Parenting in Covid Season: Recent Episodes
Pilar Timpane
Welcome to "Parenting in Covid Season," an audio series exploring parents' experience with having our small children at home during COVID-19.
Almost two months ago, out of my own desperation and interest, I started interviewing mothers in #quarantine. I'll be posting them as they are complete! Sharing them through a podcast/newsletter forum.
“We are captives…It's the system. It's not the sickness.”
This phrase has stuck in my mind since speaking to “Noel”, a nurse at Robert Wood Johnson in New Brunswick, New Jersey. RWJ is a well-equipped trauma center that is, she says, one of the best hospitals in the population-dense state. We spoke at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, which has now killed more than 10,000 people in New Jersey. However, in the last few months of this emergency with COVID-19, as her floor was converted into a COVID-patient-only floor, they have not provided their staff the appropriate personal protective equipment or reassurance that extra hygienic caution and care is being taken on their behalf. Noel and her husband both work in the healthcare field and are considered “essential workers,” and with a 22-month-old at home, they are doing a daily dance of childcare, constant sanitization, fear of exposure, and insecurity in their work.
For full text interview and photos, visit Parenting in Covid Season on substack.
Kristel finds that as she adjusts to working from home and schooling her 6 and 8 year old, she’s had to give up personal space and time for the sake of more structured time with her kids. For many mothers, myself included, this time has made our careers and ambitions feel stunted and on hold. It’s something we’ve had to grieve, our sense of control over schedules and lives. But Kristel says she is also getting to see her children up close as full people in this experience of constant time together. She talks about trying to institute alone time in the family and keeping everybody engaged. We talk about learning more about our capacity and hiding in our rooms to have a brief moment of quiet and peace.
I started this episode off with some audio from her recent Instagram stories. This takeaway really stuck with me:
“I just want to know why nobody told me that parenting during a pandemic is so exhausting. Like it’s just a lot. I mean physically, emotionally. Children don’t know how to process their emotions very well. Especially not on their own. SO having to help my children process through their emotions while also trying to keep life going – life, home, etc. It’s just …a lot.”
Kristel is always posting honest and positive comments about life and faith on her social media @kristelace.
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In my first conversation, Megan in Providence, RI, shares her experience being a work-at-home mom in quarantine with 3 children, and also describes what it was like when just one week into national lockdown, her husband started exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms and had to self-quarantine in their house.
In part 2, (which I will share very soon!) she also came down with symptoms after her husband came out of quarantine, and she describes being tested at a drive-thru site.
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