I see it in my daughter. I see how my over exaggerated scare tactics, intended to crack through my teenager’s “I’m Invincible” mantra, are feeding themselves into her little mind. I see, out of the corner of my eye, the way she shifts as they graze her. Because I know her—because she is made of me—I know she’s absorbing my words with a different heart than the insolent teenager in front of me. I know I’ve crossed a line.

“But Mom, she’s not in my class,” the teenager laments with woe, the travesty of being a thirteen-year-old boy who cannot attend his thirteen-year-old girlfriend’s Christmas party. In a town where they’ve just called in mobile crisis units because of overflowing hospitals. At a house belonging to people I don’t know, people who are having a party in the middle of the worst surge yet.

He’s complaining about my response that at least he gets to see her in school. Because he’s one of the lucky ones who still goes to school. Read that again. A year ago, I couldn’t have fathomed a world in which I considered my child lucky because he is able to attend school, safely, in person. A year ago, my biggest worry about the Christmas party would have been having to drive 15 miles away to pick him up at ten at night (way past my approaching-middle-age bedtime.)

Tonight, however, my parenting is based solely on the state of the plague that lingers outside our door. Tonight, the idea that attending a classmate’s Christmas party is one that strikes fear in my heart? Well, it’s just par for the course these days.

Despite the numbers and the cases, despite the teenager’s intelligence, and despite that he knows better than to think he can win an argument like this one, he soldiers on. Driven by hormones as if he and his very first girlfriend are Romeo and Juliet, and he will be propelled into madness if he cannot attend her party. Like many a teen before him, he’s being restricted from what he wants and its not fair!

But unlike many a teen before him, the reason for my strictness is not hinged in an untrustworthy child, a kid who’s been grounded or in possession of questionable friends. It’s because we are the middle of a horrific pandemic. He’s right. It’s not fair.

“Do you want us all to die?” I counter back. “Is it worth that, to go to a party?” He rolls his eyes at me.

I get it. I understand where he’s coming from, and I want to shake sense into him to remind him because I also need to remind myself. Because, like him, I am tormented over this lost time. I miss people. I miss parties. I miss the ease of the old life, walking into a bar and sitting down, not a care in the world about contagious diseases. I need to remind myself that death is a potential end-game here.

“We aren’t going to die,” he retorts, but his surliness is waning. He knows he’s lost the battle.

“Maybe not us,” I agree, because we’re all healthy with strong immune systems and, you know, avoiding crowds. Skipping Christmas parties and all. “But your grandparents could. And if I get sick and end up in the hospital, who’s going to take care of you?”

Again, I’ve gone too far and I know it. But it’s not him I worry about, because he understands my inappropriate jokes and sarcasm, so I know he gets what I’m saying. He can logically calculate that we are not the vulnerable people in the playbook of this pandemic. We are not front-line workers, we are not the elderly, we are not immunocompromised. We are not risk-takers. We wear our masks and we don’t go to parties.

But my daughter? The nine-year-old who thinks so much more than she says, who feels things deeper than most, who sheds tears at rescue pictures of dogs and sometimes cries for no reason because she has so many feelings she cannot name. She’s in the club of kids who are old enough to understand and yet too young to process. She’s the double whammy of belonging to the club of the dreamers and the sensitive ones. The ones who are not soothed by the scientific explanation of how a vaccine works.

I know this, because she is me. I know what its like when a thought takes the reins and comes to life in your mind. How it grows wild and wrenches your gut. Anxiety and I are old friends, on a first-name basis, and I’m not sure if I introduced my daughter or she made her own acquaintance but here we are. We both understand flight or flight in the absence of real danger.

But right now she thinks the danger is real. And quite frankly? So do I—although my fear lies hinged in the decimation of our lives and the hatred that seems to be bubbling up, everywhere. The judgement.

It is no surprise that, moments after the teenager sulks upstairs to text his girlfriend the bad news, my daughter hurls herself into my lap, all eighty pounds of her, burying her face in my stomach. It comes as no surprise that her tears are real, her voice taking on the puerile cadence that comes out when she’s afraid. I force her to look at me, and she’s full-fledged crying, tears sprouting like fire hydrants, the back of her hand damp as she collected them.

“I don’t want you to die,” she sobs, and her face reminds me of when she was a baby and I was trying to sleep-train her, how she clung to the crib bars and howled. “I don’t want you to leave me!”

