Check on the Parents
No, seriously. Check on them. The pandemic isn't going to stop upending parent-child relationships anytime soon, and it's bananas.
There’s a picture book that came out in 1991 called Busy! Busy! Busy!
It’s one of the oldest book memories I have; maybe one of my oldest memories, period. The oranges and yellows of its watercolored pages hold firm in my brain, as does the image of a long-snouted vacuum, which the mother in the book is frantically pushing around for most of the first two-thirds of the book’s pages.
It is, in principle, a story of a parent and her young child (and for our purposes here, let it be noted that “parent” refers to any parental figure, adult, guardian, etc. in a child’s life). But Busy! Busy! Busy! it is also a story about perspective, and about the importance of a parent’s choosing what relationship they want to have with their child, versus letting it unspool over time in response to the world around it.
I’ve thought about this book on and off for much my life; it offers emotional insights that plenty of children’s books studiously avoid. But I’ve especially thought about this book during the pandemic, as lockdowns have forced friends and loved ones who have children into a totally unknown parenting landscape. Armed basically with blinders and no GPS, parents have been renegotiating what raising children looks like during a persistently iterative crisis for almost two years. As a result, the nurturing of relationships between individual parents and children has been changing.
While Busy! Busy! Busy! was published thirty years ago— and to be clear, it’s about two white, blond-haired people who have never even imagined school on a screen, much less a bubonic plague redux— I am increasingly convinced that the points this book makes about parenting and parent-child bonds are pertinent right now. No, I’m NOT a parent, and YES, I am aware that that hinders how much I can really say about parenthood. What I am is an education professional— I’ve worked with children and their families for over ten years, and have broken up many fights. So when I say this picture book from 1991’s commentary on parenting is important, I mean that it is important for everyone. Especially right now. This book has reminded me of how important it is that those of us who are not parents find ways to be present for those who are, so that they have the opportunity to just be parents for a moment, present with their children without the enormous weight of a global crisis crushing them.
For the majority of Busy, Busy, Busy, a mother is trying to tidy and maintain order and wash dishes, while her young child observes. I remember the washing dishes first and foremost because of the yellow gloves, but also remember much of the interior of the home in which the book is set as being painted orange too, which was incredible to tiny, already-overly-serious me. Orange walls?! WHO WOULD DARE?!
The young child (I’d hazard age four or five) wishes that their mother would abandon her never-ending list of responsibilities and play with them instead. (Note: when you look this book up online, some reviews mention the child as “her son,” but I distinctly remember there being no gender assigned to the child’s character. The book’s cover corroborates that understanding. So I’m sticking with it.) Eventually, after several requests that Mum stop doing X, and instead do Y with her child, the child succeeds in pulling Mum away from the sink where she is doing the endless dishwashing. Over the course of the the final pages, the pair goes off together, outside, constraint-free. The book, while not super text-heavy to begin with, is especially sparse with its words at this point. It ends with the focus on parent and child being present with one another, leaving the difficulties of day-to-day responsibilities behind.
I asked my mother a few months ago if she remembered Busy! Busy! Busy! She said yes, immediately. She then added that she loved it; she had loved reading it to my brother and I when we were little, and loved the message that it shared with readers. The child helps the mum, my own Mum explained. The child reminds the mum that there’s more to life than getting things done, and that parents and children need to spend quality time together. This was a surprise to me; her take on the whole thing took me aback, it was so far removed from my own. So when she subsequently asked me, Why? What did you think of it? I had a moment of “Abby, maybe don’t say it and be awful in the face of your mother’s having shared something.” But then I did what I unfortunately often do: say the thing anyway because it’s my truth or something: well, honestly Mum, I hated that book.
This was very shitty of me, and I acknowledge it.
But then my mother, bless her, asked me why I didn’t like it. And the ensuing conversation led to me appreciating the book in a way I never had. Plus, I was able to sort of explain to her why the mere thought of it still, to this day, makes me so anxious.
Why didn’t you like the book, Abby?
Because the kid had to save the mother. Little me was afraid that I was going to have to save you.
Let me explain. The moment in Busy! Busy! Busy! when the child pulls their Mum from the sink is very charged. The mother is described, in fact, as being “chained to the sink” by her responsibilities, crying into the dishwater. The child sees this, approaches the mother, pretends to cut said chains loose, and kisses her. Then the child guides the mum away from the sink and outside to play in the sun. This whole scene is something, as both a child and as an adult, that I have never been able to bear. When I was little, it made me think that, at some point, I would have to intervene in my mother’s life and pull her back from a miserable brink. Today, the memory of that fear activates a ghostly anxiety, as if six-year-old-me’s concern has left an imprint on my cortisol production line.
