Late last week, I said the only good thing about the pandemic and stay at home order was snuggling with my children in the morning. Spring Break days didn’t start until 9 or later. Well, they did for me; I got up early to write, and let the kids sleep as long as possible. But when the kids got up I set it aside and we spent long, lazy mornings snuggling in bed: a true luxury. I’m very aware of how blessed I am to have five people to live with; I am not starved for tactile human interaction.
But early this week I realized, on the back side of two hours spent working in the yard, that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent outside. I would have gotten the yard work done regardless, but it would have been the only exercise I did in the day, and it would have felt rushed and guilty, with the knowledge of all the commitments waiting for me dragging down my soul time. Also, we had several days in a row when the wind carried the interstate noise away from the house instead of toward it, so it really was soul food in my own back yard.
Deprived of having to run the kids hither and yon, and with the publishing industry at a near-standstill, my own work feels less pressured, my time feels my own. I’ve doubled and tripled my physical activity in the past few days. Not that it’s all high intensity. But I’ll do Jazzercise On Demand with Julianna and then hike with the family for an hour later in the day and do some light housework or take a walk or bike ride with Alex.
When a friend first posted a meme that suggested viewing this enforced isolation as a Sabbath, I saw the wisdom of it but I hated it. I still hate it, but mostly because I don’t see an end point. And it hurts me to see my children’s childhood formed by this, a quarter of their schoolyear spent in isolation from the social growth that I lacked as a child, and which I’ve worked so hard to facilitate for them.
But two days into online schooling, when we’d established a routine at last, I saw my children respond with love instead of the bickering that has characterized so much of the last several years. There was laughter at our dinner table–all the way around–an easing of the tension and angst and negativity. It was such a balm to this weary, sleepless soul, I had to get up fro the table and grab the first “flower” from our stash of them to put on the Easter Tree (something we do from my Lent book)–the first thank you that has gone on our tree this year.
I told my teenager that this will be THE formative memory/event for his generation. And I realized that for most of us, the things we consider formative really didn’t impact us directly. 9/11 was crushing, but it’s a totally different thing to have experienced it from the heartland, far away from the carnage. The people who really suffered were my pastoral music friends who did weeks’ worth of multiple funerals every single day. The people who were in the buildings. The people who had loved ones they didn’t know if they were alive or dead.
I was on the outside of all that, and probably most of you were, too. I never really processed how different it is to be in the middle of a nightmare I can’t wake up from, faced with holding not only my own mental health together, but that of my kids. Kids who’ve been ripped away from their friends, their beloved teachers, their favorite activities. They’re suffering a hardship in childhood that the vast majority of us never did.
Kathleen M. Basi 
One of the few good things about the quarantine is that my parents and I are eating dinner MUCH more often than we did before. I think we ate together 4 times last week.