encounters with our friends and family were more akin to a zoological observation than a hang: we’d meet up outside, all adults masked, and watch him wander around the park. Our friends and family would keep a punctilious distance, avoiding touching or breathing anywhere near us or our son. What did this tell us about what he was like around them? Honestly, nothing at all. As time went on, I also began to wonder what we were like as parents. No one was around to see how we were doing it.

I have thought about this on and off for months, once the panicked haze of the early pandemic abated and he began to develop more of a personality, a few words, the ability to crawl and then walk. It’s hard to get any perspective on someone when you are always pressed up close against them, and when there’s no one to triangulate your perceptions off of. We never saw him around other babies: was he more or less mischievous than them, more or less serious, more or less prone to smashing his heaviest toys into the hardwood floor? We never saw him around other adults: were we more or less playful with him than other adults, more or less chatty, more or less relaxed? I had the odd sense that I knew my son too well to know him well at all. I was too enmeshed, too stripped of context, to make sense of the massive amounts of information I was always receiving from him.

As time went on and vaccines were approved, we began to anticipate the end -- something that, for the first weeks and months of the pandemic, I simply didn’t do. It has always come naturally to me to treat the pandemic as permanent, maybe because my life had just changed in a shatteringly permanent way, through motherhood. But more and more, during long walks with our son in his stroller, my husband and I would rehearse hopeful visions of life after our vaccines and a plunge in community spread: we could have a babysitter for date nights, we could hang out inside with close friends while our kid played on the floor, we could meet his baby cousin, we could stay over with his parents. It was like imagining life in a space colony; I had no frame of reference for being both a parent and a social person. 

But as of a few weeks ago, my husband and I are both fully vaccinated, and more of our friends and family are joining that group all the time. The weather is warming up. The trepidation about being around other people hasn’t gone away -- especially since our toddler isn’t, and won’t be for the foreseeable future, vaccinated himself, and since infection rates in our area remain high -- but new options were opening up. We decided to put some of those plans into action. 

We visited his grandparents for a long weekend. We had a friend over to hang out one rainy afternoon, and my brother and sister-in-law on a damp morning. We took him to stomp around the roof of my brother-in-law and his girlfriend’s apartment building. On Saturday we took him to a park and then took turns going into our local indie bookstore to browse. (He didn’t get to go inside, but he did get a new book.) My in-laws urged us out the door for our first date nights all year, bundled up to dine al fresco like I’ve seen my friends doing in Instagram Stories for months. 

This past weekend was the most hectic one we’ve had in a while, scheduled to the hilt, an utter contrast with the lazy yet draining ones we’ve been spending at home alone with our son. (Weekends and off days have always yawned out before us, punishing abysses of playtime with the same familiar toys on the same familiar living room carpet. Maybe a little chilly park jaunt.) At the end of it, I felt almost electrified with energy. I was exhilarated, high out of my mind on the feeling of togetherness. 

No wonder parents of even slightly older kids were so fucking miserable this year: They knew what they were missing. And not, contra many cruel takes I saw during the past year, because they hated their kids. Spending a day with your kid and a community, I realized, is entirely different from spending it alone with him. We were with him, but we were also having adult conversations; we were with him, but someone else was amusing him with a game he’d never played before or building a stack of blocks for him to crash into like a wrecking ball. For the first time, we saw him shyly assess a half-familiar grown-up, then turn to hide his face in our shoulders and cling to us for comfort. We learned how he acclimates himself to new people, and what games help him loosen up. 

At no point did we exactly delegate care of him to anyone, except when he was already asleep, and he was no less rambunctious. The time we spent chasing him around or calming his tears still added up to hours. But it felt, somehow, easier. It felt easier and more joyful to be the designated butt-wipers and tantrum-soothers and toy-wranglers when we weren’t also completely isolated. My life didn’t feel narrowed to the size of a toddler’s pout or an uneaten serving of steamed broccoli. (He will not, no matter what approach I try, ever eat his broccoli.) It felt capacious, like I’d abruptly zoomed out to take in the whole landscape. Our son seemed to snap into focus, all the reams of knowledge I’d accrued about him suddenly fleshing out a more holistic picture. I felt like a more fleshed out person too, both the mom I’ve been this year and the person I’d been in the past, around other people. 

The joy of seeing your kids become a part of your community, being loved and supported and taught by them, is so potent. I am terrified to lose it again, to have to retreat even from these limited allotments we’ve allowed ourselves to have for now. We will if we must. We don’t regret doing it this past year. But that doesn’t mean, of course, that it wasn’t a loss. We didn’t have a baby to hoard him, to keep them to ourselves at home. He was meant to be a person in the world, and so are we. Now that, in small and limited ways, we’re getting to be those people again, we’re all able to see each other more clearly.

We’ve been listening to…

The latest “Chatty Broads” episode, in which Bekah and Jess talk to Jade Tolbert about what it was like to be the subject of Reality Steve’s degrading blog posts.

“In God We Lust,” a new Wondery podcast about Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife Becky.

We’ve been watching…

“Mare of Easttown” is the perfect dark tortured HBO lady detective show. (At least based on the first two episodes.) Kate Winslet forever.

We’ve been reading…

“Intimacies” by Katie Kitamura, a forthcoming novel about an interpreter on a contract at the Hague’s international court. Kitamura is a piercing observer of human relationships and power dynamics, and turns a matter-of-fact account of some months in the life of the interpreter into an absorbing psychological drama.

We’ve been buying…

This perfect tote from the Jewish Food Society.