I will be documenting our experiences, during the COVID-19 pandemic, to preserve this time at home together. Although the world is a very scare place at the moment, I want to be intentional about our days at home together and provide my children with the story of what it was we lived through. Day One for us was Monday, March 16th (I’m counting down starting with the first day our regular schedules were disrupted) — the first day the girls didn’t report to school.
I kept thinking that our quarantine would have an obvious end and that I would return to some sort of regular writing routine, but that hasn’t happened. Despite what I see other families doing and news agencies reporting, our lives are still very much simplified and isolated and I’m not exactly sure when that will end. I’ve struggled with how to live within the parameters that seem to make life safer — do we continue with our “safer at home” status, do we adjust to a “new normal” where masks and hand sanitizer are just things we coordinate every day, do we pretend like nothing is wrong at all?
It’s hard to believe I’ve been at home with my girls for eighteen weeks. Eighteen weeks. That sounds like such a long time, but when I think back on how we’ve spent that time together, it seems like it happened in the blink of an eye. The days are mostly the same — hard to tell one from another — but they have been so sweet. We play in the garden and swim in the pool. We ride the golf cart to the mailbox almost every afternoon. We’ve rearranged furniture and redecorated spaces. I’ve learned not to kill plants and how to grill by myself. My parents’ house has gone from a vacant lot to an almost finished space. So many things have happened during these weeks at home and as terrible as I feel for not properly documenting them here, I’m also so glad that I experienced them with my eyes and hands instead of through the lens of my camera.
A friend and I were talking yesterday about how really good things can still be really hard. It’s weird to hold those two feelings at the same time, but it’s true. The mental load of motherhood has only increased over the last several months and even though we’re sharing tiny glimpses of our lives right now, there is so much more going on behind the scenes. I can’t seem to get on a regular grocery or cleaning routine and we still eat way too much takeout. I’m not doing nearly as many things, but it’s exhausting and I’ve been taking a thirty minute nap every afternoon. I renewed our tags nearly nine weeks late and filed our taxes on July 15th (and wrote a stupid big check). It took three months to decide to work out again and I’m still struggling not to eat Oreos at ten a.m. We’re living through a global pandemic, friends. Add to that a presidential race, racial strife, and cancel culture and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a mental breakdown.
I didn’t have anything much to say today, I just missed saying something. I wanted you to know we’re still here — surviving and thriving in the weirdest year of our lives. Scratching and clawing to find some sort of normalcy, all the while knowing we’ll miss these days somehow.
