I felt bad about leaving her alone with the kids on a weekend at the tail end of the school holidays, but I also thought I would have a great time reading and watching entire television seasons.
Instead, I spent the bulk of my isolation rolling around groaning.
I slept erratically, hurt in strange places, got alternately hot and cold, went to the toilet freakishly often and generally suffered.
On Monday morning, Zanna sent me a text: “Casper’s got Covid” followed minutes later by, “So do I”. So it was that I returned from isolation to the bosom of my family for one of the worst weeks in recent memory.
Casper began vomiting copiously and his temperature skyrocketed.
Zanna’s symptoms were less ferocious, but her inevitable decline, along with my continuing physical suffering, left all of us miserable.
After my weekend off, I felt the need to step up, but I was able only to lie down.
For the next few days, I occasionally tried, but mostly failed, to move from bed.
I watched, helpless, as the mess and dishes spread and grew into sickening piles, the washing piled up and, worst of all, my two remaining healthy children took advantage of the situation to watch hours of garbage on YouTube.
When I mentioned what I saw as my failure to Jackie Riach, psychologist and manager of parenting organisation Triple P NZ, her response was to ask what I thought I’d done right.
I made a joke about the quality of my moaning and rolling around in bed but she didn’t laugh, so I came up with literally the only thing I could think of, which was that I’d helped get food on the table, although I didn’t want to make too much of that achievement because a lot of that food had been delivered to our door by others, specifically my mother-in-law.
Riach saw things more positively: I had, she said, just identified three great things I’d done: Gone to bed to get myself well, got food on the table, and sought help from my mother-in-law.
It felt nice to be affirmed in this way, but I told her I still felt guilty about leaving the kids for long periods to be looked after by YouTube influencers whose primary goal appeared to be reversing their education.
Riach suggested I don’t be so hard on myself, but she also noted the importance in these situations, of preparation.
We live in a world in which two sick parents is not an unusual phenomenon, so we should prepare for that, putting together things like colouring packs, games, and other entertainments to give the kids when we have nothing else to give.
I knew that was good advice, but I also knew from experience that those things would only hold their attention spans for so long before they would start relentlessly whining about wanting to watch MrBeast, and I knew that, at my sickest, I found it too cognitively demanding to even order Uber Eats, let alone conjure a convincing values-based argument with my argumentatively gifted 9-year-old as to why she shouldn’t watch bad TV.
Riach asked me to think of anything else positive I might have done.
All I could come up with was that we had talked with the kids about the fact we were too sick to look after them.
She said talking with your kids about the fact you’re sick is a good idea, but it’s also important to reassure them that you’re going to be okay.
“A child is looking for you to be their protector and have things in hand,” she said. “If you go too much the other way, then it’s a bit scary.”
I don’t remember whether or not I reassured them, but I doubt it would have made any difference to how they felt.
They were so absorbed by a YouTube video of a dude farting outside the gates to Area 51, they wouldn’t have heard me anyway.
