If I’m lucky, the most exciting part of my day of the past two quarantining months tends to happen around 7 p.m. If fortune is on my side, my husband is home from work by then. Sure, I love the shift change, when I can clock out from my work-from-home life with our 3-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son, and hand the keys to their entertainment schedule over to Daddy. But that’s not all.
Because when my husband arrives home, for about 12 seconds I get to witness sheer, borderline-animalistic joy imbuing from my kids. The moment the garage door rolls up and sends vibrations through the house, my two children start squealing. First, it’s usually my daughter, who literally drops her activity of the moment like it’s combusted (we’ve learned the hard way to only allow soft, shatter-proof items near her at this hour) to jump and yell, “Daddy!” That yelp usually triggers her 1-year-old hoss of a brother, who’s still mastering the facility of his limbs, to break out into a staccato-y jig and then ogre-walk to meet Daddy at the entryway.
When Daddy finally emerges, I imagine it’s like the Beatles arriving in America or, at the very least, Harry Styles serenading a TikTok-era crowd with “Watermelon Sugar.” Pandemonium breaks loose. My son rhythmically shouts “Da-Da, Da-Da” in between giggling, and my daughter can’t stop shrieking with glee. I wordlessly stand witness, not interjecting, adding or taking away from the excitement because I know that as much as I enjoy watching these handful of seconds, my husband exponentially lives for it even more.
But many days I don’t get lucky. Out of those 60-some sheltering-from-home days, I haven’t seen this level of joy from my kids in about half of them. That’s because Daddy isn’t able to come home. As both a general and trauma surgeon who covers the ICU, he’s been caring for COVID-19 patients, the number of which has steadily climbed earlier this week.
Like most households, COVID-19 has resulted in a severe disturbance in our lives. My husband’s work hours have always been long and intense. COVID-19 has stretched them. Before the pandemic, when asked how much my husband works, I would ambiguously reply “a lot.” When pressed to give a more detailed amount, I just repeat my previous response because, like clockwork, it awkwardly becomes a competition of whose partner works more. It’s a match that I tend to win, though unlike most games, this victory gives me no joy. To put some quantity to it, most weeks my husband works a 24-hour trauma surgery-intensive care shift. Some weeks it’s two 24-hour shifts, and it’s not unusual for three of those shifts to occur in one week. Add to that his 12-hour shifts as an intensivist, his general surgery and wound care practices, plus the unpredictability of when traumas and emergency surgeries can occur, and it’s a pretty heavy load.
But alas, he and other medical professionals have trained for these intense hours and situations on both skill and emotional levels. It’s their kids who have not.
Like most children of medical professionals, my kids have developed an unusual vocabulary. While most kids begin pointing to their noses and bellies when directed to at around 15 months, by that age my eldest already had the words “clavicle,” “sternum” and “ulna” in her circulation. Add the fact that her father is a general surgeon and trauma surgeon, and her medical diction has progressed. Today, with surprising accuracy, my toddler can point to the general vicinity of the ileum. She calls tweezers forceps, and when she tumbles, she says she has a wound instead of a boo-boo.
Every night my kids ask when Daddy will come home. For 30 of those days, I’ve had to tell them he won’t be home to tuck them in bed or give them their nighttime baths, a bonding ritual he’s insisted on doing since becoming a father. It devastates them, my daughter especially. A naturally dramatic lout (once, I ate the right side of a croissant instead of the left side, and she had a public meltdown), my daughter is at an age where she feels the highs and lows of life on a different cosmic scale than I do.
Last week, when I had to break it to her that Daddy wasn’t coming home, she let out a pain-filled howl reminiscent of the sounds coming from the labor and delivery ward as the uteri of soon-to-be mothers contracted. As tears streamed down her face, she cried, “I miss Daddy! I want to see Daddy!” I comforted her as best I could, telling her that I understand and that I, too, miss Daddy. Nothing worked, so I grabbed my phone to FaceTime my husband, praying that he wasn’t scrubbed into a case. He answered. As he video-chatted with his baby girl, he told her that he’ll see her soon, that Daddy loves her so much. Suddenly, the trauma alert sounded, and he abruptly had to hang up. And just like, somehow I was left in an even worse situation than I started with.
Somehow we got through the night, though not without more crying and howling. The next morning, I thought about a friend’s suggestion over a year ago on how to emotionally prepare my daughter for the arrival of her baby brother. We were told to get her a doll so that she could role-play and perhaps develop more empathy toward others. At best, we gave it a half-hearted attempt before shrugging and defaulting back to our “we’ll just figure it out” mentality.
I decided to take another spin at this pedagogical theory, this time taking out my daughter’s medical kit and having her care for her dolls. As her ivory teddy bear laid flat on its back on the couch, she patted him and asked how he was feeling. When I answered that he was having a hard time breathing, she began thinking of how to solve his ailment. I then told her that’s what Daddy does, that he and a team care for patients and their families, doing everything they can to get them healthy. Miraculously, something clicked. My daughter began tending to teddy for the next several minutes, taking out her toy stethoscope and sphygmomanometer (blood pressure instrument with a cuff) and placing them on the bear.
The real test came when my husband had his next overnight shift. As I braced for impact after telling her Daddy was working tonight, my daughter paused, looked down and then quietly asked if she could FaceTime him. Yes, of course, I said, before dialing his number. And when she saw his face, she began jumping up and down, screaming, “Daddy!”