Unicorn Wallets, Tea Parties, and Brain Fog
/
It only took about two weeks of kindergarten for my daughter to master the fine art of persuasion.
After her first foray into the wider world, we slid back into our more familiar routine when she got sick with a non-COVID illness that required a little bit of rest, lots of iPad time, and apparently, a unicorn wallet with her name embroidered on it.
This may come as a bit of a surprise, but I’m not typically an easy mark when it comes to buying stuff for my kids. Sure, I’ll pretty much fetch any snack, accept the application of any color nail polish (even though dark colors go better with my skin tone), and do basically any silly thing they want me to do, but I don’t just buy up everything in sight (except for rabbits, of course).
However, on this occasion, my barely sick 5-year-old managed to convince me to order her a customized unicorn wallet from Etsy of all places. Perhaps she is an amazing negotiator, maybe I was just feeling vulnerable and nostalgic for our old father-daughter at-home life, or it could be that I kind of loved the wallet myself. We may never know.
I don’t remember much about the particulars of that day, which, as it turns out, has become a bit of a theme for me.
I have been blaming my brain fog on the pandemic for over a year now, but maybe it’s the result of existing in a human body? The pandemic is still very much going on, of course, but even with the return of some of our routines and activities that allow us to better track the passage of time, I still often feel like I’m drifting through a haze, simply existing from moment to moment as the hours, days, and weeks tick by.
And weirdly enough, this fog is consistent whether my children are around or not. I have written before about how I anticipated this would be the year that my life would change significantly. At last, I would have a more formal routine that didn’t involve childcare every minute of every day. As it turns out, I was terribly wrong not only because of the pandemic, but also because having all your children in school doesn’t change things as much as you might expect. Even during the approximately one out of every five days I have an empty house, I spend a significant chunk of time preparing things for when the children return only six short hours later. Grocery shopping, cleaning up, laundry, and dishes with a little money-making work squeezed in around all of it. And when one, two, or all three of them are home on quarantine or sick, we continue to sputter along in a soupy heaviness.
My youngest was on quarantine most recently and while we were home alone, we unboxed the tea set she had us pick up from my mom’s house. Early in the morning, right after we dropped the boys off at school, she was still in her fuzzy pink princess pajamas as we repositioned an end table and covered it with an official tea set cloth. She then pulled up four chairs, arranged dolls in two of them, and told me to take a seat.
Before we got down to business, my daughter stopped the proceedings because one of the dolls was being bossy. She quickly swapped her out for a more laid-back doll who “didn’t care about saucers.” As a person who cares deeply about saucers, I assumed my minutes at the tea table were numbered, but I persevered and raised my pinky (as instructed) to drink apple juice from the tiny ceramic cups.
This little scene probably seems vivid enough, but the rest of the day? Who knows what we did? I vaguely remember playing hide-and-seek because when we were getting started with that, my daughter assured me that she would NOT be hiding behind my back as she sometimes does. I think you can guess how that turned out. Let’s just say I had to seek for about seventeen minutes while turning around periodically to find a “statue” behind me. Surprise!
When your home life is basically the entirety of your life, I think the sameness can be almost overwhelming. And even as the children grow up just a little more and the cuffs of the pink princess pajama pants get a little bit higher off the floor, it’s hard to even believe that time is passing at all.
Sometimes you just have to host a tea party, tell a bossy doll to hit the road, and maybe even order a personalized purple unicorn wallet. Because you gotta find something to make you feel. Something to make you remember. Something with a little sparkle to cut through the fog.
Andrew is a writer of essays and humor and an editor of Frazzled, a parenting humor publication on Medium. You can subscribe to his email list for updates and follow him on Twitter for terrible tweets and more unicorn wallet content, probably.