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.
