I can't be the only parent - can I? - cast into this coronavirus limbo who feels like guilt's sharp, insistent teeth are gnawing at their soul all the time.
The sensation has been particularly acute this week. Guilt has given his jaws a rest and pulled out a really noisy, powerful chainsaw - a full-fat petrol-engined article with diamond-tipped incisors - to have a proper go at me.
The first two full weeks of lockdown, shut-in or whatever you want to call it at least included some school work for the 11-year-old and the very reasonable expectation that there should be some class-like structure to his day.
But we are now deep into the school Easter holidays, where an erstwhile P7 pupil's expectations are, quite legitimately, very different.
Yet these are Easter holidays like no other. We can't go anywhere. We can't see anyone. Typically, this school break includes a few days at his grandparents' farm in Fermanagh. Not this year.
Far from being a reminder of what we have to look forward to, the kitchen calendar instead reads like a litany of missed opportunities and unfulfilled promises, a memorial to cancellations and postponements.
He should have been on his first rugby tour last weekend and playing in a concert in a couple of weeks. Family birthdays, including his own, have come and gone.
Being cut off from physical contact with friends and loved ones is tough enough for an adult - even one, like me, generally content with their own company - but it must be doubly so for a sociable, only child.
A natural response to this would be to spend if not all then at least more of one's time with your child.
Here is where guilt takes a double bite, thanks to the requirements of working from home - a peculiarly intense and exhausting experience in these Covid-19 times - and the fact that I am the only other person in the house with him all day, every day.
His mother works in a hospital, where the atmosphere is described as standing on a beach waiting for a tsunami to strike. She can't work at home, so neither can we tag-team child-shepherding responsibilities throughout the day.
It would be easy - too easy, perhaps - for guilt to turn to despair. There's a lot of despair around these days - not entirely without justification, given the pandemic we are living through.
But there is also hope and goodness and gratitude and redemption.
The applause and cheering, the tooting of horns and banging of saucepans, that rang out in our street and yours last night, echoing across our towns and villages and countryside, has become a weekly ritual of thanks to the health and social care workers serving us so selflessly.
Another positive and highly visible phenomenon in these coronavirus days is the appearance in windows of colourful rainbows drawn by children.
This has caught on where we live, and as well as rainbows brightening up every window in our house, we see skies full of them when we take our officially-sanctioned walk each morning. They are symbols of hope and promise that the coronavirus flood will eventually subside.
The best known rainbow in history is that which appears in Genesis at the end of the story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood.
It was a sign of a new beginning and God's promise that he wouldn't destroy the world again; rather, he would rescue it.
A rainbow's arc always points upwards, as if towards the heart of heaven and God himself; it points to today, Good Friday, when Christians recall the Crucifixion and the cup of suffering Christ drank to save his people.
And if you trace the rainbow's arc, it unerringly leads to Easter Sunday and the Resurrection, that sign that God keeps his promises - and can overlook even a parent's guilt.
