The nightmare of parenting through two years of a pandemic

There's a heartbreaking piece in The Atlantic about parenting through a long-burning COVID-19 pandemic and how parents have reached the end of their rope.

It's enough to bring a parent to tears, except that every parent I know ran out a long time ago—I know I did. Ran out of tears, ran out of energy, ran out of patience. Through these grinding 18 months, we've managed our kids' lives as best we could while abandoning our own. It was unsustainable then, it's unsustainable now, and no matter what fresh hell this school year brings, it'll still be unsustainable.

All this and parents are somehow expected to be okay. We are expected to send our kids off into God knows what, to work our jobs and live our lives like nothing's wrong, and to hold it all together for months and maybe now for years without ever seeing a way out. This is not okay. Nothing is okay. No parent is okay, and I'm not sure how we come back from this.

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Image: Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash