Parenthood: Week 409 - The Cold

It's cold.

Yes, I complain about it being cold when it's 40 degrees out, but this past week and what we got coming up is cold by anyone's standard. Right now, it's 10 degrees outside, and the highest temperature we got coming up in the next week is 19 degrees.

One of the strategies for handling this pandemic and the anxiety around our lives' uncertainty is to focus on what's in front of you. Yes, think about the future but spend your energy on the next day and the following week. So I didn't think about how COVID-19 would affect parenting in sub-freezing temperatures.

In past years, when it's been this cold, we would get our children out of the house in different ways. When Ollie was a toddler, I used to take him to our library. Our local branch has a heated underground garage, which was convenient these days when your face hurt after being outside for a minute. We would look at books, he would play at the play space, and sometimes he would run up and down the aisles while I would chase him around.

There were also play spaces we would go to, bookstores, and grocery stores. Winter was rough in the past, but there were always ways to get out of the house.

My children are in a better mood if they get out of the house at some point in the day, so we would go somewhere even on the coldest days.

And now there's nowhere to go.

Libraries and play spaces are closed. Retail stores and grocery stores are no longer places where my children can explore the aisles and shop with me comfortably. There are many places like Chicago where outside playgrounds in parks still are not open, which is ridiculous. Many school buildings and park district facilities are empty. These aren't challenging problems to solve. It's not a money issue. It is a lack of will.

Our country is dealing with so many issues. Creating spaces for children to play indoors when it's cold outside might seem like a minor convenience for some people; it's a symptom of a larger problem: children are not a priority in America.

One of the hardest things in America as a parent to accept how unnecessarily difficult our society had made parenting. This has only become clearer during the pandemic. I hoped in some way that this crisis it would refocus on what is right for the nation's children. But no, the focus instead was on financial gain and sports.

We can be better, and we can do better. We can have a country where no child goes to sleep hungry, but we don't. So we keep digging deep, and in this winter of discontent, we make something work for our children stuck at home, wishing for something different, knowing that change is not forthcoming.

The darkness of this winter is reminding me that America is a very cold place.