And just as I had to go overboard in one direction with the teenager, I needed to climb back on the raft and put the metaphorical lifejacket on this kid. Two kids who’ve never responded to the same parenting techniques, but this is different. This is something new, this parenting-during-a-global-crisis.

Keep it real, I tell myself every day. But don’t scare them. Well, scare the teenager a little. But definitely do not scare her. Well, scare her a bit so she remembers not to touch her face at the grocery store. And definitely don’t tell her about all the toxic people on the internet.

“Girlfriend, we’re all fine,” I say. “You know I was just exaggerating with your brother? Because he’s a teenager now.” I make my voice lighter, try to get her to crack a smile with some good-natured ribbing at her sibling. She’s not having it.

“But what if you go the hospital and I can’t see you? You’re always leaving me!” Her whole face, like one big broken heart.

She cuts with a knife, this one. She uses sharp words, knowingly and unknowingly. She doesn’t know this, but if I could have predicted a life in which my kids would grow up in two homes, I wouldn’t have left her crying in her room, ever. If I had known that she might live half her life in another house I never would have turned away.  But, hindsight.

Because the truth is, here we are. Whatever decisions I made over the years, for both of these kids, really don’t matter right now. Tonight. Here we are in a world that is floundering, flailing in the wake of a deadly pandemic, a culture of political unrest that has spawned hatred that is breaking up lifetime friendships. Hatred that’s turning human beings against one another.

We’re here, in this tanking economy. We have fatigued healthcare workers, a holiday season in which your choices are to skip Christmas or get Covid (so it would seem.) We’re here in a world of fake news, Zoom birthday parties, a collective crushed spirit, and a general sense of every man for himself. The idea that we need to make responsible choices for humanity is lost. Its every man for himself out there. This is the world that these two kids, ones I am responsible for molding into real, live adults, are actively living in.

As if that were not weird and scary enough, what’s even stranger is how we carry on so simply. How, amidst all of 2020 combined we still get up every day. We still drink coffee, work and go to school, virtually or otherwise. We still see a limited number of friends. We still do chores and exercise. The house is copiously decorated for Christmas and we all know how to order from Amazon with one-eye shut.

We’re still living, and it looks totally different and exactly the same at once. We saw the family over Thanksgiving, it just happened to be over Zoom. We still run errands, we just slap on masks, and if we forget the car is full of them. We hesitate, sometimes ever so slightly, any time we go anywhere, assessing the crowd. Are there too many people? Do they all have masks on? Should we not have come?

And there comes the worry. The worry that builds up silently, that eats away little bits and pieces of us, the parts that hadn’t been weathered down before. The worry that every mother carries, ever-pulsing. The worry that changes shape over time from what if she stops breathing in her sleep to what if he runs away in the parking lot to what if someone bullies them. That worry has taken on an intense new face, too: what if she gets sick?

This worry changes everything. I imagine someday, whenever she returns to school, that the intensity with which I’ve ingrained in her to wear a mask, don’t touch anyone, let’s skip the park today because there are too many people, lets stay home and be safe…that the intensity of that will have marked her in some unchangeable, forever way. That she’ll always hesitate, that she’ll never fully grab life by the balls.

For her, I fear the anxiety with which she was already infiltrated with, will never really leave her. Maybe the teenager is lucky right now, lucky to have that mindset of invincibility. He will emerge on the other side of this as a young man and, if history repeats itself, will come of age in a better world. She will too, of course, but will this worry plague her in some forever way?

She eventually stops her tears, but her need for comfort and safety still throbs and she asks to sleep in my bed, and I say yes even though I know this will lead to terrible sleep for us both. The me of nine years ago would laugh haughtily as she paged through her sleep-training manual, but the mother I am now, during this time of our lives, knows better. That mother knows you soak it all up, all of it, because the next time you blink she’ll be grown—and who knows what else life will have thrown at us in the meantime.

We will eventually make our way upstairs, snuggle in bed and read from our books, and the worry will sleep for a bit with her. As for me, I will lay awake for a while, wondering if I’m being too restrictive. Not restrictive enough. If my kids are safe, if my family is safe, if this will ever end and I will ponder the growing notion that the normal we all remember will not be the normal of tomorrow.

When we wake in the morning, we will carry on as we always do: we will drink coffee and get dressed and participate in work and school. We will do homework and chores, we will walk the dog and cook dinner.  We do all of this with the belief that eventually we will emerge on the other side. And we absolutely will.

But just as the world will not be the same, neither will we.