LOCKDOWN: How We're Doing

Day 1748329 of lockdown. (Actually, it’s been a little over a month!) How are we doing?

Well to begin with, we are all healthy and I still have my job/income, so those are two HUGE blessings right off the bat! We’ve slowly gotten into a routine of working and schooling from home. I’m incredibly thankful that I have a nice home office set-up with a huge desk, multiple monitors, and lots of natural light. It’s actually a pretty nice place to work from every day. Also very blessed that in spite of daycare and school closing, I still have help in the mornings so I can get some done work done without also trying to juggle caring for the boys at the same time (My nanny Kelly is amazing in every way, I have no idea what I would do without her!)

Also on the positive side, I have LOVED the extra time with the boys. It is such an incredible gift. I was actually a stay at home mom for a year around the time Graham was born and until we moved back to Columbus in the summer of 2018. I was heartbroken to have to give up all that time with the boys when I went back to work, and never thought I’d ever have the opportunity to be around them 24/7 again, so this month at home has also been such a blessing! I love hearing them giggle the day away while I’m working (Well, most of the time.. sometimes I long for a nice quiet office space to focus! haha!!) We’ve also had tons of wonderful experiences and messy adventures I wouldn’t have had (or probably allowed!) had we been going on with our day-to-day busy life as usual. Major forts, digging holes in the front yard, massive lego builds that take up the whole dining room table for weeks on end, and lots of staying up late and playing outside until the sun sets (the gift of not having to get up QUITE so early!) Leo told me the other day he never wants the Coronavirus to end. Clearly he doesn’t really understand what is going on, but I think it is a testament to the love, joy, and closeness we are feeling during this time!

I’m also thankful for the push and normalization of remote technology for working and connecting with people. I’m thankful that working remotely is working so well, and I hope to use this as an opportunity to bridge myself into doing it more often even when the lockdown is lifted. Also loving how much technology is being fully used to connect to people - Zoom calls with cousins/aunts/uncles and family I normally see 1-2x a year if I’m lucky! (Some of them in their 80s! It is adorable!) This has actually brought us all closer. Amazing! And I love that my church is doing so much to stay connected via online Sunday services and IG live lessons, worship music, and prayer throughout the week. I feel closer to this community more than ever - what a blessing that has been as well! I think these types of technological touch-points have been born out of the COVID situation but that they will become a normal/additional part of communicating going forward and it is all for the good.

Also thankful for the disruptive changes that will hopefully occur. In addition to technology advances noted above, I hope the identification of so many pain points in our culture/community/world can be addressed and fixed going forward. I have hope good will come out of all of this. God always seems to find a way to do that and I’m clinging to that hope. (And in my opinion, we owe it to our front line workers and those that have passed to try.)

All of that being said, it has also been one of the hardest months ever. This lockdown has definitely taken single parenting to another level. This new routine is soo much more work in terms of cooking, cleaning (and DEEP virus-killing cleaning), laundry, entertaining/exercising the boys, the challenge of grocery shopping, being busier at work, and trying to squeeze in some time for myself to breathe! I’m finding myself staying up wayy too late in order to have that quiet, peaceful time to myself.

It is also SO HARD not to have my parents helping out. Normally if I had an extra busy day at work or was feeling extra tired or needed an hour to catch up on things around the house, they would take the kids for me. They have been my major support system since moving here almost two years ago, however, we decided relatively early on though that they were safest if they pretty much isolated themselves. We miss them so much, but we would never want to risk them getting sick! We want them around for a LONG time! Not having them to jump in has been a huge adjustment, but I’m also happy to say we’re falling into more of a rhythm and finding ways to bend/stretch to get done what needs to get done and still be happy doing it. Just goes to show, we’re stronger than we think and can do things we never thought we’d be able to do!

Another hard thing was that early on I had to make some really difficult decisions about daycare and when to take the boys out, whether to withdraw them to save tuition (since we would still be charged even without going) but risk our spot going forward, and deciding who - if anyone- I should allow in our house during lock-down to help me with them. It was HARD making these decisions on my own with so many unknowns about the future, but I prayed a lot about it and made the best decisions I could with the information I had on hand at the time. So far so good! And at this point I have full faith that any closed doors moving forward will be blessings in disguise and things will find a way of working out.

Lastly, missing my friends and family and grieving my routine and so many cancelled events. I felt like the boys and I were finally doing so well and had created such a good routine, and then BOOM. It just hit me kind of hard :( And I think feeling this grief also brought up some older feelings of grief, and I’ll be honest and just say there have been some hard and sad days. But if anything I’ve learned the last few years, it is that grieving is part of the process of healing. Grieving sucks, but it is also part of the pathway to turning our heartaches, disappointments, and pain into compassion, appreciation, and hope.

I KNOW how much sweeter day-to-day life will be when the world opens up again and how good it will feel to laugh with friends, run into a Starbucks, walk the streets downtown to my office, play on a playground, go out to eat at a restaurant, and to just live a ‘normal’ life again. I patiently wait for the day we have the processes, tests, and infrastructure in place to do that safely. In the meantime, I pray I can soak up the blessings and lessons of this (hopefully) once in a lifetime, unique situation.

That’s pretty much it over here! I hope you all are staying healthy and doing well. Lots of love and virtual hugs.