Unschooling the Heart

Learning to co-parent at the beginning of the end of the world 

04/03/20

by Diddle Knabb

A few days into lockdown, my friend tags me in a heavily-circulated post on Facebook that reads: “Before you complain about your situation, remember, someone is quarantined with their ex!”

My friend thinks this is hilarious because my ex-husband has just moved in. He will be living in my spare bedroom as we attempt to co-parent our son during lockdown. 

Hunger Games canon: let the games begin!

The virus has infected my Facebook feed. Over and over I see people sing a sigh of relief that it only kills old people and people with underlying health problems. My six-year-old son Iggy was born twelve weeks premature and is asthmatic. He’s been hospitalized for complications due to asthma twice in the last year. I imagine his lungs, already ravaged by this year’s flu, turning into a cloudy, white honeycomb by a virus that has people dropping dead in the streets. 

Iggy earlier this year while in the pediatric step-down ICU at Lurie’s Children Hospital. His asthma specialists have advised a self-quarantine for all the high-risk patients. 

Two weeks before Papa Pritzker puts a shelter in place, I panic and pull Iggy out of kindergarten. The gravity of the situation hasn’t sunk in yet and my friends are still joking about scooping up cheap flights and cruise packages. People keep telling me that children aren’t affected by the virus, but Flint still doesn’t have clean water. I think of the children who the government watched drink lead-contaminated water, but still feel a little insane as I write to his teacher that I will be taking him out of school for the foreseeable future. 

His dad Jacob, who I’ve been separated from for years and Iggy spends half the week with, is hesitant but I am learning to trust my gut and tell him he can eat my entire ass if he thinks I am going to ignore the reports from Italy and trust Donald Trump. He declines to eat my ass, but we agree that it’s best for Iggy to stay out of school. Soon the shelter-in-place takes effect and I pitch the idea of him moving in with us.

On the one hand, it makes complete sense. Neither of us wants to be indefinitely separated from our child and the constant back and forth in Ubers and public transit from Boystown to Logan Square poses too much of a risk for exposure. My apartment is huge, and I have an unused guest room, so why not? 

Because logic is dumb and living with an ex sucks. There is a reason we are not together! I still mumble “moron” to myself every time we end a phone chat, because he is a moron who absolutely stole my youth and that must never be forgotten; and Jacob would be trading his quiet, tidy home to join the circus that is my house. I live with Iggy, the dogs I took in the divorce, my partner Mark, and our baby Luna. The apartment is perpetually unkempt and beasts both fur and flesh run amok- my petite menagerie of magic. 

My baby daddies could not be more different. Jacob is a burly, barrel-chested Appalachian writer I met when I was 19 and he 35. He’s a raconteur, smart, and charming and while you get the vibe he would make a killing as a used car salesman, it’s chill. He exposed me to a level of culture and sophistication I likely would not have known without his influence, but I grew to resent our age difference and the more traditional gender roles that defined our relationship. Mark is a nonbinary bon vivant, a slender Nick Cave look-alike who gets a manicure more frequently than I do. He puts on a velvet suit coat and vest to take out the trash and when I was 8 months pregnant with our son, we attended a well-thought out orgy to celebrate our soon to be sexless lives. Mark and Jacob are friendly but let’s be real, they both deep down probably want to sword fight with their weiners over me, and I am more than happy to stoke that fire. 

Mark and Iggy on the day of Iggy’s first World Naked Bike Ride in Chicago

I love my son more than I love not wearing pants, though, so I offer Jacob the third bedroom, which Iggy refers to as the “skunk room,” because it’s “scary and it stinks.” 

Imagine this pitch: Social isolation got you down? Consider moving in with your ex-wife for an unknown amount of time! Her new baby is fresh off of colic and still cries regularly, and if you’re lucky, you might be able to hear her getting pounded by her partner during a late night sexcapade- these walls certainly are thin! Also if you get bored, she has a bunch of shelves she needs you to put up, because she doesn’t know how to use tools. Best of all, you’ll be staying in what Iggy calls the “skunk room” because it’s scary and apparently smells like ass. Wakka wakka wakka.

It’s fine. This is fine.

