My heart is beating a bit fast, and I explained to my 14 year-old carefully, speaking almost syllable by syllable to make sure that he is actually listening and understands, “I have sent you by Whatsapp my teudat zehut, my identity card. Yours is on the slip of paper beneath it. It is proof of both our identities and proof that you are my son…Damn.”
“What?”
“My new address isn’t on the identity card. The card proves I am your mother but the address is the Gilo address. We lived there three years ago. What if a police officer asks you why you are walking from Katamon to Arnona, but not to Gilo?”
“Who would walk all the way to Gilo? It would take 2 hours!”
“There are no buses and your dad can’t take you.”
And then I have one of my moments when my head clears of its own volition. My mind goes from boiling with the impossibility of it all, to off the heat entirely. Stop. Start again. Well, if the police stop my son on the way to walking to my house, and they aren’t convinced he is actually visiting his mother (child visitation is one of the few permitted reasons to travel according to the new regulations) because the address on hasn’t been updated on my identity card (it would have to have been updated annually. We’ve moved so often in the six years after the divorce), and if, as a result, my son is fined 500 shekel, which means of course I am fined 500 shekel, then I’ll pay it. However, since the regulations were upgraded last week, I have lost most of my day job clients, so how am I going to pay it?
During the best of times, certain predicaments as a working single parent can sound like the classic schoolkid excuse of “The dog ate my homework.” They are real, but they often sound fishy because they are so complicated or bizarre. Because when you are on your own, there are so many steps needed to do basic things because everything depends on you. And if there is one detail missing, one thing that gets delayed, the whole day can go completely out of whack. Often, things get pushed off—whether it is fixing the fridge or fixing the cat—if there isn’t ready cash to do it immediately.
In the time of coronavirus, the excuses—or reasons—seem more convoluted and yet more common. Would a policeman really stop my son walking to visit me from his father’s house if the photograph of my identity card lacking the correct address fails to prove that he had a valid reason to be in my new neighborhood? Sure, most police officers would probably believe the kid and would believe a single mother might not have had the time (or bothered, depending on the attitude) to change her address on her identity card. But who knows what kind of mood they are in, whether they are eager to prove they are super-efficient at enforcing these new regulations, or whether they feel like they are above trying to prove something and want to show they can afford to be nice.
There is this feeling that, as an immigrant single mother, there may not be someone who will have my back if I do get questioned, or get a ticket, or even if I end up—G’d forbid—separated from my child somehow if one of us gets infected. And there is always the concern as a society that those in power might grow accustomed to this degree of control over people’s lives long after the crisis ends (and please G’d, it will someday).
I can’t imagine what I would do if this crisis happened five years ago, in a rundown apartment in the center of Jerusalem I rented by the month to save money. I recall a particularly exciting day when my three kids and I were packed in together in our 55 meter one-room apartment on a snow day off from school, and they couldn’t wait to go out and build snowmen. The reason the apartment was livable for three people at all was that my children, like most Israeli kids, spent much of their time playing outside. Four years ago, during a spate of terrorist stabbings in the center of Jerusalem, we were ordered to keep our kids inside, and that seemed tough, but it was only for a few hours a day for a few weeks. Who knows how long this period of social isolation is going to last.
I see my neighbors taking their children on daily strolls on small circuits surrounding the building. Many of them express that, for the first time, Saba and Savta can’t help them take care of their children because of the required separation to prevent coronavirus from spreading. Many lamented that, for the first time, they weren’t able to have all of their extended family members with them around the seder table.
I think this is a time that many might start to understand what a single parent with a birth family absent because of distance, indifference, or death, has to undergo during normal times. Similarly, dual parent families and extended families may be able to learn from single parents during this time of widespread social isolation. I was insisting for years (yet few seemed to believe me) that yes, a seder can really be a seder with just me and my kids, even if a few of them are with their father. Yes, believe it or not, if an adult can pull off a three course Shabbat meal every week of the year, she can also prepare, charoset, maror and the rest of the seder ingredients and the meal. The kids can even help and actually enjoy it. Yes, she can have a meaningful haggadah reading with her sons. We can even stop and tell inside jokes and laugh over them without a bunch of other people telling us to get on with the haggadah and stop getting sidetracked. So many times, people didn’t understand why I turned down seder invitations when I preferred to spend a seder just my kids and I, and now many people are having to do just that out of necessity. Social isolation during the time of coronavirus is telling larger families what single parents have been insisting all along—Yes, you can do it alone when you need to, whether it is bedtime for the kids or homeschooling.
At least in some sense, all families in the time of coronavirus can finally find common ground, and it is a time when single-parents can be better appreciated and understood.
