Today I am feeling grateful.

I live in Seattle, Washington, where on Feb. 29 one of the first U.S. Covid-19 cases was found, spreading within days to an assisted-living home a 5-minute walk from my house. That’s when my family started staying home, at the urging of my biotech-journalist husband. Our schools closed March 12. Our governor’s stay-home order lasts another few weeks, before a phased-in reopening May 31. That’ll be three months for us, then.

Like so many of you, I have cycled through contentment, grief, despair, and resilience. I have eaten too many chips and poured too many glasses of wine. I have compromised on screen time for my kid (Sound of Music: three hours, folks!) and for myself (so much Netflix). I have breathed deeply through panic and wept after reading the news. But mostly I am grateful. For health and for work that can be done from home, certainly. And also:

I see beauty in this slower, simpler life we’re living. Ways of being that I don’t want to forget in the reopening.

B.C., Before Coronavirus, dinnertime in our house felt squeezed between work and our daughter’s bedtime. If we were together in the first place. My husband traveled several times a month. He might be away three days or three weeks at a time. At some point it became hard to keep track of when he’d be home or not, and “Daddy’s going to Boston tomorrow” was a phrase we’d say as casually as “Oh yeah, I have a dentist appointment tomorrow.” My calendar was dotted with recurring evening events: a ballet class, a lecture, a girls’ night out, a women’s circle, a board meeting. We made a point of eating dinner together as a family when we “could.” During dinner, either my husband and I tried to catch up with each other while our daughter felt left out and snuck away under the table, or else we tried to focus on our daughter’s day and talk later. But later never happened: I’d be heading out to an event or he would fall asleep early, and the next morning it was off to school and work. To some extent we lived parallel lives, passing our daughter between us.

Now (D.C., During Coronavirus?), we have dinner together every night. We play Rummikub and laugh while we eat a leisurely meal. I remember to defrost something for the next night’s meal, rather than wonder at 6 p.m. what we’re eating. Cooking feels new again. I know I won’t want to keep doing this much cooking, given that the task isn’t exactly shared (working on it…). But I do want to keep our family dinners. And our neighborhood walks to nature, or to nowhere. Maybe even silly things like us biking alongside my husband as he goes for his run. The sense of togetherness.

Before Coronavirus, it was hard to see my moai group of girlfriends. We were all so busy that it sometimes took weeks to coordinate a time for the five of us to get together. Someone would propose, say, a picnic on a day that would work for some but not others, then someone else would offer a different time that would work for some but not others, repeat, repeat, repeat: so many planning emails I couldn’t take it. Meeting monthly at a predetermined time seemed like as much as we could do. Other conversations would happen within that clipped emotional world of the text message.

Now I’m more likely to randomly call up a friend to check in, a richer connection than all those text messages. We have a weekly evening Zoom call and it was a snap to find a time. Last week I delivered cookies to a couple friends, which made for a fun surprise, even if from six feet away. When was the last time we’d spontaneously dropped in on someone? And with a reasonable chance they’d be home?

Before Coronavirus, my daughter would do a little cheer on Friday afternoon because it signaled the freedom of the weekend. Which is just not right: she’s 8 years old. I didn’t intend to overschedule her, but she was trying to tell me something. I can more clearly see, now that they’ve evaporated, all of the things I’d signed her up for. Mandarin. Ballet. Cooking class. Mountaineers club. Girl Scouts. She liked them. But really she just wanted to play.

Now she spends most of the day on her own time, unstructured, and I can see how happy she is. I don’t want to forget that.

Before Coronavirus, I had no idea what my kid was doing at school. “How was your day?” I’d ask. “Great!” she’d answer joyfully. To any questions beyond that: “I’m not telling you.” I had no idea what she knew compared to what she was supposed to know.

Now it’s been cool for me to see that yes, she can do the mental math that second-graders are apparently taught. She can read to herself for quite a bit longer than she’d let on. I asked her to do a school writing assignment, and she didn’t want to, but she proposed a comic strip instead. What? I wasn’t aware she even knew what that was. The perfectionist in me hesitated: Was she slacking? Wait, trust her. Encourage her initiative. I loved the comic she drew. I couldn’t tell who was supposed to speak in what order, but when she read it to me, I was impressed that her characters interrupted each other like in real life. I want to keep trusting my daughter’s interests.

We’re not doing a lot of formal schoolwork at home. My plan to do a solid two or three hours of schoolwork each morning did not, uh, pan out. I feel surprisingly relaxed about it. I can see that my daughter is learning by virtue of living. She asks how a virus gets inside a cell, and we look up a video and have an interesting conversation. Science: check. She bakes cookies and fills one cup with sugar, then one and a half cups. I ask her for the answer or think out loud when I’m adding something. She’s the bank when we play Game of the States. Math: check. Geography: check. She composes a letter to a friend. Writing: check. We do an assignment or two each week that her teacher sends. OK, one. We read from the truly weird math books Life of Fred, an idea I borrowed from (intentional) home-schoolers. It’s nice to have a non-screen option in this time of Zoom fatigue, and it’s nice to laugh while doing math.