I appreciate that this co-parenting situation is a hell to the no for most people, and describing the days of our lives in a pandemic with such cute whimsy feels obnoxiously privileged. Jacob and I get along fairly well as exes, and Mark is annoyingly not someone who experiences jealousy. Neither Mark or Jacob are considered essential workers, so we get to have a paid staycation. We aren’t losing income and healthy friends are more than willing to do grocery runs or deliver medicine to keep Iggy safe. All of which is to say it is not for a lack of self-awareness that I am able to laugh about the absurdity. As someone who has experienced too much trauma in my life, I find comfort in gallows humor and having everyone safe under one roof gives me a false sense of control during this boring bitch-ass plague. Two months ago I was looking up skate rental prices to go ice skating before the winter ended, and now rinks in Spain are being used as makeshift storage for the deluge of dead bodies overflowing the morgue. 

The day Jacob moved in, I was excited by the chaos of it all. He immediately began to tell me about his new natural deodorant, a strong lavender spritz that blended well with his natural hillbilly stink to create a pleasant musk. We stood in the doorway of my apartment sniffing each other’s armpits while Mark ate a Slim Jim and watched us with mild bemusement. 

I decided it would be comforting to have another adult help with Iggy, because homeschooling is a fuckhell that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. No parent should be forced to teach their children.

Teachers deserve one billion dollars an hour for not pulling a Ms. Trunchbull and throwing our children out of windows by their hair. It is a universal truth that children are uncouth assholes, unwilling to imagine life outside the parameters of their immediate wants and needs. I know if I am going to make it out of quarantine alive, I will need backup. Mark will be in charge of baby Luna - also a terrifying tyrant, but small and immobile. Jacob and I will tag-team Iggy, a child so vain he named his one-person band “King Iggy and the King Iggies.” To avoid quick burnout, we will outnumber the children and take turns having them chip away at our spirits. 

During an hour of academia, Jacob was teaching Iggy how to spell words that begin with the letter A: Apple. Are. And. All. Am. Ate. Ant. Ask. Asp. 

I believe in teaching through song, so I hopped in and started to sing, “Girl you look good won’t you back that asp up / you’re a tiny little snake won’t you back that asp up!” at which point Jacob shouted out “ok Google play Juvenile,” and we all busted out into an impromptu midday dance. It in moments like these that the absurdity of the situation simply refuses to be veiled.

Jacob practices sight words and Mark prepares dinner as I lay on the couch collecting tarantulas on a Nook Miles Mystery Tour Island to pay off my mortgage in Animal Crossing- the rightful order as nature intended.

Getting to witness each other’s parenting styles once again, for better or for worse, was not part of the plan. Because I am superior to Jacob in every way, when we first separated it was not easy for me to accept that half of the week Jacob would be parenting our son without my supervision. Of course now I get Iggy out the door the second it’s time for him to go to his dad’s house, but initially it was hard to accept that I would not get to see my son every day. Sometimes I try to trick Iggy into revealing what goes on at the Land of Dad. Does he talk shit? Is his new girlfriend ugly? I want to know, but I absolutely do not ask my child these things because I am not deranged. Even if I did, Iggy wouldn’t bite. He will let his teacher know that I have my nipples pierced or that the dog shit on my bed, but he refuses to give me even a crumb of salacious gossip from his dad’s house. “Don’t worry about it,” says the child I labored thirteen painful hours to bring into the world, so I am thankful to the good lord for providing this little window of time to see my ex as a father once more.


Our place in the universe is so accidental, and our existence is rather insignificant in the timeline of forever. The fact that Jacob forgot to pack comfy pants for this quarantine so I have to watch as his dick bulge wears a hole in the crotch of my favorite Hanna Andersson pajamas is really not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, so why let it chafe me? 

Occasionally I will remember an old hurt, but I just smush it back down into the nice big box of repressed memories in the back of my brain. I look back on a lot of the decisions I made as the follies of a young person. We married because I needed to get a root canal and he had dental insurance, so we eloped at the courthouse like one does in a country without universal healthcare. Time and space have healed most of the wounds of our marriage, but the deep cuts are still there. Like how his family was southern nice, but would have preferred he picked anyone but me, or how he prioritized his ambitions and dreams at the expense of mine, and all of the times I didn’t stick up for myself. I was insecure and wildly jealous of any friendships he had, and the number of times I looked through his phone to confirm a suspicion that never materialized is embarrassing. 

Petty grievances are much harder to keep to myself. One time somebody stole our car, but really Jacob just forgot where he parked it. We found it a block away from where he remembered it being. Embarrassed and refusing to admit he forgot where he parked the car, he was dead-ass willing to die on the hill that someone stole the car, moved it one block, parked it, and left. To this day he will not admit the car wasn’t stolen. JonBenét Ramsey’s mother died knowing that it was her son who accidentally killed her daughter, so the family botched a coverup in panic. I suspect Jacob will similarly take to the grave the fact that robbers absolutely did not take our car for a one block joyride and it’s insane that he still claims this. 