I explained my experience of the book to my mother, and she was honestly shocked. Where I had seen a threatening responsibility, she had been celebrating something beautiful observed in the same pages: a child’s ability to free a parent from the harsh routines of sustaining a family, purely by existing. My take on Busy! Busy! Busy! is (and was) very typical of young me: an anxious over thinker with an enormous sense of responsibility. But my mother’s interpretation says something really wonderful about her: that she never expected her children to “save” her from something. She did not feel that my sibling and I owed her. Rather, that by being in her life, she felt that we offered her a reminder of the existence of the marvelous. This realization brought me up short. In its purest distillation, is that what parenting is supposed to be? Something celebratory?
Certainly, in contexts historical and otherwise, parenthood has been a means to an end. Or an ends to a means. Or both. Either sex is not conducted using prevention methods, or free labor is needed in the form of progeny, or faith pressures couples to reproduce extensively if possible, or, well, folks just want buckets of kids and thus procure them. These parameters do change, as access to technology, wealth, and other benefits increases (e.g. I come from a few long lines of peasant farmers, but am currently not a peasant farmer). But even then, parenthood is never easy. You’re responsible for an entire life, if not several. As I explained earlier, I have spent much of my adulthood in the company of children and their families, and am fully aware of the fact that raising children is not only a job that is inherently uncompensated, but a job that is literally unending. It changes people irrevocably. Even if folks put children up for adoption, cut themselves out of their children’s lives, or otherwise absent themself from the physical act of parenting, it seems that you can never fully undo being a parent once you know that you are one.
In a very, very basic way, I feel that Busy! Busy! Busy! captures the complexity of the whole shebang. It shows that being a parent can be a relentless natural disaster of responsibilities and anxiety and not-knowing, but that it can also offer real gifts of love, loving, and discovery. It also offers the reminder that parents get to experience something that no one else does: sitting in a front-row seat as their child or children become people. Maybe parenting is the “yes, and…” of adulthood: it’s the hardest fucking thing most people will ever do, but it can also be one of the most beautiful. This picture book certainly makes me think so. But when said book and its nicely layered exploration of parenthood is examined through the lens of the pandemic that we are in, everything gets flipped on its head. At least from my point of view. Because I can’t help thinking that, in many ways, parenting has been stolen from parents in the years since March 2020.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, parents have been forced to become many different, additional things: teachers, after school instructors, mediators, psychologists, speech therapists, math tutors, coaches, cooks, etc. The specificity of parent-child relationships has been in a state of flux ever since things first shut down. The simplicity of the relationship we can see between the parent and child in Busy! Busy! Busy! is long gone from our current lives; even in family systems where parents had to work long hours that limited their time with their children before the pandmic, or otherwise found themselves struggling to be present with their children, things have changed. Parents must be everything, often without access to the network of relatives, chosen family, or other families and their children that can help both kids and adults flourish. Which brings me to the whole reason behind having revisited this damn personally emotionally charged picture book in the first place:
Fellow non-parents— we really need to show up for the parents in our lives right now.
The rise of increasingly virulent COVID-19 variants is threatening a return to lockdowns very similar to those we lived in in 2020. This means that kids will be spending more time doing school from home, and parents will be spending more time being far more than parents. The capacity a child has to remind a parent of the joys of just being present with one another will be, naturally, much smaller, because children will be, and have been, asked to do much more than they are capable of:
-manage technology that most of us didn’t meet before high school if we were lucky (decades later for most of the rest of us),
-live and function within the ongoing anxiety of unknowns and fear that come with an unmanaged pandemic,
-survive without regular social interactions with peers,
-develop screen headaches and try not to lose academic skills during virtual learning periods, and
-somehow get up the next morning and do it again.
These young bodies are not built for the stress and demands of the time we’re living in. The parents are not built for it either. Yet both parties must somehow survive with and around one another. That is hard.
In revisiting Busy! Busy! Busy! this year, I was better able to see things through my mother’s eyes. That although I cannot unsee the messaging that a child should rescue a struggling parent in the book, I can additionally see the point that maybe a child and parent can be good to one another simply by being present with one another. Or that parents are lucky to get to learn from their children. This, in turn, pushed me to consider how access to those gifts of presence and peace have been stolen from parents, and their children, since March 2020. Parents all over the world have not been able to “parent” without the need for income or support for centuries (TL;DR: capitalism). But they have not been able to simply parent at all since the pandemic began.
I know I have been trying to come up with safe ways to support parents in my life as the Omicron variant has surged. I invite those of you who also do not have children to do the same. Can you take the kids to the park so parents can catch up on work and be present for their families at dinnertime? Can you send over takeout dinner so parents do not have to cook? Can you let the parents in your life know you love them, and that you’d be happy to let them vent to you on the phone or via text message if they would like to? Can you wear a mask and help with laundry while the parents take the kids out to play? There’s no one way to show up for folks, right now, But I’d like to urge you to come up with one, or two. Because while children cannot, and should not, be tasked with “saving” their parents, the parents need some saving right now.
Parents deserve to be able to experience peace with their children. To sit in their front-row seats as their kids grow into themselves. The pandemic has stolen much of that. Perhaps we can help restore a little of it.