Parenting in a pandemic has taught me this: the grown ups aren’t coming and the point of everything is to fall apart.

It is summer. The woman, mid-life, bathing suit at mid-calf, emotionally deadened enough to her bizarre current state of reality where she really feels nothing beyond the mid-point of her still beating heart, climbs slowly into the lake. The water is cool but not cold. It soothes her hot, pale skin and surrounds her fully. Here in this moment, there is not noise or Twitter or barking candidates, global pandemics and recessions and worries and constant planning. In this moment, held by nothing but the arms of the lake’s ripples and her own weightlessness, there is nothing but the glorious silence and stillness of the water.

As she comes up for air, the silence is punctuated by reality. The beach is full of wet sandy feet. The water is full of noisy children. Her own children tug on her suit and she scoops them up, big and small alike. She reminds them that no matter how big they get, they will always be her babies. Besides, in the water we are all weight less. We are not weighed down by our bodies or realities or secrets or the general trappings of life, here in the water.

She scans the lake, searching the water for a person or persons she knows to not be there. For her own mother’s arms to cradle her once more as she did in that very same lake years ago. There are many things that mark this season of her life, but the most singularly defining feature is the feeling of searching for grown ups that will know what to do. The searching and the longing never ceases. Though she knows they aren’t coming, and though she knows the person she is searching for is regretfully herself, she never stops looking for the adults to show up, to make it better, and most importantly tell her what to do. It is the thing we text ourselves at night when we lie awake. That we whisper to each other at the pool, in masks from 6 feet away.

When? When are the grown ups coming to help?

As a woman of a certain age, at a certain point in her life, this time frame of middling is often the perfect storm. I’m at an age where I need to really pay increasing attention to my own health. Yet my children are still young enough to really need me. And my father is just not well enough to also need me.

Everyone needs help. But no help comes. It is only just me.

I stare at the weathered picture of the family in the lake. My mother is holding me and I’m clutching her for safety in the water and she is there ,her arms fully encircling me. Somebody else, in that moment, is holding me up.

My God, what must that feel like when somebody else bears the weight of it all.

At night, I lie awake turning every choice over in my head until I push past the point when sleep is an option. Decisions about next year’s schooling, and about what is safe and what is fair and what to do. What if sleep never comes again. What if I just lie here indefinitely, waiting for answers and rest, fatigue and questions suffocating me at night.

There are many moments where I find myself missing my mother, but one of my most frequent longings is to speak to her as her equal. Not as her daughter, but as mother to mother. That we would pull up alongside each other, toes dug into the sand at the lake and I could ask her, is this what it’s supposed to feel like? Is it supposed to feel this hard?

I imagine she would say yes and no. That there were of course hard edges to our childhood that she worked to gloss over. That she was careful to shield me from her adult reality. That it is normal to feel like your identity is so misplaced you cannot find it and that perhaps more worrying, you lack the energy or desire to go looking. But there is a new layer to all of this in the era of COVID that I expect she would acknowledge is freshly difficult. The layer of life and death consequences that exists with almost every single decision we make about groceries and schools and vacations. That every single moment has an element of disaster preparedness to it, even the seemingly casual ones. Even the, let’s throw on our flip flops and head to the pool starts with, did you pack the masks and sanitizer and, how does the lot look? Does it look too crowded? Every moment is so packed with risk. Maybe it always was and we just didn’t know? Maybe the entire problem with our lives right now is all of the knowing. Ironically, I do not know.

I dig my toes into the sand by myself, watching the water carefully and rhythmically pull in and out before gently breaking against the shore. In the picture, the woman in the lake is playfully pointing at me to turn around and face forward, face the camera but I don’t comply. I’m stubbornly facing her. She is my forward. She is my future. I am their present.

She fulfilled her promise, a life as good or slightly better than hers for her children. But what’s the point of all this if we can’t at least build something as good if not better for them? That baby in the picture had it better than these masked children by the water. Am I to assume that the point of all of this is just the loving of them? It hardly seems like enough.

The water does what it is supposed to and and dutifully fills in the hole my youngest has just dug at the sand’s edge. In a world where I expect almost nothing from no one, the predictability of this lake’s gentle waves, are particularly endearing.

Maybe the whole point of it always was never to build anything but actually to learn to be okay watching it wash away and fall apart. Maybe that’s what the woman in the lake wants to tell me but never will. That the point of being their mother is not just about letting go. It is about the total erasing from the picture. That you should smell this salty air and kiss their sunscreened heads just above their masks and feel this water slip between your hand sanitized fingers because one day, you too will disappear from this lake. And none of this worrying will have mattered. And that is exactly how it should be.