Letting go has been illuminating. I love seeing how my daughter plays on her own. The parachute she builds for her dolls is an experiment in physics. The fence she gains the confidence to climb is practice in emotional resiliency. (The fence is now her “magic spot,” a place to go by herself when she decides she needs a break. Kind of like calm-downs.) The artwork she makes is unhurried creative expression. We’re in a “double bubble” with the family next door, so she plays for hours every afternoon with her quarantine buddy. They inevitably irritate each other, and they have to figure it out. (The double bubble makes everything, such as my sanity, possible.) We read, read, read. We read so much that this past week, I was able to read my book while my daughter read hers. Whoa. It all seems to add up to a well-rounded amount of learning. Learning that doesn’t need to be equated to the seven hours she spent at school.

This is not to take away from teachers, who are saints and saviors. My daughter has a great foundation. (I will take some credit as well for my efforts to build her independence early on.) I’m just enjoying noticing what young kids already know. Where their curiosity might one day lead them, if we let them follow it. The equal importance of life skills to academic skills. How much more motivated kids are to learn and do things that relate to their interests and their lives (shocker). What they figure out through play. How often they need to move their bodies. How they solve their own boredom.

Maybe I’m saying this because I’m an introvert. I’m well aware that I’m saying it from a place of enormous privilege. The caveats are too many to count. Still:

This slower, simpler life feels good.

Our go-go lives were full of wonderful adventures. Yet for months I’d had an uncomfortable feeling of overflow. A fidgety pressure. An urge to escape. We could barely remember what we did last week or last month. Sometimes even trips we’d taken. Was that earlier this year? we’d say. Feels like so long ago. Or Oh yeah, we did do that! The thought kept nagging me that one trip per year would be more memorable, one birthday present would be more memorable, one project at a time would be best, less would be more, and yet I couldn’t find my way to it.

Always I have taken great pleasure in the simpler things. I thought that I could do that, or was doing that, even while stuffing my life with events, people, travels, classes, obligations. I would trim one thing here or there when I “could.”

Now everything is stripped away at once. Things that used to matter suddenly no longer matter.

An outing means walking through the beautiful wooded ravine in our neighborhood.

Exercise means weeding the yard while my kid blows dandelions around it. Or walking a mile to the store for Easter egg dye, just because it’s sunny out and we have time.

A nice dinner means salmon with roasted Brussels sprouts and corn on the cob, preferably cooked as a family, preferably eaten on a picnic blanket. (Condolences to those of you who saw snow today.)

Community means small acts of kindness, giving to those in need, asking for what we need. Buying local from the take-out window or the online shop. Neighbors out for a stroll on the previously empty streets, saying hi.

Could this really be just as satisfying as all the fabulous, costly, subtly draining stuff we used to do? Right now it feels that way.

I don’t want us to go back to business as usual—not entirely, not in all ways. This terrible situation is giving us an opportunity to create a truly healthy society. Amid the stress and uncertainty and worse, let’s also look for the good. For the things making us healthier. Let’s use those as the building blocks of our new normal.

I’m feeling grateful.

I don’t want to forget.

~

Links in this post:

• Forget Pancakes. Pay Mothers: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/sunday/women-housework-coronavirus-mothers-day.html
• Secrets of the world’s longest-living women: https://www.bluezones.com/exploration/okinawa-japan/
• The secret to time-outs that work: https://zerotofive.net/parenting/the-secret-to-time-outs-that-work/
• Will the ‘double bubble’ bring coronavirus trouble? Not if you’re sensible, experts say: https://globalnews.ca/news/6892531/coronavirus-double-bubble-canada/
• Confidence to Carry On (my growth-mindset workshop): https://tracycutchlow.thinkific.com/courses/growth-mindset
• The lessons we really should be teaching our kids in the pandemic: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/4/22/21230201/homeschooling-lessons-coronavirus-pandemic
• F* the Bread. The Bread is Over: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/05/07/fuck-the-bread-the-bread-is-over/
• The Life Radius Approach to Optimizing the Living Environment: https://www.bluezones.com/live-longer-better/life-radius/
• Third Place Books (my excellent neighborhood bookstore): https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/

Written by

Tracy Cutchlow

Tracy is the author of the international bestseller Zero to Five: 70 Essential Parenting Tips Based on Science, a public speaker, and a creator of places to speak and be heard. Sign up for her newsletter here.