The Kids Are Alright

In simpler times, a twenty-one-hour drive with a two and four-year-old would have been out of the question. But even before schools were closed and shelter in place orders were issued, my husband saw the writing on the very confined walls of our New York City apartment and insisted we go to his family home in Tennessee. We packed a rented minivan, woke the girls before dawn and loaded them, pajama-clad and sleepy-eyed, into car seats. It was four in the morning and the city was eerily quiet. The usual ticker tape of worries—Should I put their coats on just to walk them to the car? Would they be able to fall back asleep? Were the snacks within reach? —flashed against a blaring broadcast of novel anxieties—Were we doing the right thing? Would it get as bad as everyone suddenly seemed to think? Were the fevers the girls had the week before more ominous than our doctor thought? Would they close the schools? When would we be home again? But one glance toward the back, two wide grins revealed that, to their eyes, this was all one big adventure. My job as their mother, I supposed, was to keep it that way. So as my husband turned the key in the ignition, I turned around, smiled my best smile and said, “Here we go!”

Unfortunately, the car we had rented delivered on that big adventure almost immediately. We were somewhere in Pennsylvania when the minivan cut off abruptly at seventy miles per hour. I had just drifted back to sleep myself and woke to my husband shaking my arm, “Liz, the car. It just cut off.” “What do you mean cut off? Can you steer? Do the breaks work?” The answers were no and not really. We waited for it to roll to a stop, cars flying by, trying not to panic. We played it cool for the girls, but it was jarring. The whole world, even the car we were driving, felt beyond our control. I called the rental car company and was able to locate a replacement at an airport about thirty miles off route. Not ideal, but preferable to making the trip wondering when the car might fail us completely. We were able to transfer everything from one car to the next and while I expected the girls to protest, to have developed some irrational attachment to this particular minivan, they took it in stride, dancing between the seats as we unloaded. When my husband opened a mysterious compartment in the floor and began removing canned foods I thought, not for the first time in those early weeks, I definitely married a prepper.

The remainder of the trip was relatively uneventful. We wound down a curvy highway that cut through faded green patches of grass dotted with red wooden barns, horses and cows. We ate nothing resembling real food the whole way and I surprised the girls with cherry slushies like the ones I loved when I was a little girl. The two wide grins persisted with lips stained bright red. When the sun went down, we put Frozen on the laptop my husband had rigged between the two front seats.

“It’s like movie night in the car!” my four-year-old squealed, somehow managing to burrow a bit deeper into the seat she had now been in for over fifteen hours. Even the little one who is—mercifully—just coming around to movies, gave a “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” Again it was clear, and confounding. They were content. Ecstatic even. Was I grateful to be with my family? Yes. Relieved that the girls were happy, that their fevers had subsided, that we had somewhere to go to escape our apartment? Yes, of course. But ecstatic? Content? Hardly.

As we settled in Tennessee, the girls had questions. We had talked to them in a matter-of-fact way about the virus, but the questions weren’t about that. They wanted to know why we were the only ones at the house—we had only ever been with family—and out of an abundance of caution, my husband’s parents would not be joining us any time soon. My four-year-old also desperately wanted to know where her greenies were. Greenies is what she calls the set of matching pajamas my husband bought on amazon and gifted us on Christmas morning. We’d been wearing them as a family ever since, because the girls loved it. They’d scream “Can we wear our greenies tonight, please?” and then we'd curl together like an amorphous Cheshire cat, all stripes and bellies and limbs. My two-year-old wore hers on the trip and my husband had packed his. I had even managed to pack my own, despite the fact that they are the single least flattering thing I have ever put on my body. But I forgot the four-year-old’s. It took her no time to figure this out, of course, and while we would never be so cruel as to wear them without her, just the slightest glimpse of the green stripes on the shelf could trigger a meltdown. “Mommy, you forgot my greenies. I am the only one who doesn’t have greenies!” (I have felt mom guilt for a lot of things. But failing to pack pajamas for the apocalypse was a first.)

So they had questions. But when it comes to the larger ones for which I do not have the answers—when will we go back to New York, to school, when will we see friends and family again— they have been—and I can’t believe I’m saying this about my children at this particular stage of their lives—downright flexible. They can’t wait two seconds for the time it takes to remove the wrapper from a lollipop, but when life as we know it is suddenly upended into one big game of wait-and-see they exude calm, even patience. They exist too purely in the moment to be weighed down by the uncertainty of our future. I am trying to follow their lead. To turn off the news, the constant worry, the infinite scenarios that may or may not play out, and just be. I am trying.

We’ve been here five weeks now—and as lucky and grateful as I feel for our health, the roof over our heads, our jobs—a mix of longing for the life we used to have and grief for all of the people who are suffering, for the world as it will never be again, seeps in like groundwater. I find myself buoyed by the routines we devised, ironically, for our children—my husband's signature egg toast for breakfast, movie night on Fridays, three stories at bedtime followed by the inevitable request for just one more. When the replacement greenies arrived, no one was more excited than me. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that this moment has forced us to reexamine the world as our children might, with a mix of fear and wonder and an appreciation for the small things. It has restored our capacity to marvel at the mundane, the first cup of coffee, the softness of a blanket, the lizard gliding across the porch shining with pollen, the ladybug held between the fingers of a city girl who says, “Mom, I’m touching nature!” Young children have always been adept at thriving in their own little worlds, even as they change. They might be the only ones who can help us to do the same.

Liz McDaniel is a writer and contributing editor at Maisonette. You can follow her on instagram @lizmcdanielwrites.