When Your Kids Have Two Homes, What Does It Mean To Stay At Home?

On Sunday evening, I washed my hands, pulled on my coat and walked 20 minutes to my ex-wife’s house, where I washed my hands again. She had ordered pizza for me, our two sons and her boyfriend. The five of us gathered around the table, ate pizza — the driver left the boxes on the front porch, where my former partner wiped them down with an alcohol solution — and chatted. After dinner, the adults and the tween sat around the table and played a board game, with the sounds of the teen on the Xbox floating up from the basement. We’ll do a version of the same thing in a couple of days at my house.

Welcome to Modern Family, pandemic-style.

We’ve all been told to hunker down in our homes and to limit contact as much as possible. Except for those we live with, of course. And those are great instructions. Except they don’t really take into account families like mine. When your kids have two homes, what does it mean to stay at home?

"The only other place where I can eat a meal, share a drink or play a game in real life belongs to the person I married 16 years ago and separated from a decade or so later."

For our family, right now, physical distancing and social isolation mean treating our two households as one. That means agreeing upon a shared set of parameters: the only people allowed in either of our houses are each other, our kids and my ex’s partner. It means a lot of handwashing. For now, our community has not reported any COVID-19 cases, so we’re OK with limited amounts of socially distant contact with select, healthy friends: a walk outside a couple of metres apart, for example. Last week, we were OK with our kids playing hockey on an outdoor rink with a few of their friends. Today, we’re not so sure. The point is, we keep talking about it — and that we stick to the agreed-upon rules, for everyone’s sake.

So, right now, the only other house besides my own in the entire universe that I can safely (or, in some cases, legally) enter belongs to my ex-wife. The only other place where I can eat a meal, share a drink or play a game in real life belongs to the person I married 16 years ago and separated from a decade or so later.

It’s a bit odd. But frankly the world right now is so beyond “odd” that it’s barely noticeable.

Social isolation is hard. CBC Parents producer, Kevin Naulls, explains why everyone should be taking advantage of video chatting. Read that POV here.

It helps that our situation is relatively uncomplicated. There are no other people in the equation — no stepchildren or previous exes with complicated families of their own to exponentially increase the odds of contagion. A friend of mine, for example, is coming to terms with the fact that she won’t be able to see her boyfriend for the duration of this pandemic: he has children from two previous marriages, who also move in between houses with parents and step-parents. Combine that with her three kids, ex-husband and his new girlfriend, and there are simply too many moving parts to keep track of safely. I am grateful for the clear lines of our bubble of five.

"I’m grateful that we’ve had lots of practice and experience in negotiating what it means to be a family."

It also helps that we get along, for the most part. Ours was not a high conflict separation. Neither of us was fleeing an unsafe situation. We are insulated by our privilege: decent jobs, enough money, safety nets, supportive family and friends. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be trapped in a house with children and an abusive (or even just a highly antagonistic) partner right now, rather than in two comfortable homes with imperfect but functional and well-meaning adults. I am grateful for that.

It helps, perhaps, that as a queer family, we are used to, even founded on, off-the-beaten-path understandings of what it means to be in relationship to each other, to be parents, partners, allies. We and the kids lean heavily on the children’s father, who is socially isolated right now in a different province but available by phone and text to play Minecraft with the boys and send puppy pictures. I’m grateful that we’ve had lots of practice and experience in negotiating what it means to be a family.

Look, I’m not trying to sugarcoat this. If my ex-wife and I had got along perfectly, had always seen eye-to-eye, then we wouldn’t have separated in the first place. When you have to pick someone to hang out with indefinitely on a desert island, you generally don’t choose your ex-spouse. But that’s essentially what we’re being asked to do right now. And we are doing it. And we have the luxury of doing it from two physical spaces.

Life has become expensive and, as this working mom points out, relies on two incomes for her family to thrive. So why does society still see women as the primary caregiver? Read that story here.

Maintaining our relationship takes real work and the ability to communicate effectively even when all we feel like doing is throwing up our hands and retreating. It requires compromise, patience, soul-searching and the ability to keep coming back to the table to put the kids’ needs beyond our own desires to be “right.” All of that was true before COVID-19, and it is doubly true now.

So, right now, that means family dinners, board games and conversations. It means more direct contact within our bubble as direct contact with the outside world shrinks. It means sitting around the dining room table with my ex-wife and our kids and her boyfriend not being fazed by it, even enjoying it. It means laughing together, sharing funny stories, talking about our anxieties and coming up with joint strategies to minimize them. It means picking up milk, texting regularly about the kids. It means being on the same page (rather than the same chapter) with parenting and the kind of structure and patience and attention our children will need in the coming weeks and months, at either house. It means making mistakes and being willing to acknowledge them and then move on, for the sake of the family.

It means recognizing that if I get sick, my ex-wife (and perhaps her boyfriend) will likely be the person taking care of me, and vice versa.

Think about that.

Pandemics make strange housemates, apparently.

The world outside of our two front doors is becoming increasingly small, and increasingly frightening. And so, the world inside those doors is expanding. In these unprecedented times, I take comfort in that.