When Ramona and Mario Singer had a nasty divorce four years ago, no one thought they would even speak again.
Yet now they are sheltering in place at his Florida home with their daughter, looking for all the world like a cozy couple.
Friends whisper that, after two months of quarantine, the “Real Housewives of New York” star might be in love again.
“It’s going pretty well,” she told a reporter last month. “Much better than I anticipated. We’re really bonding.”
Jimmy Fallon also has declared that isolating at home has brought him closer to his wife of 12 years, Nancy Juvonen.
“It’s been very bonding . . . We were like: ‘We actually like each other! We chose well!’”
Such is family life in a global pandemic. The reality is a remarkable repudiation of the gloom and doom pumped out by relationship experts, child shrinks and divorce lawyers.
As if the nuclear family were a malignant threat to health and sanity, they predicted the worst from close confinement: domestic violence, child abuse, “irreversible” damage to intimate relationships, and a divorce epidemic.
But anecdotal evidence is that children are happier, and a lot of families are getting along better than ever. Enforced isolation has brought a newfound appreciation for family life that is the silver lining to this wretched pandemic.
You can see clues in the sales figures; board games like Monopoly selling like hotcakes and a surge in communal sports equipment such as basketball hoops and footballs.
The craze for home baking has sparked a flour shortage. Without easy access to fast food, families are making their own bread and eating meals together, as fresh produce flies off the grocery shelves.
At a time of national crisis, Americans have had to slow down and turn inward, and those lucky enough to live with family are counting their blessings.
There is even a Facebook group, “Unintended Positives from Shelter-in-Place 2020,” with almost 7,000 members sharing silver linings, such as “I’ve connected with family more.”
On social media, discussion boards and letters pages, people are expressing gratitude for the unexpected richness of relationships they once took for granted.
A mother in Texas whose daughter had come home to stay wrote to a newspaper: “We make bread, dinner and desserts together, and all three of us laugh like little kids. I almost never want it to end.”
Another wrote of the new camaraderie between her sons: “I have caught my oldest son helping his little brother with his online Spanish class and have heard conversations filled with advice . . . and it just melts my heart.”
A woman wrote that she and her husband were practicing the fox trot: “We love our daily dancing date, we’re getting good at it, and it’s bringing us closer together.”
Students sharing COVID experiences for their high-school paper, the California Granite Bay Gazette, wrote of missing friends but also valuing families.
“I finished the day by watching ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ on Hulu with my family, which was a lot of fun since we don’t always get time to hang out as a family when things are normal,” wrote senior Brent Evans.
Under the headline “Why some kids are happier right now, and other unexpected effects of quarantine,” CNN found “hundreds of parents from around the United States [feel] a sense of relief and joy [that] their children seem happier.”
One mother said her kids, ages 8, 7 and 4, have become “better behaved, kinder to one another and more independent . . . It’s been really eye-opening. I don’t want it to go back to the way things were.”
And while education academics warned that homeschooling would set back the COVID generation, in practice, a lot of children have thrived, so much so that teachers now want to learn from the experience.
Parental attention, a more relaxed schedule and sleeping in helped, according to Edutopia, the online education hub of the George Lucas Foundation.
In an article titled: “Why Are Some Kids Thriving During Remote Learning?” it found the benefits evident especially in “shy kids, hyperactive kids, highly creative kids.”
Such positive news flies in the face of this month’s Harvard Magazine cover story, which claims home schooling “violates children’s right to a meaningful education and their right to be protected from potential child abuse.”
It is rife with “racial segregation,” “female subservience” and, horror of horrors, “conservative Christian beliefs,” wrote Professor Elizabeth Bartholet of Harvard Law School.
Her timing couldn’t have been worse.
Families can see that the real agenda of left-wing educators is to push parents aside and impose their own values on our children.
But it turns out the obituaries for the nuclear family were premature, judging by these tales from the lockdown.
All the hard work of leftists to destroy the family unit has come to naught.
In fact, W. Bradford Wilcox, senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, predicts: “In facing new trials and tribulations, married men and women will be less focused on their own emotional fulfillment and more focused on meeting the basic financial, social and educational needs of their [families]. Divorce rates will fall, and marital commitment will rise, as a family-first model of marriage comes to the fore.”
Let’s hope he’s right because we will need strong families to see us through tough times ahead.
Weed it and weep
Nancy Pelosi’s destructive mindset is on display in the Democrats’ $3 trillion stimulus try-on, laughably titled “the Heroes Act.”
It’s stuffed with “get out of jail free cards” for prisoners and goodies for illegal aliens that would only make life more miserable for unemployed Americans.
But perhaps the most perplexing element of the bill is the special assistance it provides for that well-known “essential service” of weed dispensaries.
Included is “expanded access to financial services for potential and existing minority-owned and women-owned cannabis-related legitimate businesses.” And the comptroller general must “carry out a study on the barriers to marketplace entry” of the aforementioned weed merchants.
Some heroes. For years, the Chinese Communist Party has waged a reverse opium war on America by pumping fentanyl into the heartland, killing 32,000 people in 2018, alone.
Now the Democrats’ pathological compulsion to increase drug addiction, especially for minorities, means we’re doing China’s work for them.
‘Bad’ Brennan
Karma may be catching up with former Obama CIA boss John Brennan.
As a paid MSNBC contributor, he used the authority of his former office to brand President Trump “treasonous” and “wholly in the pocket of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin” and claim Russia rigged the 2016 election on his behalf.
After the Mueller investigation found no collusion with Russia, Brennan blamed “bad information.”
Not so fast.
Fox News reports that Richard Grenell, acting director of national intelligence, is declassifying information suggesting Brennan “suppressed” intelligence showing Russia actually preferred Hillary Clinton.
This backs a report by former CIA officer Fred Fleitz alleging Brennan “suppressed high-quality intelligence suggesting that Putin actually wanted the more predictable and malleable Clinton to win.”
The theory makes sense, considering the Clinton Foundation’s Uranium One ties to Russia which included $500,000 for a speech given by Bill Clinton in Moscow. That trumps a plan that went nowhere for a Trump hotel in Moscow.
