COVID Diaries: Anna Silman

Panic! in the Pod Some groups survive through teamwork; others eat each other alive.

AMY, LET’S CALL HER, is the Regina George of the moms in Kelly’s upper-middle-class Pittsburgh neighborhood. (Some names have been changed.) She’s the one with the pool and the biggest house who throws the most over-the-top Christmas party every year, and she wields more power than God or Tony Fauci when it comes to determining the group’s social calendar. So when Amy started acting like covid was over this summer, it was a green light for all the other moms (except Kelly) to start socializing again.

Back in the spring, Kelly, who works as a researcher at a nearby hospital, formed a remote-learning pod for her first-grade son with two other neighborhood families (not Amy’s), and they had strict rules about socializing to make sure they didn’t risk exposing anyone else in the pod—or so she thought. Then, one day, she logged on to Facebook and saw a photo of all the neighborhood kids piled maskless on top of one another for a movie night at Amy’s house. And this kept happening. “It got to a point where it was starting to be very hurtful, like, You’re putting my family at risk because you couldn’t possibly not go watch the college football game at Amy’s,” she recalls. After she realized the more “chill” moms had created a separate group chat to make plans without her, she found herself crying alone over a bottle of white wine in her backyard. “I feel like I’m losing a popularity contest to Typhoid Mary,” she says. “I don’t feel like a grown woman with a doctorate when I’m talking about this. I feel like I’m in middle school.”