Writing on a Wednesday #4: Parenting in Quarantine

Wake up. Scroll through my phone. Make the bed. Do my morning yoga practice. Give Madison breakfast and her morning journal when she wakes up. Morning meditation with the family in the living room starts at 9:30am. Then comes homeschooling for the day: Science and Social Studies and English and the bane of my existence, common core Math. All sprinkled with a little bit of outside time and a little bit of quiet inside time before Madison gets electronics for the day. By the time we’re done its at least 4pm and time to start thinking about dinner. I get in the kitchen and do my thing, when I’m done its time for our daily family activity followed by Madison’s bed time. Maybe have a little adult time after she’s asleep if we’re not too tired, then go to bed, and start all again the next day. Oh, the joys of parenting during a pandemic. Does anyone else feel like they’re losing their minds a little bit? Because I sure am. 

I have always loved being at home. With the intense anxiety that I have struggled with for years, it has become my sanctuary. Having a space that feels clean with my bed made and candles lit and yummy food smells filling the kitchen is one of the most comforting feelings in the world to me. Movie nights snuggled on our living room floor with homemade popcorn and a Disney flick are one of my family’s favorite pastimes. But as I explained to my grandfather just yesterday, there is a huge difference in emotion between not wanting to leave your house, and not being able to leave your house.

I miss simple things like the ease of grocery shopping, or the quick sprint through the Starbucks drive thru without wondering if I’m making a fatal mistake. I miss movie premieres at the theatre and dinner dates with my husband. I miss the festivities and excitement and plans that this time of year normally brings. I miss the comfort of hiking on a trail and not feeling weird about saying hi to a stranger. I miss going to my daughter’s t-ball games and dance classes, I miss picking her up off the school bus every afternoon. I miss traveling, I miss planning to travel. I miss going to work. These sentiments sit in my heart with sadness and acceptance, because I know that everything is changing, nothing will be the same again, and none of us really know what the new normal will be. 

Change is inevitable, it’s one of the only guarantees in life. I’ve had this lesson handed to me by the universe over and over again. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel incredibly anxious about the state of our world. I have been forced to learn over the last few years that everything is temporary, and could be gone in the blink of an eye. And I have really begun to find a comfort and balance in the chaos of things being so totally out of my control. I have developed a trust in God and the universe that everything is divinely orchestrated, and what is meant for me will always be for me, including suffering, sadness, and pain. And I have this innate feeling that our planet will be better because of the ways we’ve suffered and shifted perspective during this time. 

So when I’m asked what I’m struggling with the most during quarantine, my list is short. My husband and I have learned to ebb and flow with our individual spaces and responsibilities, my days are started with the same morning routine that I’ve kept up since the New Year, I’m cooking more than I ever have before and dedicating more time to my writing, we are spending more time together as a family and less on our phones, and most importantly my mind feels a state of peace that it never has before despite the uneven ground we stand on. But the one thing that makes me want to dig my nails into my hair and yank it out, is my stir crazy almost 7 year old daughter. 

It is normal for 1st graders to push boundaries, it’s in their blood. How will they know what will push mommy too far unless they do it? How will they understand that they must take care of their toys until they break them and feel the sadness of losing them? How else will they know they have to eat dinner unless they sit at the dinner table all night and test if they can get out of it? I feel as a parent, this has been one of my biggest challenges to date: to understand that I have the same buttons that my daughter will push over and over again, and my job is to continue to reinforce those boundaries and rules to her, over and over and over again, as many times as I need to until she gets it. It’s already a pretty exhausting job, and now my child has had her school, all of her friends, all of her activities, and all of her social interactions outside of the house stripped away. It’s like someone took a big magnifying glass to her behavior, and turned the magnitude all the way up. 

The first week wasn’t so bad. She would push but listen. She would struggle to concentrate but try her hardest. She may have not liked dinner but she would at least try it after mommy asked. She understood that school work came before the Ipad. Fast forward almost 2 months and now I’m met with slammed doors, foot stomping, talking back, whining and tears when she’s asked to do school work, a grasp for my attention every 5 seconds, and the worst dinner fiasco was when she went about 3 nights without eating a few weeks ago. By the end of the day, I’m laying in bed and my mind is mentally exhausted. And most of the time, the mommy guilt tries to sneak its way in, talking about how I could have handled things differently. 

I had an emotional outburst bordering on an anxiety attack after 3 weeks of doing the homeschooling by myself. Lots of tears and hugs, and my husband got the message loud and clear that I needed help. He offered to alternate weeks homeschooling and deemed Wednesdays as his day to get out of the house with Madison to hike and my day at home to write (thus Writing on a Wednesday was born). I feel so blessed to have a partner who always makes an effort to meet me in the middle. Because I don’t think there is ANYTHING more frustrating at home right now than trying to teach my daughter. 

A photo from the first week of our homeschooling sessions

I don’t know which part I struggle with more, the concepts that are somewhat the same and somewhat completely different than what I grew up learning, or the repeating of the Power Point slide one, two, three, FOUR times because Madison wasn’t listening. I will take 5 minutes to explain to her what a tradition is, then she’ll be asked in the next question what a tradition is and she won’t be able to answer it. She’ll click through slides before I’m done reading them, and she’ll click the right answer without understanding why it’s the right answer. I’ll explain to her how to solve the math problem she just asked me about, and she’ll say “Okay, but mommy can I have a snack?” I picture myself having an internal mental thermometer and lately it’s been hitting the big red ball at the top consistently. I have become a staunch believer that one of the FIRST things that should change when the world settles back into a new normal is how much teachers get paid, because oh man, THEY ARE SAINTS. True, blue, patient angels. They are not given the credit or respect they deserve. And you can bet your ass I will never balk at anything that I have to do for my child’s school or teacher ever again.

