The Week I Became a Stay at Home Mom Thanks to Corona
After spending a week of shelter in place with my in-laws, husband, and two young children I have come to a major realization. While it’s easy to operate from a place of fear, frustration, and anger, I also have to be a mom. A teacher mom. A mom who is currently working from home and homeschooling my children. Sure, the uncertainty of how long we will be instructed to live a life indoors seeps into my thoughts and causes an acute level of anxiety, but for my children who operate in the moment, life keeps going. I am cautious of how much information my seven-year-old is receiving related to COVID-19 and my two-year-old doesn’t know the difference. So I wake up everyday, take a shower, eat breakfast, brush my teeth and go downstairs to my makeshift office where I write emails, deliver presentations via Zoom, and meet with my colleagues to plan for the future.
After my four hour shift, I head upstairs to make lunch for my children as my husband wraps up an impromptu P.E. class for them. It feels like one of those old school WWF wrestling matches, where you tag in your partner, except we are not tagging each other in to take a rest, but to start the next round of the match. My husband goes downstairs to start his workday as I facilitate online learning, vocabulary lessons, and math sheets that I created the night before. A half-hour recess, reading time, and a YouTube yoga class later, it’s time for dinner, baths, and bedtime routines. Then I’m back at my computer to complete the second half of my eight-hour work day, before I have to go to bed and do it all over again.
While it may take some time to get used to this new routine, I am realizing how much I am valuing this extra time with my children. Not commuting to work is giving me an additional two hours per day. While I’m exhausted as hell, I love knowing exactly what my kids are working on and having them obliviously interrupt my virtual meetings is a welcomed reminder that life is more than phone calls and emails.
More than anything, I realize how little we all value our freedom. I think of that Janet Jackson song that says, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” Now that we can’t go outside freely and breathe in the fresh air and walk down the street and notice the kids playing across the street, we would give anything to experience it once again. So, during the duration of shelter in place orders, let’s try to stop and smell the roses in our homes, try not to worry too much about the future, and enjoy the company of others.
