Still at home

The kids are now back at school during the day but I remain working from home, and I am left with a strange echo of the pre-COVID era. In that other life I would work from home one day a week and it was my professional highlight of the week every time. After seeing my children onto the bus, I would practically skip back home to bask in the luxury of wearing sweat pants and working with my laptop on the couch. But these two days have felt empty in the house and I’ve experienced waves of unease, as though I am forgetting something important.

J continues to work from home as well, and the two of us eat lunch together and marvel at the silence in the house and realize how much we miss spending all day trapped with our children. This past year has brought so much grief and stress and sadness, but it has been special to have spent a year seeing everything our children experienced with their friends, in their school, and with each other. It has not been this way since they were infants. It is a rare thing the experience of this COVID year, and I now realize that a lot of my anxiety about school re-opening was sadness for losing this time with my children.

Being a parent is strange in unexpected ways. Constantly.