‘Not like this day’ is how my four-year-old has come to describe the time when social distancing measures will be lifted and he can go back to doing all the things he loved. We know how adaptable and resilient children can be through unbelievable adversity, so I wonder what can be learned from how they are coping with our new reality. And in the small sliver of time I have to ponder that, I also wonder how my struggle to cope is affecting these little humans who look to us for guidance. Physical exhaustion has begun to set in and the fervour with which I attacked every day of what was once just an extended March break has set a bar impossibly high for me to reach on a daily basis. Shortcuts need to be taken and corners cut just to make it through the day but not without cost. As I lose track of the hours they’ve spent watching screens and tiptoe across the minefield of crumbs on my kitchen floor I start to feel very uncomfortable in my surroundings. If I were to look at this though through the eyes of a child, I probably would notice the living room transformed into a brotherhood fort and the crafts and toys scattered around like footprints through our action packed days. I doubt many adults will look back at this period of time with fondness and I guess I just hope that what my kids take away isn’t the shortness of my temper but all the wonderful memories that helped us all get to the time thats ‘not like this day’.

Yesterday was really hard. We knew going into it that would be a busy day with my husband in meetings on and off and myself trying to carve in some time to teach all while occupying and entertaining our two lovely boys in our new makeshift home-office-classroom. We woke up with intention, powered through all the morning tasks and by lunchtime we were pretty proud of ourselves. Everyday of this quarantine I feel like we’ve been making progress in fine-tuning the parts of our days that seem to be the most energy draining for all of us and yesterday was looking to be quite a success. The sun had finally broken through, the end of the meetings was on the horizon and energy was building towards our imminent release from the demands of work. But then one meeting splintered into a secondary meeting which was now exceeding the time we had allotted and my window for freedom was becoming narrower and narrower. All I wanted to do was grab that microphone and demand that the powers at be show some respect and consideration for the mountains being moved in order to allow my husband to sit at his computer and participate in hours of meetings all day. Together we had created over eight hours of quiet workable time in our home and now they wanted more. I don’t believe that people who decide to have children or other types of dependants that may interfere with their commitments to work should be given special treatment. But before this pandemic, we had childcare set up and I did absolutely everything in my power to facilitate my partner’s ability to go above and beyond at work. Now the curtains had been drawn, and all the work and choreography that goes on behind the scenes is revealed. I didn’t grab that microphone but I did the next best passive aggressive thing – I unleashed my children and let the full enormity of their energy bombard whoever was on the other side of that conference call. I definitely wouldn’t say that I’m proud of it and the last thing that I want do is make things more difficult for my partner but part of me needed them to know the sacrifices that I’m making in order for them to get what they need. I can’t help thinking that I’m not the only person in this position right now. Yesterday felt like the first day of this new reality where as every day up until then felt like some weird vacation from real life. It should not be up to individuals like myself and my partner to demand change for how we structure work for the time being. I’m disappointed to realize that I couldn’t expect more consideration just on a human level but if it means that legislation needs to be passed or policies need to be addressed, something has to be done because nobody will be able to function this way.

It isn’t until your future is deferred that you realize how much energy you spend thinking about and planning for things to come. Every day we hear reports of concerning statistics and tragic stories as the experts throw us a crum of hope that this may only last a few more weeks, a few more months. And with each day, hundreds of thousands of dreamers are robbed of this little shred of hope as they have to cancel weddings, post-pone moves, or pause their education while they recalibrate in these uncertain times. For some of us, this has been but a disruption to our normal routine, a chance to step back from the relentless pressure of modern, city living. We are the lucky ones.

Today marks the beginning of an important test for a lot of people as we sit down to empty Passover tables and cut our Easter cookie recipes in half to feed the fraction of family members we will celebrate with this year. Breaking the fast for Ramadan will look much different when we can’t come together at the end of the day. I find it particularly sad because in my family these holidays represent the few times that we get together and when the simple prospect of missing an Easter dinner means we lose so much, it makes me wonder why we wait for these occasions to show love to the people we care about. As I cross off events on my calendar further ahead in the future, I feel so sad to be losing something that hasn’t happened yet when the people that I would be enjoying those moments with are here right now. So where do we look when we can’t look ahead? How do we focus all of that energy and intention on the present and find new ways of what it means to stay connected?

The days are long and exhausting and the specific details blurry. The numbers on the calendar lose relevancy with every passing sunrise. Despite all this flurry and the constant reminder that I have absolutely no energy left to spare I find myself awake in the early morning hours most nights, my head swirling with perhaps all of the thoughts and worries I just don’t have the time to attend to during the day. Even though this nocturnal routine does nothing to help me through the day, it’s during these quiet moments of self reflection that glimmers of a person I used to know come through and it’s hard to say good night to her. As a newer parent, finding ways to maintain a sense of self when you have the many needs of others to take care of has been a very challenging road for me. These late night meetings with my long lost confidant have come to represent a way for me to ground myself and try to make sense of all of this uncertainty. It’s so hard to turn her away but the constant reminder that the kids will wake up soon, diapers need changing, breakfast needs making starts to nag louder as the birds start waking up outside. I force myself back into bed and turn my brain off in order to get a few precious hours of sleep before I strap on my mommy helmet and buckle in for the ride. I want my kids to know more then just the Mom part of me and I have to find ways to let her shine through in spite of the comfort I find in my maternal armour 🛡

