Months into the pandemic, confined to our house by COVID-19 restrictions and the unrelenting Texas summer, I followed my restless eight-year-old into the pantry where the bulk of our interaction took place. We argued over what qualified as a healthy snack. 

As my daughter eyed a box of crackers, I considered mandating a change of clothing. How long had she been wearing that oversized t-shirt with the depressed cartoon cat sprawled out on its back? Two days? Three?

“Do you want to FaceTime a friend?” I suggested, hoping it would inspire a quick hair brushing. 

My daughter shrugged. “I don’t really have any friends.”

I felt a sudden hotness and sinking sensation, as if I were falling down an elevator shaft. 

I shook my head and laughed nervously. That couldn’t be true. I distinctly remembered a parade of classmates leaning out of open car windows, tossing handmade birthday cards into our shrubs while parents honked and waved from the driver’s seats. And what about that week in April when she discovered the Marco Polo app? My cell phone blew up with clips of second-grade girls testing out filters and voice-changing effects. “Hello” was said a dozen different ways, in a high-pitched helium voice or with emojis splattered across foreheads. So what if those conversations lacked depth and substance? They still counted, right? 

“Why don’t you play Roblox and see who’s online?” I proposed.

I had uttered the magic words, permission to commence screen time. She grabbed the box of crackers and darted past me to collect her iPad. 

“I think I’ll just play cat games,” she called back, already halfway up the stairs.

I grimaced. Spend two hours on our inane app and earn yourself forty gold coins to spend on cat upgrades! But I was tired of saying no.

Quarantine had sparked an all-consuming obsession with everything feline. When she wasn’t watching cats on a screen, she was drawing them: fluffy cartoon cats, realistic cats in an impressive variety of poses, cat-human hybrids standing upright and wearing clothes, warrior cats with glowing eyes and scarred faces. She had serious artistic talent, but I was too disturbed by the cat bleeding out on the battlefield to notice.  

I paced around the kitchen, wrestling with the stereotype of the crazy cat lady: lonely, eccentric, and prone to hoarding. I pictured my friendless child playing cat combat games in her cluttered bedroom. She couldn’t even have a real cat because her dad was allergic. 

Last month, after celebrating the Fourth of July with no friends and no fireworks, I brought home a hamster, our first family pet. We’d gathered around the enclosure, mesmerized, as our newest family member nibbled on a blueberry. But the excitement quickly turned into disappointment. Sandstorm Fuzznugget slept all day and hid most of the night, flattening herself into a pancake and army-crawling away to avoid our touch.

The feeling of the summer was guilt, guilt that I couldn’t surprise my daughter with an adorable kitten, guilt that we didn’t have family nearby, guilt that we didn’t have an obvious quarantine bubble to provide pandemic playmates. Her only cousin lived in Canada, my two best friends lived in Spain and Baltimore, and my husband had always preferred computers to people.  

Almost ten years ago, my husband and I moved to Austin on a whim to start a family. As a stay-at-home mother in a new city, I’d provided stimulation and social connection via meticulously planned outings we lovingly referred to as “adventures.” I had a spreadsheet containing over two hundred adventures categorized by indoor/outdoor and season. It went beyond the nearby playgrounds and indoor play centers. I was prone to bouts of intense research; I knew every Instagram-worthy bakery and ice cream shop within a fifty-mile radius. I sent out monthly photo albums to friends and family chronicling our many adventures: a dizzying montage of museums, children’s theater, festivals, live music, petting zoos, aerial yoga, and splash pads. The response was always, “How do you do so much?” 

When COVID hit, we found ourselves spending every day, all day, at home. I tried to plan socially distanced outings, timed reservations at the Botanical Garden and a slew of state park passes. But by the end of the summer, we’d resigned ourselves to pajamas and screens, with twenty minutes of mandated exercise that quickly degenerated into lying on the trampoline.

 I had just Googled “symptoms of loneliness in children” – excessive whining, disrupted sleep, and lethargy – when my daughter plodded downstairs (sans iPad) and did the unthinkable: initiated play with her four-year-old sister. 

She dictated a game of warrior cats, and my youngest quickly agreed, grateful for the attention. They assigned themselves names and territories – Tigerstorm of the living room and Silverpaw of behind the couch. As I watched them prepare to sneak-attack their dad in his home office, I was struck by a realization. Maybe it wasn’t my daughter who was lonely. Maybe it was me.

It wasn’t only my daughter’s social life that had revolved around school functions and birthday parties; I had always looked forward to catching up with other parents, however awkward. Our adventures around Austin hadn’t only provided stimulation for my daughters; they had provided me with a sense of community. I missed the subtle nods exchanged with other mothers, the solidarity I’d felt in their presence.

Reflecting back on my own quarantine behavior, I ran down the loneliness symptom list. There I was, excessively whining about the mask-less teenagers congregating across the street, peering suspiciously through the blinds like a cantankerous old lady. There I was, wide awake at one in the morning, talking to Sandstorm Fuzznugget with a bag of Tostitos and a third glass of wine. I scrolled through social media until my eyes wouldn’t stay open any longer. There I was, supervising my children’s “mandated exercise time” from a lawn chair, the nylon mesh pattern imprinted on the backs of my lethargic thighs.  

Loneliness is perceived social isolation. Since quarantine had begun, my casual friends evaporated, my social circle in Austin suddenly nonexistent. Why was it so hard to make real, lasting friendships after the age of thirty? For real connection, I depended on girls’ trips with faraway friends, now no longer possible. 

Forced into isolation, my daughter developed a new hobby becoming the world’s most prolific cat artist. I had been watching more TV and drinking too much. Instead of projecting, perhaps I should have been focusing on my own mental wellbeing. If I was being honest, I’d been struggling with loneliness even before the pandemic. Were all those obsessively planned adventures just an attempt to compensate for a lack of nearby friends? 

I left my daughters playing and took my phone into my bedroom. Instead of mindlessly scrolling, I composed an email to my long-distance friends, pasted a Zoom link at the bottom, and pressed send.

-Jami Bonyun

Jami Bonyun earned an M.S. in Mathematical Finance in preparation for her career as a humor writer. She lives in Austin, TX with her husband and two daughters. In an effort to focus on her mental health during COVID, she now does Zoom workouts with faraway friends. The more embarrassing, the better: Buns of Steel, Richard Simmons, or Jazzercise. Her essays have appeared in Skirt Magazine, Underwired, Cure Today, and Listen to Your Mother. She is the author of a personal cancer blog, MommyMoondragon.com.