The Kids are Alright

Our family has gone back to basics. Suddenly, there is just more time. No one is rushing to get to school, to get to work, or baseball practice. No one is too busy to take a phone call with our parents to update them on the smallest details of our day. We laugh together at something childish our children do or say—because their simplicity and innocence place us right back into the present, where we all belong.

Yes, we can read the whole book. We can bake. Make homemade play dough.

Not to suggest this time isn’t stressful and complicated.

It’s worrisome.

And there is fear.

But our kids, if we are shielding them, aren’t feeling this in the same way we are. They are feeling and loving our presence. It blankets them in protection and makes them feel safe.

They recognize changes. They are missing the people from outside our bubble. But remember, they love us most of all. They will look back and think of this time where they didn’t need to compete for our attention.

They will remember the time school ended and then looked different. People wore funny masks. They were bored, and survived it.

They’ll remember the times we went to the pond with the ducks. The way the colors of the outdoors made them feel something on the inside. They will remember the forts made out of couch pillows, and bed sheets, lit with flashlights.

They will remember this time, where we had nothing but time just for them.

A Mom’s Guide to the Stages of Quarantine

Never did I ever think I’d be writing a mom’s guide for a shelter-in-place response to a pandemic. But here we are, at home—were your butt should be.

Pre-Quarantine: Overly ambitious goals and caffeinated efforts.

We made lists of overly ambitious tasks, unfathomable projects requiring unreasonable amount of time. Projects like: the garage, the kitchen junk drawer, color coordinating your spices.

We now have no excuse not to fulfill resolutions and goals: this will be our opportunity to return to the high-school-track-and-field-weight and emerge just in time for bikini season. Kids will be reading, potty trained, sleep-experts in no time. Marie Kondo will be calling us for advice when this is over.

The over-used phrase of the times is officially “out of an abundance of caution”. 

Homeschooling will be a challenge, but we’ve always dabbled with the idea anyways, how could a school possibly cater to our child’s uniqueness like we could?

Week 1: Intentions are strong.

We spend a small fortune on Amazon preparing for creative and inspired schooling— annoyed that they are no longer shipping in a day, because that’s the reason we weren’t able to jump start their learning— and has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that when we floated the idea to our kids, they just grunted from behind their iPads.

When we go outside the colors seem brighter and more vibrant. That’s it! We will be a hiking, exploring, nature-loving family!

Week 2: Denial.

We are still riding the waves of denial; we may have even used the word “stay-cation” non-ironically. We aren’t necessarily exercising, but instead are emulating a bear just before hibernation—which is justifiable because the grocery store shelves themselves are bare and just this visual makes us grateful for the surplus of Easter chocolate.

The internet has become our obsession, both for the witty memes and terrifying statistics.

Week 3: Unprecedented.

We discover The Tiger King the docuseries on Netflix and personal hygiene and aspirations get traded in for a flamboyant, feline-obsessed polygamist suffering from Trump-levels of narcissism. The fact that we no longer brush our hair is excusable, since it’s not a mullet.

The term “unprecedented” has quickly replaced “out of an abundance of caution” as the new buzzword.

We fantasize about what life would have been like had this occurred in our childless carefree-years. Never has it been more apparent that it takes a village to raise a child and dear God, are we missing our village.   

Real home schooling has yet to gain roots—after all the internet is encouraging us to nurture our children and not bombard them with worksheets. We’ve blocked all of the Pinterest moms that are attempting to win the quarantine. Thanks for tagging us Karen in your post about making compostable to-scale WW2 dioramas with your 6 kids, we will be sure to get right on that just after we finish our snow cones for breakfast and Daniel Tiger marathon.

Predictions for what’s to come:

We’ll discover everyone living in our home appears to be playing a uber-competitive game of who can annoy us the most.  

We will float the idea of getting a hamster or a puppy and cutting our own bangs doesn’t sound like a completely terrible idea.

We will start setting caffeine, alcohol, and internet limits.

The projects, label maker, Common Core math textbook and the scale mock us with their presence.

We start to argue with random strangers on the internet about predictions of release dates, now that everyone is suddenly an infectious disease expert.

Some things are too scary to predict--so we try our best to find humor where there is some, or we’ll surely succumb to the heaviness and we need the light to carry our children through this.

Hope for the future:

We’ve heard the expression “life can change in an instant”— but now we’ve lived through it.

And survived it.

We will come out the other side changed with a profound appreciation for the value of face-to-face human connection, that we will never again take for granted.

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Both Sides, Now

Everyday I feel like I’m being split into two sides. I see everything one way and so clearly, another. Things like the internet. I have never been so grateful and fearful for what’s online. We need the humor to keep the heaviness light, but the news and information flooding in, fills me with a lingering sense of dread, an incessant drip, drip, drip like a faucet of worry inside my mind.

In one minute, I’m chuckling over a fake personal ad—

Women with hand sanitizer seeks man with toilet paper for good clean fun.

The next I’m reading about a single mother of 6 who survived stage-4 breast cancer, but then died from this virus.

It’s so serious, it’s sobering.

In one breath I believe: we can do this. My family will adjust. We can lay outside on our backs and stare up into the sky and do as Joni Michell suggests, identify each cloud,

“Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons every where”

But even the clouds aren’t what they seem, like so many other things these days, we really don’t know anything at all.

My closets and cupboards have never been so organized, but because my kids remain indoors, my home looks chaotic, like I’m hosting some sort of multi-family yard sale.

I am a more present parent; we have endless time for reading and cuddling. I surprise myself with my ability to wear all the hats. We are moving along and suddenly, my kids refuse to bring their dishes to the sink, and for some inexplicable reason, that is the last straw. Those dishes coming directly to the sink and needing their complete unwavering compliance, was the tiny thread that was holding up my last shred of patience that day. I weathered 11 hours of indoor literal bouncing off the walls, homeschooling, the baby eating crayons left on the ground, again—but those plates, that was it.

We are sharing moments together that otherwise would not exist, some are sacred and some I know would have served us all better at school.

I’m staying active because outdoor runs and Zoom virtual Fit4Mom workout videos are my only escape and I need them, like we need the sunshine. And yet I am mindlessly downing coffee and chocolate because worrying about caffeine and calories seems insignificant.

This, right now, is our metaphorical 6-mile walk to school uphill in the snow. Even social distancing has two sides, for us at home the sacrifice can be minimal. For others, it’s cost everything.

Somehow, we are maneuvering the wire between two spans of time. There will only ever be before this and then what comes after. So we are here, together, yet not together, writing the pages of future history textbooks, and it feels like we are on both sides, now.

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