I’m not sure where it comes from, but as storytellers we tend to see the narratives unfolding around us as being finite, when in fact nothing ever begins or ends, it just constantly changes. As soon as the smoke of a wildfire clears, you can see the forest floor beginning to regenerate and derive life from the remains of what came before. A very profound feeling grief has started to frame so many of the memories that I hold dear because they reflect a period of time in our history that for many many reasons will no longer exist as we knew it. The world I grew up in had many challenges and the older I got the more frustrated I began to feel towards the minimal progress we were making as a species towards a sustainable way of sharing this planet. But I still saw hope. Hope enough to bring new life into this crazy world…maybe because of some biological imperative to populate but I think I believed that this world was a place that could be treated differently and taken care of in a way that would allow my grandchildren and great grandchildren and great great grandchildren to continue to enjoy it. When I turn on the news and when I look at how limited and confined our life has become, I can’t help but think this is not the world I wanted to bring my boys into. On top of all of the things that moms worry about, the hours of lost sleep, spent concocting what if scenarios, now we have to contend against an invisible, insidious virus that stands to take away people who our babies have grown to love and cherish. We have done our best to try to impart upon our four year old the facts that he needs to know so that he can understand this new world he finds himself in but despite every effort we make to protect him, he is still afraid that one of his parents will get coronavirus every-time we leave the house. I need to find a way to make the problems that we face as a society into opportunities for young minds re-mold the structures of the past and evolve as a species. In a lot of ways this is a blank slate for us, a chance to examine what wasn’t working and refocus our priorities around what we now know to be essential when everything else is stripped away. Our dreams for the future can’t be built off of memories from the past but for the sake of all of those to come after us we have to figure out a way to regrow from these ashes 🌱

A thought that I have been trying to push back for a better time keeps resurfacing more and more frequently. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve been thinking more and more about the reality of our family making our annual pilgrimage to our ‘holy place’ in New Brunswick Canada. I keep seeing positive messaging in social media giving us permission to mourn the loss of things like graduations, summer vacations and weddings and while I do feel like these are all valid reasons to grieve, doesn’t it all seem pretty trivial in the grand scheme? I find it difficult to live in the present because a lot of my efforts and thoughts are spent looking forward to what’s to come, planning and preparing and hoping that whatever semblance of control I have over the future I can use to my advantage. This pandemic has stripped me of my ability to do that and in a strange way, almost like hard-core exposure therapy, I have been finding that the most effective use of my time is trying to be in the now. To be academic for a moment, it’s almost like a paradigm shift because my entire belief system, which revolved around anticipation (and sometimes anxiety) has now shifted to a more immediate concern for where I am and what’s happening around me. The notion that I can just change my surroundings or my circumstances to improve my situation is no longer a helpful coping strategy. I can’t fill invisible needs with retail therapy and drive through coffees or even hold onto the feeling that the two weeks of vacation in my favourite place on the planet can give me for an entire year until the next time I can go back. And now I’m back to where I started, wondering what is our new purpose in this world that will probably never be the predictable, routine place I think we’ve all realized now we took for granted 🙃

On the surface yesterday was just like any other day – it was actually a beautiful day. the sun was out and it warmed your skin and the air was filling with the warmth that comes with spring. Signs of new life and beginnings are everywhere you look with the tiny shoots springing up in the ground and birds chattering overhead. But to enjoy this day feels wrong because it was not a good day for everybody, in fact for some, it was the worst day. It was very uncomfortable to sit amongst the juxtaposition of such extreme emotions knowing that every person that I love and hold dear is facing their own insurmountable obstacle right now. My education reminds me that being able to live amongst these oppositions is what it means to be enlightened but that knowledge provides little comfort at times like these. My nature strives for perfection and fights to see things in black-and-white although the grey has started to take over more and more as I get older. Life is not just one thing – it is everything all at once and I guess I what I might be recognizing is that perhaps our only agency lies in our ability to choose how we let the events around us change how we see and interact with our world. Not to say that we can choose to never feel sadness or suffering again but to just stayed cognizant of the fact that the sun still shines in the birds still chirp and the flowers still bloom, even on your darkest day 🌻

The situation we find ourselves in caused everybody to drop what they were doing and hunker down wherever it was that they found themselves living at the time. But I am really grateful to discover is that place for me is somewhere safe and loving and has everything we need to not only survive this but to use this as a time of growth. As an eternal optimist I find my mind is constantly trying to find the silver linings in everything and with that comes tremendous guilt for recognizing that in many ways my self isolation prison is somewhere that a lot of people would be so much better off to be in. One thought that has kept me going throughout the last few weeks has been thinking about how I can learn from this and what I can take away from this into the unknown murky future that nobody can really visualize yet. Taking nightly walks after the boys go to bed, listening to my favourite podcast has shown me that I need time to myself – but beyond that I need to remove myself from absolutely everything so that I can actually give myself the gift of time alone. I know that I need to ask for help and to also accept it when it’s being offered because this arrangement doesn’t work without partnership. The people that I would turn to for answers don’t have them for this, nobody does, so I look out for the things that bring me comfort and I try to nurture them because we don’t know what tomorrow brings. My children depend on me not only for their needs but also for (what I now know to be the false) sense of safety parents can offer when really we don’t know if everything is going to be OK. Having the privilege of disconnecting from reality and focussing on what can be the daily, relentless slog of parenthood is something I am trying to make a concerted effort not to take for granted anymore as I hear stories of frontliners leaving their children to go and take care of all of us. But whether your battle is over bedtime or risking your own health for that of others, everyone is struggling right now and everyone is fighting a war. But we are also searching for signs of hope so if you don’t do anything else today maybe just try to keep your eyes open for them.