Quarantine Is a Skill
We’re getting better at pandemic life every day
“If the kids interrupt me one more time,” I hissed to my husband. I didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t know how to. I was already at the end of my rope.
This was about a month into quarantine, and my anxiety was roaring into high gear — we hadn’t had childcare in weeks, and I was at max capacity trying to juggle my kindergartener’s distance learning, my preschooler’s constant emotional outbursts, and my own freelance writing work. Something had to give, and I had a hunch it wouldn’t be the pandemic.
The moment felt like a crossroads. I had a choice: I could keep living in frustrated denial, or I could find a workaround. With support from my husband, I scaled back on work, hired a pandemic-safe babysitter, and let my kids watch entire seasons of Paw Patrol when I was on a deadline. That wasn’t necessarily the reality I wanted to live in, but after a while, I realized that being more honest with myself about my own limits — as both a worker and a parent — made this less-desirable reality at least a tolerable one.
Months later, I look back at that point and see how far I’ve come. As much as it can feel like a Groundhog Day-esque stretch of stultifying sameness, this time isn’t static — or rather, we aren’t static as we move through it. We’re getting…
