Thoughts on Quarantine, The New Normal and the B Word

Surprising their grandparents with homemade cards and some groceries, by bike!

A friend asked that I share my thoughts on this unique time in all our lives, this time of quarantine and staying home to keep ourselves and others safe. I have been thinking a lot about this request over the past 15 days and to be honest I wasn’t so sure if I was up to it. My thoughts ranged from: What could I possibly have to offer to others at this time? What if I come across as being too positive or too negative? What can I possibly add to all of the excellent articles and posts that have come out over the past two weeks covering this same exact topic? One friend shared a writing by the Miami Heat player, Udonis Haslem, which totally moved me. It was about children in a part of Miami called Liberty City where he grew up and how those kids looked forward to going to school each day because that was where they knew they would be fed and where they would feel safe. He talked about how for many children in Miami (and all over the U.S.) this quarantine is life-threatening. Another article I saw was by Bill Gates, where he lists all of the positive things that can come from being at-home at this time. He suggested that Coronavirus unites us all as we are “in it together”. He suggested that living in quarantine will remind us that our true job is to look after one another. It will strengthen families. It will serve as a reminder that material things don’t matter and that life is fragile. To name just a few. So many writings lately have resonated with me during this unusual time.

I guess there is one thing I can add that I haven’t seen anyone else write about yet…the topic of boredom. I have seen a lot of funny memes about boredom at home over the past few weeks. In my house we don’t use the B word, but I can see how boredom might come to surface during this time. The days are long, our children are tired of being cooped up day after day (as are we), and parents are struggling in so many ways. We are trying to keep things as routine and as close to “normal” as possible. It’s a lot for anyone to handle and for some it is next to impossible. Stress levels are at an all-time high for most and sadly our children are with us 24/7 and will certainly witness firsthand how we respond to this huge change of life, although temporary. They will notice our change of tone, our patience running thin, our readiness to get them to bed, and our lack of empathy at times. One thing I keep thinking about is how my children will remember this period of time in the years to come.

The boys making up their own obstacle course in our backyard.

I grew up in Miami and lived through hurricane Andrew and I feel like it’s similar in a way to this. The panic, the fear, the uncertainty, the empty shelves at the grocery stores, etc. I was only ten years old in 1992 but I remember bits and pieces of it. I remember riding out the hurricane with my family in our house. I remember us all sitting in the staircase huddled together and hearing what sounded like a freight train above us, as the window of my parent’s bathroom blew in. I remember my mom racing to her bedroom to try and close the door that flew open from the force of wind. I remember walking outside during the eye of the hurricane for a few minutes just to look at the damages and check-in with neighbors. I remember the wind picking back up and almost lifting me up off the ground as we all ran back inside to take shelter. I remember taking pool floats and rowing down the flooded streets with our next-door neighbors for fun in the days following the storm. I remember how grateful we were to still have a standing house, as so many weren’t as fortunate. And I remember being grateful that none of us were in the kitchen several days later when the ceiling caved in. It was certainly a scary experience but because of the way my parents reacted to it I mostly remember it feeling like more of an adventure than the end of the world or life as we knew it. And like all hurricanes that cause loss, this too shall pass and times will get better again. Cue the 1992 hit by Gloria Estefan “Always Tomorrow”.

Our children might not remember all of the details about the Coronavirus pandemic and being stuck at home to stay safe and to keep others safe. In a few years time they might not recall all of the changes in routine or the sacrifices that were made or the arguments that occurred; but they will remember how they felt at home with us.

When you sit back and look at it, there have actually been numerous positive changes since we have been housebound. We are slowly going back to simpler times. Sure, there is still online learning each day and Zoom chats, and social media and apps galore to suck up a ton of our time but at least we are now balancing it out with more activities outdoors (and boy does a healthy dose of vitamin D each day help us keep our sanity) and more hands-on quality time as a family. My boys are spending less time watching junk on YouTube and more time working on puzzles together, taking family bike rides, helping me fold laundry, do dishes, make beds and water my plants. We are back to washing our own cars, having all hands-on deck for preparing dinner and I am relearning how to do my own nails! All of a sudden, my boys want to shed their training wheels and upgrade to a two-wheeler (something we have been talking about doing for years) and they want to swim for hours upon hours and impress me with dives into the deep end of our pool (something that usually wouldn’t occur until the heat of summer).

Instead of killing time with quick trips to Target to buy more things that they don’t need, we are killing time in the backyard together, laying on our backs and discussing what animal shapes each cloud in the sky makes. I hear myself sounding more and more like my mom and dad. I say things that I never have said before to my own kids, things that my parents used to say to me, like the silly rhyme, “birdie birdie in the sky, why’d you do that in my eye”, to which they crack up! I taught my boys the old rhyme “star light, star bright, the first star I see tonight. I wish I may I wish I might, please have the wish I wish tonight”. How did I miss this before?

Lots of extra hugs for Gator these days!

Each day I find myself having moments of pure joy and nostalgia as I see more of a resemblance of my own childhood. We took a family bike ride the other day on the same streets where I used to ride for hours upon end as a young girl. I showed them where my childhood best friend used to live and although her house has since been torn down and rebuilt into a compound, the tree house we used to play in together still stands in the backyard. Why did it take a quarantine to get us to this place?

One of the biggest things I have come to be truly grateful for these past couple of weeks is the slower pace of everything. We don’t need alarm clocks. We don’t have appointments to get to or places to be or a set schedule for that matter. We don’t need to race out of the house to get to school on time, with me raising my voice at Hudson telling him to put his shoes on for the 100th time! We can stay in our pajamas for as long as we want and we can eat our meals whenever we feel hungry, not because it’s “time” to do it. There is something so freeing in it all and dare I say, there are things we will surely miss once life is back to normal. When we walk our dog (multiple times a day now) we look up and see less airplanes and more blue sky, and we hear less traffic on the surrounding roads and more birds chirping and parrots squawking. Mangos hang from the tree tops, orchids are in bloom all around, and butterflies float overhead, more than I have ever seen. We are having family dinners at the table together, just talking and laughing. We listen to music in the house daily and my husband and I spontaneously performed our “first dance” from our wedding for our boys one morning. They loved it! We are pulling out old board games that were given as gifts years ago but were tucked away in closets and forgotten about because who has time for that! My boys are inventing new games of their own and are bonding with each other more over the past few weeks then they have bonded in the past year. We are all that we have.

The reality remains that none of us know when it will be safe again to come out of quarantine. We don’t know when we can return to holding hands with our grandparents and giving hugs to our friends. We don’t know when we can go back to having professionals educate our children face-to-face or when we can have our kids return to the baseball diamond with their teammates or when we can hire a sitter for a date night to go to one of our favorite restaurants…the list goes on and on. Until that day comes, I will choose to make the best of the situation. I will keep finding little things to be grateful for each day and I will do my best to make our days at home feel like a fun adventure.