Quarantine Quests: Get Out of the Way

Establishing a routine started kinda rocky.  Stacey’s mind was in overdrive.  She NEEDED a set schedule and she needed it yesterday.  Her anxiety was so high that she was grasping for control over the situation in whatever way she could.  && of course, being a girl after my own heart, she needed some lists.  Only…. she was being run by her anxiety mind and needed it done a certain way.  I could see her anxiety but it was so high that when I tried to break through it the emotions started to emerge.  I could see there was more behind this behavior than just the unknown of being in another person’s household, which was big enough.  She was having a hard time holding it together.  

All of that being said about my best friend’s vulnerable state, I too was having issues.  I had tried the way she was set in scheduling and knew it wouldn’t work for long.  I had a hard time not taking her inability to hear or see past her perspective at that moment a bit personally.  It was my house, after all, that she had moved into to, did she not trust me to be able to handle the chaos of a large living situation?  These were my offended thoughts when just minutes before I had been genuinely thanking the heavens for sending someone to help me stay sane and run my household. This is just a glimpse into the tension that was immediately present because of each family bringing their compounded anxieties together. Working through it was just the beginning of a wonderful learning experience that I will not soon forget.  

We have a rule in our house: when one of us is stressed out, the others reach out to talk, listen, or just do something that will make the one having a harder time feel better. We try to step outside our wants, needs, and desires for a bit and give the other person what they need at the moment. Stacey had been in her little house for over a week, just her and her kiddos, one of them having just gotten over the flu during a pandemic.  Bless her heart. She needed us to love her a little harder right then.  

We made a huge schedule that I ended up using probably longer and more than anyone else. It was well made and super detailed. We used a huge whiteboard and set it up on an easel in the great room of the house.  Being the central room of the house, everyone congregated there randomly throughout the day. It gave us a great overview of the week and what chores needed to be done.  It was nice to have a big picture to look at when scheduling our weekly activities.  I soon reverted back to my own scheduling system, using the big picture schedule as a guide. The big picture schedule made my normal routine of daily lists for each family member easier to evolve into a multi-family list 

However, the initial tension and anxiety-driven chore and lesson scheduling brought back some bad memories in my oldest child. Our early years of homeschooling were not the easiest when it came to scheduling.  There is about a three year learning period before you get the flow.  Learning that homeschooling isn’t like public school can apparently be traumatic to a child.  The fact that her mother has OCD didn’t help her case any.  The dredging up of old anxieties out of my kids helped us to have deeper conversations about things that we didn’t realize were still affecting us today.   I was very proud of how my oldest daughter opened up about her feelings and made others feel safe to express theirs.  She will make an excellent therapist someday. 💓

Our reactions were soon tempered on the subject of the schedule.  Being aware of myself at the moment helped me to not spew all over my newly arrived friend. It also helps that Matt’s skills in quelling my temper and anxiety are quite refined after all these years.  Apparently, our example of how we handle things like this in on the regular was a learning experience for the others.

& Stacey and I work together super well as a team, as we would continue to learn.  We just had to get out of our own ways.