Quarantine: Daily Survival Tips For Remote-Working Parents*

*Let’s be clear from the start: this is crisis management, not remote-working.

I have no self-care tips. No creative ideas on how to get the most out of 5 a.m. online barre classes, HIIT workouts, or the best app for learning a new language. For remote-working professionals with school-aged kids, it now boils down to daily survival — mentally speaking.

Quarantine Life Is Hard — Exhaustion-Level Hard

With two children under the age of ten, two dogs, and a husband who also works in the legal field, we are . . . busy. We both work long hours sandwiched between long parenting hours. We follow orders to “shelter-in-place,” get our groceries delivered, and social distance.

Please, I want everyone to know that I consider myself very fortunate to be employed, have a place to stay, with food on the table. We are all blessed to be healthy. We have the bottom tier of Maslow’s hierarchy covered.

I am not on the frontlines as a healthcare provider, in the military, a delivery driver, or grocery clerk, thank god. (really, thank you, God)

Before quarantine, we got our kids ready for school and dropped them off, drove to work in heavy traffic, attended meetings with clients, presented at conferences, went to school concerts, ate dinner with friends, traveled, and worked out at the gym. Our kids took hula hoop and piano lessons. They played on a YMCA basketball team and took art classes. We ate dinner at grandma and grandpa’s house, a lot.

My family and I are still adjusting to a new normal.

What is our new normal?

Good question.

Now, we spend most waking moments at home juggling six peoples’ workload, schoolwork, exercise, and mealtime schedules (we count the dogs, so it’s six). Our personal, professional, and school lives have morphed into a 24-hour blur — in the same physical space.

We are slowly figuring out the logistics of four remote workspaces, conducting simultaneous conference calls, meal times, making sure our kids are learning at least a little bit, and getting fresh air. The dogs need to be fed and walked. The kids are “remote-learning.” Both of our girls are in different classes, with separate schedules, videoconference times, and assignments. There are at least ten passwords for all of their different learning platforms apiece. (no joke!) Piano and hula hoop lessons are now conducted via Zoom. Basketball is canceled. Our local playground is closed. (playgrounds are not regularly disinfected).

No sugar-coating here

I am still wrapping my head around our former lives. Even though it’s been threeish — wait — seven weeks? I’ve had very tough conversations: with my spouse, my parents, and our kids — ranging from how best to stock the pantry to worst-case life-and-death scenarios. We’ve updated our wills. Argued over various pandemic contingencies regarding our children’s future if both of us die. We exchange silly lawyer memes and watch cute animal videos. We bleach. Take more calls. Answer emails. Cancel extracurricular activities. Read scary information. Take turns using our office space (we call it musical chairs). Have virtual happy hours. We’ve let our kids watch three back-to-back movies in one day. We shield our kids from the constant news coverage.

Alert: our kids know more than we think they do. Our daughters now occasionally sleep with us because of “bad dreams.” They are concerned about their friends having “coronavirus.” They miss grandma and grandpa, their friends, and neighbors. One daughter asked us last night if I was going to die soon. Our girls are eight years old.

We haven’t even started to figure out alone time.

Things That Have Helped Us

*Don’t laugh, but I moved our coffee maker up to our bedroom. Close proximity to caffeine is the first good decision we made.

*I erased our finely-tuned but now irrelevant monthly calendar and replaced it with four columns:

| spouse | me | child#1 | child #2

*We write out our schedules one day at a time together, the night before. Last night was a hard schedule to write: my husband had meetings scheduled all day with two randomly-spaced half-hour spots when he was not on a call.

*We include mealtimes and breaks in each daily schedule. We schedule dog walks in here, too.

• We stop work by 5:30 p.m. By this time, our collective brains aren’t working anyway (we usually work after the kids go to bed, too). We also switch it up with early morning work (4 a.m.–8 a.m.)

*It is ok if the kids do not stick to their daily schedules. I am not an expert but I am sure it is better for the girls to be happy playing in our backyard than staring at a Chromebook and attempting to turn in multiple assignments at a time.

*We cook dinner and sit down at the kitchen table as a family to eat together. The keys to this:

~ prep time is less than 20 minutes. (last night we had pasta with pre-cooked meatballs from Costco — go ahead and judge)

~make the kids help out. (they get to pick the dinner plates, set the table, and clear dishes) Hence, we all often eat off of the kids’ T-Rex plates. One of our daughters even added a special touch: hand-written place cards we reuse.

*After dinner, we watch a funny show. Lately, it is “Nailed It” on Netflix. Henry Danger is a close second.

*I liberally use earplugs. Self-explanatory.

*If my husband has back-to-back-to-back calls all day, I give him snacks and his favorite energy drink and a big glass of water. (we are all in this together) He also does the same for me.

*I continuously remind myself that this is temporary and for the public good. I have no political message here. I don’t know when we will be back at work but it is not permanent.

*Try to soak in the present moments, no matter how small. This afternoon (during a hopefully on-mute-no-video-Zoom conference), my girls and I had an impromptu pillow-fight complete with shrieking laughter.

No comparisons, please?

As we all learn to adjust to life at home, realize we all adapt at different speeds and we are all facing different obstacles. Adaptation is different for each new change (the city is not shutting down; wait, the city is now shut down; now the State is shut down; all people should wear masks in stores; wait, all people should wear masks outdoors, too; wait, what businesses are allowed to open now?)

People are trying their best. This “best” looks different for everyone and it fluctuates daily. We are all — on some level — worried about the health of our loved ones, the health and overall wellness of our kids, worried about our jobs, anxious about whether the grocery store will have what we need, and, worried about the good old fashioned unknown. But. We are all in this together. Even if some people hoard all the toilet paper.