Even more not part of the plan was getting to experience Mark and Jacob as co-parents. Pregnancy is difficult for me so I never imagined having another child after Iggy, but experiencing the gentle and warm way in which Mark loves was all the motivation I needed to shit out another kid. Mark parents our children with equal enthusiasm, but I wasn’t sure how Jacob would respond to Luna. Growing up, my sister’s father made sure I knew any love he gave me was a favor he did for my mother, so I have zero tolerance for the othering of children, but Jacob has shined in his role as the Other Father. 

I’ll hear the baby crying and by the time I get to the other room, I’ll find the now cackling baby bouncing on Jacob’s knee as he croons out Johnny Cash songs in his booming, silky West Virginian accent. To pass time, Jacob and Mark have immersed themselves balls-deep into video games together. They started a play-through of the game Dragon Age Inquisition, an immersive RPG quest game. The game begins with a catastrophic event that has thrust the world into chaos, and now an enemy force threatens to open portals into a demonic dimension and release the hordes of hell to take over the world. Mark sits on the sideline and advises Jacob, who is playing a weathered and aged Dwarf Barbarian named Malika, as she battles hurlocks and beheads miscreants to preserve order and justice. They’re escaping the disorder of our COVID-19 reality for a virtual Camelot bursting at the seams with demons and dark magic, where they know with certainty that if they kill enough bosses and close all the veils, everything will end with hope.

Salome the chiweenie is the only one who thinks the situation is totally fucked

The days are long and most of the harmony relies on a mutual agreement to not acknowledge how awkward the situation is. Embracing the absurdity is what helps us through each day. Jacob likes to joke that life feels like the movie Groundhog Day, the premise of which I loathe and find unbearably boring. I have been taking a series of thirst trap photos with an unknowing Jacob in the background, doing my dishes or holding my baby, that I am calling 1-800-GET-CUCK. 

1-800-GET-CUCK 

We’ve begun to lean hard into unschooling, and screen time limits are not enforced here in the End Times. I’m staging a Tiger King photoshoot. Iggy is pissed because he wants to be Joe Exotic, but I cast the baby as Joe and Iggy as Joe’s first husband John, because Iggy recently lost some teeth and fits the bill.

Iggy: I WANT TO BE THE TIGER KING

Me: YOU’RE GOING TO BE JOHN OR YOU DON’T GET A PEANUT BUTTER CUP

When he talks to his new girlfriend on the phone, I try to eavesdrop because I am nosey af and I am dying to know what she thinks of the situation. Already knowing what she thinks of the situation, I pettily texted my ex mother-in-law a photo of Jacob cuddling Luna, asking if she could send her peanut butter cookie recipe when she had the chance. His mom once gifted me some vintage clothing with the tiny caveat that should Jacob and I ever divorce, she’d like the items back, so it’s cool to rub things in. 

The coveted Knabb family peanut butter cookie recipe which, true to Southern style, lacks crucial directions like oven temperature and bake time

Chores are split evenly and we all take turns making meals; whoever cooked that day is free from dish duty. When one of us needs a moment to sob in the bathroom (because what the fuck is this timeline), there is always someone to play with the kids. If polygamy was not reliant on abuse of power at the expense of female labor, it would look something like my current situation. 

Today is April Fool’s Day and the Governor has announced an official extension on the statewide lockdown, and set the expectation for the likelihood of another extension after that. The death toll increases daily and we’ve been promised the worst is yet to come. The five of us are sitting at the table eating a platter of taquitos and watching Raising Arizona, because what else do you do at the end of the world besides eat junk food and introduce your child to the joy that is the Coen Brothers? Iggy has been pestering me for a bow and arrow for some time and I finally broke down and ordered one so we’ll have something to do in the yard while we prepare to isolate for at least another month. The arrangement isn’t sustainable and we can’t live like this forever, but for now we are taking bets on how soon until my son shoots me in the ass with a pink training arrow. 

Diddle Knabb is an artist, writer and mother. Her work has been published in various places such as The Chicago Tribune, Consequence of Sound, Shout Your Abortion, North Dakota Quarterly Review, Gamut and Drunk Monkeys and she is the editor of fem rag lit mag, a handmade feminist zine that is carried in bookstores across the country. She spends her time painting and loves small dogs and coffee.