Quarantine Quests: Hopeful Change
Hopeful things are a blessing.
That’s a thought that keeps recurring to me, in different contexts over the last few months. With all the change we’ve been experiencing, a little hope is essential. We hope that the change will be something we can manage. We hope that there might be good that comes from the change. We can’t know what the future brings. We can only hope we will manage it, for ourselves and our families.
I had relocated my family on that hope; moved our clothes, our bedding, our pets, our food, our plants, our books (can’t do without those, don't care where you go), and everything else that made up our life. Things we couldn’t live without for the next conceivable future. We would hunker down and make a home within our friends’ home.
The crazy of the time is the only thing I can come up with now that made all this upheaval sound so reasonable. Even the kids, and especially those temperamental teenagers, accepted that the world was changing in ways we couldn’t understand. Maybe this is what new normals look like? Going back to village-type living. Communing together around the dinner table. Growing our gardens together. Schooling our children in our own “one-room schoolhouse” style. Maybe this is the future. But the future doesn’t come without change.
And change is hard.
There were big adjustments for starters. 10 people in a house requires a lot. It requires a lot of food and meal planning. It requires a lot of cleaning and chore distribution. It requires a lot of scheduling to ensure daily do’s are being met… schooling, chores, who takes showers when, and scheduling for family laundry days. It required a lot in management.
This was the first hurdle we encountered as two households became one. The sheer volume of things to do, and how we would distribute those tasks among each other and throughout the week. It seemed daunting and had sent my list-making brain into overdrive.
The first weeks we started to establish our routine was rocky. We found some things didn’t work once we tried them. We would readjust, take something out, add something in. The kids lightly rebelled against the new normals we were trying to create; new normals meant to counter the chaos outside. We tried to control what we could in those first couple of weeks. It was often met with resistance or hardships we weren’t predicting. It felt like a struggle some days more than others. But we kept at it.
And what a blessing it was to have a ‘we’ to keep at it with.
Moving in together wasn’t a utopia. There were new struggles and challenges combined with the unknowns we had been already dealing with. But they felt more manageable. I felt better able to meet my children’s needs and my own. The support of my friends was a game-changer.
We spent a lot of time talking together as parents. Discussing the hardships our children were experiencing as they happened. Discussing our own feelings about how we were meeting those hardships. We talked about what “safe” looked like, and came up with a plan for those new normals. It’s a discussion we continue to have, and protocols that we continue to evolve as new information comes out and things (again) change.
We also discussed mental health, a very important topic of conversation in the Yount household. Matt is a therapist and mental well being is always a topic of conversation in their household. When quarantine started he had us do a daily check-in. We would scale from 0-10 how we were feeling emotionally that day. We would check-in at dinner time. Discuss as necessary. Those first few weeks this was an important tool we used, and it helped us to know who needed the extra support that day.
Many days it was the adults that needed it.
The pressures of parenting, providing, and keeping operations moving safe and smooth felt overwhelming some days. And when one of the adults was struggling, the other two would come and provide support. That was our deal. That was our calling. To be a blessing to each other. To keep up hope that we would get through this one hard day, and be better able to tackle the next one.
And it worked.
When I first came to the Yount house I was struggling hard. I was grieving losses that I had mourned before coronavirus. I was feeling the weight of solo-parenting during a crisis. I was dealing with intermittent bouts of depression. I felt like I would cycle between trying to not think about the things that hurt and being overwhelmed by them. I had been spending the past year trying to climb out of the ‘hole’ of depression, and I was always so frustrated at myself for how often I would fall back in.
The first few weeks I spent with Andrea and Matt was a therapeutic experience. We had long talks that unveiled issues I hadn’t yet named. The daily check-ins had me thinking, “How am I feeling today?”, instead of trying my best to not feel at all. Where I would normally push down the bigger issues and swamp myself with the busy-ness of life, I found myself doing deep soul work one can’t tackle well on their own. I had the loving support of two people who wanted nothing more than to see me thrive. They listened with open ears and hearts to me processing the many hurts I was holding. And they helped me put down a great many of them.
Piece by piece, talk by talk, my burden was lightened. I started to feel myself healing. I started to bear witness to what a real partnership between people can be. When people want the best for you and support you when you’re not at your best, it allows you to show up better for them. I was able to use my gifts to show up for them, and lift them up when they had struggles. By leaning in when times were hard we became stronger. By helping each other we were healing ourselves.
