By the time this is published, it’s likely that the blizzard that blew up all of the northeast’s phones Saturday morning is in full force. Maybe the power is out, maybe downed branches are making driving an ultra-olympic endeavor. Maybe Washington has already weighed in on the mayhem, naturally blaming the storm on the Democrats for being too soft on weather.

My brother’s kids are slightly older than ours. A few years ago, he started talking about winters as if it was 1700s Boston. Who knows if he and his family would survive the wrath that Mother Nature wrought? Someone on their block would definitely succumb to consumption. And there was no way everyone’s dogs would make it. I thought he was crazy, but I kept it to myself.

Now with two girls 20 months apart, I finally understand. Between two major snowstorms, several smaller ones, and weeks of temperatures that actually do harken back to General Washington’s winter in Valley Forge, we’ve been trapped inside for nearly two months. As I’m writing this, my feet are touching dried spaghetti and Cheerios under our living room table. I’d clean them, but I’d probably wake up my younger daughter from her nap. Also, our house is essentially submerged under layers of food, dirt, and random toddler residue.

A deep clean would be nice, if we could ever get our kids out of the house. About 47 deep cleans are what’s necessary.

In a previous life, yesterday was one of those cancel-your-plans, batten-down-the-hatches type deals that would have been a revelation. As a snowstorm was bearing down on us outside, my wife and I probably would’ve turned the day into a leisurely sequence of hours spent reading, sipping coffee, browsing AirBnBs for some trip that we wouldn’t end up going on. For dinner we would’ve made pizza from scratch, a staple of our double-income-no-kids days in Brooklyn. The world would be raging on outside, but that’d be none of our concern.

At this moment, this sounds like the perfect day, and one we both desperately need.

But that’s a different reality, and it’s one that no longer feels like even the remotest of possibilities. Our daughters are becoming full fledged people whose centrality to our very being has subsumed all previous incarnations of ourselves. My older daughter has block towers to build (skyscrapers, as she calls them), pictures to draw, and a younger sister to unceremoniously wake up. My younger daughter has EDM music to giggle to, walls to scale, and crayons to eat. It’s beyond obvious that guiding these girls to becoming the best versions of themselves is the only road. My life is no longer a Robert Frost poem. It’s an interstate highway. Or rather, I am the interstate highway, responsible for getting my daughters from point A to B, clearing dangerous potholes, and enforcing the speed limit when necessary.

But platitudes and metaphors are for the big picture. The immediate picture, as it stands, is that I’m going to somehow have to figure out when to shovel snow as my wife attempts to work downstairs. We’ve all gone stir crazy 10 times over, and we haven’t had a full night sleep in over 10 months.

Spring is around the corner they say, but it more feels like we’re stuck in Holland tunnel traffic and the google maps ETA keeps going up and up.

We know we’ll get there eventually. Enjoying the ride is never easy when you’re dealing with constant screaming from the backseat. But I also don’t ever have to go to sleep with a nagging feeling that simply making pizza from scratch is never going to make me whole. Which isn’t nothing.