It's five-ish on a Wednesday night and my young boys are taunting the smart speaker, much to the dismay of my teenage daughter. Chaos is overtaking my kitchen, while I convalesce with the flu, safely hidden under the weighted blanket; my spouse is at a work meeting. What's striking to me about the disaster that's happening downstairs in my house right now is that it would be totally different if my husband were home. The carefully crafted chore chart would be semi-enforced; the announcement my daughter made of "I made burritos but eat them wherever because mom and dad aren't around" would have been refuted in favor of our normal preference for tables and chairs. Whenever he or I attempt single parenting we always come back with: "bad idea." Recent reporting has confirmed my suspicions about the dismay of parenting alone: married mothers in two income families were the least lonely and the most financially secure as the weight of the pandemic bore down on American soc