Despite our homeschool ups and downs, we’re getting by day after day and sticking to a pretty routine loose schedule. I know that her behavior at home is amplified (and poor) because of this incredibly challenging time we’re all faced with right now. I know that her hyperactive outgoing Gemini mind has so much energy that it doesn’t know what to do with it. I know that it feels like she’s actively trying to push every single boundary and button I have because she doesn’t have anybody else’s boundaries or buttons to push right now. I honestly can’t imagine how scary everything going on must be in her little mind. When I have to go to the grocery store, she’ll want to give me a big kiss and hug and she’ll say she hopes I don’t get sick. Every morning after we meditate together, we all pray and say something that we are grateful for. It was Madison’s turn to pray this morning, and she thanked God for protecting our family, something she says in almost every prayer. 

Life went from constantly moving for her to standing still. Tomorrow is May 1 and normally we would be planning a big birthday party or Madison’s birthday trip. We would be planning the dates for her annual summer trip to West Virginia to see her grandparents. She would be in the middle of her first baseball season with a machine pitched baseball, and getting ready to graduate 1st grade at school. I know that my sweet baby is feeling a lot of emotions that she doesn’t know how to process right now, and they are manifesting in bad behavior and disrespect towards the people she knows will always love her. 

A photo of Madison from this same week last year

Knowing this, and being mindful and present allows me to have patience in moments where I normally wouldn’t. In the moment, I feel triggered. My button has been pushed. I came into the house after being outside for 10 minutes and you’re eating a chocolate egg that wasn’t in your snack bowl at 10:30 in the morning. And your best response is “Um, can I eat this? Because I already started to.” If I gave in to my trigger I would huff and puff, I would tell her of COURSE she can’t eat the egg because everything she can eat for the day is in her snack bowl and it has been this way for weeks. I might raise my voice a little bit, before making her throw the egg away. Instead, I took a deep breath, I told her no she could not eat the egg and to please throw it away, and I let her get back to her schoolwork and told her we would talk about it later. She had already eaten the egg. Was me getting upset about it in the moment going to change it? Nope. 

Don’t get me wrong, there are days when the additional enforcement of boundaries is needed. I’ve asked you to clean your room 5 times and 2 hours later you’re still sitting in the hallway playing with LOLs, I think you need to hear my voice raise a little bit to understand that mommy’s not messing around and she really wants you to clean your room. I know I’m not doing her any favors by completely caving and letting her walk all over us because I know that this is a hard time. But can I be more gentle in my approach? Can I be more patient before I hit (as my yoga instructor says it) my reasonable edge? Can I maybe not cry over spilt milk every single time and just clean up the milk? Absolutely. 

I feel that as challenging as this time is for us as parents, this time also presents us with an incredible opportunity to raise our vibrations and the way we look at our day to day lives. Despite everything that we’ve lost over the last few months, every morning we pray for those who have lost more. We pray for those who are sick and dying alone with no one by their bedside, or for those without a home who have nowhere to shelter in place. We find something we are grateful for every day, because if there’s one thing I want my daughter to pull from this whole experience, it’s that there is always something to be grateful for. ALWAYS, whether your list of gratitude is a mile long or whether the only thing you can think of is the ease of your breath, something I think we are all realizing is precious and valuable. I also want her to understand that its okay to be grateful, and to still grieve. It’s okay to miss what has been lost and still be excited for what is to come. It’s okay to feel all of your emotions, all of your fears, all of your worries, all of your hopes, and all of your dreams. And if we allow ourselves to coexist with our emotions that rise and fall every day, we teach our children to do the same. 

My sweet girl on our movie night 

A few nights ago, Madison and I had a girls night. TJ went to Phoenix to get some work on our Toyota 4Runner done, and I made a date night in for us. Madison got to take a bath with a bath bomb, we wore comfy pajamas, I put a bunch of movies in a bowl and let her pick one, we ate snacks and painted our nails, and snuggled and watched Mulan. We were going to bake cookies, but we were so full on snacks that we decided to cuddle and watch Once Upon a Time instead. It was a great night. When it came time for Madison to go to bed, she was so upset. She kept asking me for one more episode, and when I told her no, she kept cutting me off saying “But… but… but…” until finally I snapped and said Madison it’s time to get ready for bed and I’m not arguing with you about this anymore. She got up, stomped her feet to the bathroom, sat in there for 5 minutes, and then came back out to the living room crying. I asked her what was wrong and she said: “I just want to have a good life every day.” She said that she wants to be smiling and happy and having fun like in her YouTube videos every day, she doesn’t want to feel sad or angry, she wants to be happy all of the time and have a good life. I sighed a little to myself and held my arms out to her. I hugged her and told her “My sweet girl, you will never be happy every day, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a good life.” I brought up the movie Inside Out, and asked her if she remembered all of the emotions in Riley’s head. She did, and I told her all of those emotions are okay to feel. Joy and sadness and anger and disgust and fear. If you expect yourself to be happy all the time, you’ll never be fully happy. Happiness is temporary, but so is sadness, and that’s all you need to remind yourself of when you’re feeling down. All of your emotions deserve to be felt. We looked into each other’s eyes and I said we have a good life, she said I know, we hugged and pretty soon she was off to bed. 

We may not know where we’re going, or when this will all be over. We may not know what tomorrow will bring. But we can be present with today. We can enact intention over the things within our control. We can choose to be vulnerable and open. We can take this as an opportunity to rest, reflect, and grow. Children are sponges. And if they watch you shower yourself with love, compassion, tolerance and acceptance, they’ll learn do the same.