July 12, 2020

Dear Diary,

My friend Chiara recently called me as she was driving to the Canadian border. “I don’t blame you for trying to get out, but I thought the border was closed,” I joked as I pictured her for a split second trying to make a break for it. Turns out she was headed to a border patrol office somewhere near Vancouver in order to exchange her 11 year-old daughter with her ex-husband, a Canadian national, for summer vacation per their standard custodial schedule. Normally, this is a much simpler matter of arranging a few flights and other travel arrangements. This year, after consulting with an attorney and exhausting every other possible option, this was literally the only way that they could legally effectuate the handoff.

Co-parenting after divorce is rarely simple, but tack on the coronavirus crisis, and an already combative landscape has the potential to become a veritable minefield. When everyone is telling you to stay home and socially distance, how do you do this safely across two households? What if one parent is an essential worker who has increased exposure to the virus? What if one parent is taking appropriate precautions, while the other parent views coronavirus less seriously? What if one parent has more job flexibility and can more easily handle the demands of distance learning/child rearing? 

Adding to all these complications for many parents is that fact that early shelter-in-place/curfew orders upended their court-ordered custodial schedules, especially if exchanges were scheduled to take place at schools or daycares that had closed. Ideally, parents should have worked together to devise a schedule modification which was in everyone’s best interests, but for many, the coronavirus health crisis, combined with family court closures, provided the perfect pretext for one parent to unilaterally assume sole custody, while limiting the recourse of the other.

This is certainly true for my friend Reina who is an ICU nurse in New Jersey and married to a trauma surgeon. I called Reina on March 16th to gauge her level of concern. I was still in phase one of pandemic processing, which meant that I, along with every brand since the beginning of the internet with whom I had ever shared my email address was clearly concerned with COVID-19, and yet several of my friends were still trying to convince me that this was a simply a bad flu and to stop following the news. Seeing as Reina and her husband were on the frontlines, I figured she could provide me with solid first-hand information. 

As you might imagine, my conversation with Reina quickly confirmed my worst fears. Not only was she gravely concerned about this novel coronavirus for which her hospital was ill-equipped with effective PPE, but her hospital was also approaching scary max-capacity levels. For context, Reina does IronMan competitions and hikes Mount Everest in her spare time when she isn’t working as an ICU Nurse, teaching nursing while pursuing a doctorate, raising four children and generally being a bad ass. So to hear the palpable fear in her voice, when she is basically the most indomitable person I know, really put things in perspective for me. In addition to being very worried for my friend on a personal level, I was instantly outraged that my country, the United States of America, a supposed world leader, could be so ill-prepared and put so many of our healthcare workers at such risk.

While still fuming at our national incompetence, Reina made me even more upset by sharing that she and her husband hadn’t seen his sons for weeks due to his ex-wife’s concerns of their potential exposure. Neither Reina nor her husband were offered an opportunity to see the boys - even from a safe distance - to say goodbye before “it was decided” that they no longer have access to them. I was devastated for Reina and her husband that they were being treated so cruelly by his ex-wife while they were so heroically battling this invisible killer on the frontlines. Especially after she detailed all of the extraordinary protective measures they took each time they returned home, I felt certain that no court of law would allow this to continue, and advised her to file a motion, to which she replied they had already done so, but it would be a long time before it could be heard. 

Shortly after Reina and I got off the phone, my stepdaughter Amy Beth’s mother Sharon called me to see how we were all doing. In stark contrast to my friend’s situation, Sharon and I have always co-parented respectfully and cooperatively. In addition to Amy Beth’s milestones, we also celebrate holidays regularly together and even call each other “step-wife.”

I told Sharon about my conversation with Reina and that I was starting to panic and prepare for the end of days.

“I started a vegetable garden today,” I told her. “We should be good to go in about 70 days. Do you think I ought to get some chickens?”

“Totally,” Sharon replied, “maybe a goat or two while you are at it.”

“Would you like to come stay with us for a bit?” I asked her. 

“You’re a doll. You know I love you.” Sharon delicately responded, before gracefully declining my offer as a long-term proposition. 

As it turns out, over the course of the last seventeen weeks, Sharon has visited and spent the occasional weekend with us. We spend our days lounging by the pool and accepting cocktail service provided by Hubby, and our evenings playing board games or charades as a family to a lot of laughs. Amy Beth likes to roll her eyes when her mother and I join forces, but we both know she secretly loves it.

Sharon and I have forged a great friendship and she has been one of the biggest supporters of my blog since it started. Not only did she personally call me to tell me how much she enjoys it, but she also shared it with so many of her friends, which is the ultimate compliment! I can’t tell you how much her support has meant to me and touched me. 

Meanwhile, after three months of not seeing her stepsons, Reina and her husband finally had their day in court via Zoom conference and, after reviewing the affidavits submitted certifying their hospital’s precautionary measures as well as their own at home, their family court judge thankfully restored their custodial rights. It still stings that they lost so much time.

As I am continuously reminded time and time again throughout this pandemic, I am so grateful that my family, by and large, is so harmonious. Now if only we could come together as a nation…

Very truly yours,

Maya