What a rock through a car window taught me about parenting in a pandemic

I was halfway up the driveway to get the mail when I heard the glass-shattering pop. I turned around to find my 2-year-old son staring at the remnants of a car window - from the car we'd only purchased a month ago. He'd just shattered it with one of the many stones that line the sides of our driveway. Before I could stop myself, I yelled out an expletive.

"Daddy you shouldn't curse," my 4-year-old daughter said, laughing.

Normally I'd laugh at her response. But this time I didn't react; there was nothing funny about the situation to me. My outburst wasn't directed at my son as much as it was at the universe in general, whoever or whatever it was that decided it was a good idea to throw a car repair into the mix after the day I'd had.

Before the rock-meets-window moment, the entire day had been a struggle - a long, trying day in a stretch of nearly identical long, trying days sheltering in place because of the coronavirus pandemic. I spent the bulk of it holed up in a makeshift workstation of our master bedroom, plagued with worry and guilt.

I worried about my wife, a nurse at an underprepared hospital experiencing a steady increase in coronavirus patients; I worried about the security of my job as a writer/editor for a medical publication; I worried about my mom, a health-care worker who was on a mandatory two-week quarantine after she called out of work with symptoms consistent with covid-19. And when I finally thought I'd gotten the worry under control, I took a peek at my 401(k) and worried about that. The worry was followed by guilt. "What's your problem?" the annoying voice in my head nagged. You have it so much better than so many people right now. At least you have a job. At least you're not in New York. At least you're healthy.

Then my rookie of the year in Pampers showed he had an arm capable of destroying tempered glass with a casual toss of a two-inch stone, and it was a knockout punch on an already barely standing fighter. I was defeated.

Until a few days ago, I never would've thought my son had the ability to break a car window with his adorably underwhelming arm. Of course, until a month ago, I never would've thought a virus from the other side of the world had the ability to shut down the economy, the National Basketball Association (during a year when we all knew the Philadelphia 76ers were going to gel at just the right time to shock the world and win an NBA championship) and my favorite restaurant (please be a temporary shutdown, Han Dynasty).

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Everything feels so fragile and uncertain right now, which makes parenting - a challenge under even the most ideal circumstances - feel like an impossible task. As a parent, you trick yourself into believing you have some semblance of control over the world into which you brought your kids. The crisis we're experiencing right now shatters that illusion of control in the same way that rock shattered my car's window.

I'm determined to walk away from this whole thing with more than just another use for the Happy Birthday song, an aversion to phrases like "the new normal" and "in these uncertain times," and a deep sadness for everyone and everything we lost. I need some greater insight into what I'm experiencing right now. It feels like every constant I've ever know is in jeopardy. When you're trying to make sense of a world where there's spring without baseball or graduations and death without funerals, you get pretty desperate in your search for meaning. You need to believe there's some big-picture lesson to be learned from the nightmare you're living through in real time.

But for the life of me, the only takeaway I can come up with from this incident is: Whenever you feel like you can't deal with one more thing, a toddler will be right there to say, "Oh yes you can, buddy. And I'm here to prove it by [insert toddler destruction]."

This story may not have a moral, but it does have a happy ending. After calling a half-dozen auto glass businesses, I found a place that was willing to come out and fix the car in my driveway. The technician, an older gentleman who looked like an extra from "Sons of Anarchy," showed up in my driveway and told me the entire job would only take a half-hour or so. Twenty minutes later I answered my phone and heard a gruff voice on the other end telling me to come out to my driveway about "an issue with my car."

"What's up?" I ask when I reached my driveway sporting the pajama pants, bathrobe, greasy hair and disheveled beard that is very much in vogue with today's remote workers.

"What we have here is the perfect piece of glass for a 2018 Camry, the car you told us over the phone you drive," he says.

"What's the issue?"

"Your car is a 2018 Toyota Corolla," he says.

"It is?" I ask, genuinely surprised by the make of my month-old car.

This causes the technician to double over laughing, and unlike the previous day, I laugh, too. What else can I do?

He returns the next day with the correct window for a Corolla, and he doesn't even charge me anything extra for my mistake. "You look like you've been through it."

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