5-Year Lockdown Anniversary Refresher: What My College Freshman Taught Me About Mothering

March 13 marked the 5th anniversary of the Covid lockdown. I remember the day well. Friday the 13th, March 2020. My college freshman was arriving home for spring break; and I’d been looking forward to going out with my family to dinner before attending a coffee house performance by my daughter’s piano teacher followed by the local high school musical. The cancellation emails from the piano teacher and school superintendent came that morning. The Massachusetts governor issued quarantine guidelines and ordered restaurants and theaters to close. My husband and I got emails from work telling us to stay home on Monday. Thus began my family’s year in lockdown – a year of uncertainty and evolution. I picked up the habit of writing daily and a lesson or two about life. I wrote the story that follows in the fall of 2021, recounting a lesson I learned about mothering from my daughter in the early days of lockdown.

“I know what you’re going to say, Mom. And I don’t want to hear it,” my first born said, turning to look away and out the front passenger window.

“What?” I asked meekly.

I knew what was coming.

“You’re going to tell me how much better off I am than most people. You’re going to say I’m lucky to have a nice house in a nice town to come home to — that I’ll come out of this a more resilient person.”

“But you need to stay positive,” I protested.

“Stop.” My daughter demanded.

She went on as I drove through the sparsely trafficked streets of Needham on a cold, gray day in April 2020, a month after her college abruptly closed campus a week before spring break.

“Please don’t remind me of all the kids who are embarrassed to turn their cameras on in Zoom class, or whose parents lost their jobs; or had to quit their jobs to help with remote school.

I’m aware of all that. I know I have it good. But I can still be mad. And I don’t want YOU telling me to put things in perspective.”

From my perspective, a middle-aged woman facing the unknowns of a looming empty nest, I saw a silver lining in the dark cloud Covid had cast. My inevitable move to unsettled territory had been delayed for me. I felt a sense of guilty gratitude.

I felt grateful my daughter and her younger sister, a high school junior, were both safe at home, “Zooming” to school mostly from their unmade beds but also from the back deck, the dining room table, and when my college student trained with the opera singer, the living room piano.

I was working remotely, and like a fly on the wall, could eavesdrop on my daughters in class from my home office — a privilege I had taken for granted during the early school years when they wanted me to volunteer in their classrooms. They said “yes” when I invited them to join me on walking breaks or binge watch Gilmore Girls and Queen’s Gambit on Netflix.

I felt waves of tenderness when I’d walk through the family room on my way to the kitchen, look out the sliding glass doors to the deck, and see my daughters studying together under the patio heater. Their friendship was a great source of joy and comfort.

With their beautiful, genetically blended singing voices filling the house with music, my sheltered corner of the world felt whole again. The impromptu duets. The powerful sound of my eldest belting it out on the ukulele from behind her closed bedroom door. These were the things I’d missed most since August, when we left her in New York to start her freshman year.

The house had been so quiet. The replay of the noise made by a family of four enabled me to block out the truth trying to get through in the silence.

My perspective, the glass-half-full mindset I’d embraced all my life, was a blessing and a curse. It had both saved my soul and contributed to the demise of my marriage. During long stretches of frustrating and bewildering hours and days, it has allowed me to experience deep, authentic joy in the most ordinary of moments.

But choosing to look at the world only through rose-colored glasses came at a price — blinding me from seeing brokenness and encasing my heart in protective armor that often prevented me from experiencing a full range of emotions.

I had let myself succumb to a chronic case of “toxic positivity.” But it wasn’t too late to stop the spread and reverse the damage. The eternal optimist, of that I was certain.

There was a time and place to share my world view. Likewise, there was a time and place to envision how the world looked from someone else’s vantage point.

As my daughter told me on that gray April day in 2020, there are times when it’s best to check one’s perspective at the door and just listen.

I’d brought my daughter into the world in which she lived. I’d played a heavy hand in shaping it and influencing her expectations. Who was I to tell her to look on the bright side? In her world, the abrupt and indeterminate interruption of relationships in the making and adolescent-to-adult rites of passage were worthy of mourning.

Outside the bubble that had somehow, so far protected my family from the loss of life, loved ones and livelihoods Covid had unleashed, few would empathize with my daughter. Nor should they. That’s what moms are for.