Fortunately, there are few times in our lives that the entire globe is simultaneously dealing with a crisis of any kind, much less an airborne virus that wrecks your lungs, and that is if it doesn’t kill you.
The last pandemic was in 1918. The babies of the last world war are now in their 70’s, and those of us who came along later in the 20th century can only point to the Cold War and economic recessions as global events.
Here we find ourselves, and here we will be for the foreseeable future.
All of that said, we are all dealing with this in different ways. Our children are at home.
We are at home. All day. Every. Single. Day.
And we are only a few weeks into what could go on for months.
Our employers, who are dealing with their own brand of stress, need us to continue to produce. For organizations that aren’t organized for telecommuting, this is a Herculean task.
There are meetings to discuss how to have meetings. Video conferences one after the other, and all the while, our children need us to console them, entertain, organize, teach, feed and launder them, while we hyper-vigilantly monitor every throat clearing, dry cough, or complaint about an ache or pain, fearing the worst.
So, in between the meal preparation and clean up, laundry that seems to grow exponentially, bleaching every surface, navigating bandwidth issues with a dozen devices, feeding and walking the dog, we are worried and tense. Worried. Tense. Stressed. Scared.
Yes, it is okay to say that you are scared. It is also okay to go to your bedroom, close your eyes, count to 100 and do some deep yoga breathing, or scream into a pillow. Our employers need us to stay well and our children need us to stay sane. This isn’t easy, and no amount of multi-tasking and checklist checking is going to make it easy.
Accept good enough. Expect that your kids are actively absorbing your stress, and, as a result, they will act in new and unexpected ways. You may find them extra-argumentative, needy, or just plain anxious. This applies to children of all ages, not just the little ones. They lack the experience to understand what is happening or how to make sense of it. I’m 51 years old and I am at a loss on this one.
All we can do is hug them a little tighter, tell them you love them a little more often, and take care of ourselves and each other.