Quarantine Parenting - it's a little wild over here...
So when all of this started - when the schools shut down and the businesses were all closed down in response to the Corna outbreak, I did my level best to talk about things that had nothing to do with diseases and quarantine and living in isolation. Why? Partly because I didn't want to spend any time talking about something that already seemed to be consuming every waking moment of my life and filling up every discussion on social media. And partly because I was still blindly hoping that it would all be over in a couple of weeks and we could all breathe a sigh of relief and go back to life-as-normal. Clearly I was delusional.
Our family has been in near-total isolation for almost five weeks now (the only exception being our walks around the neighborhood, and once weekly trips to the grocery store to pick up our online food order), and this shows no signs of being over any time soon.
I don't know about you guys, but some stuff can be so hard to adjust to, so challenging to process, that you end up either laughing or crying about it. That's how a good deal of this quarantine has been for me - something I either laugh about or cry about. As an introvert who works from home, I haven't had a hard time with the stay-home orders. But what has been challenging has been staying home with my entire family. Like everyone else, we've had a WHOLE LOT more family time than we're used to, and with few options for getting away from one another, I've had to get creative in order to get some alone time. (Like taking a cup of coffee with me to an empty parking lot and reading my book in my car by myself.)
Anyway, in the laugh or cry approach to this unprecedented situation we all find ourselves in, I've been trying very hard for the laugh approach. Wh
ich led to an attempt to chronicle this experience in the form of little #quarantineparenting comics, capturing the humor and frustrations of being trapped in our house together, week after week, while we wait out the virus. They're not any kind of great artistic achievement, and their only purpose is to make people smile, or feel seen in the midst of their parenting challenges. So if you have a few minutes, feel free to check out my Facebook and Instagram pages, where I've been (trying to) post a daily #quaratineparenting comic. Hopefully, you enjoy them...