Stay-at-Home Orders and Stay-at-Home Moms

How the pandemic is sending us all back to where we started

Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

“This is exactly what we’ve been training for,” said my friend, Jill, an artist and fellow stay-at-home mom, when talk of quarantine began to circulate. Our friendship began with the help of the Internet, as modern friendships do, after having our first babies three days apart. Those babies, our sons, started full-day Kindergarten this year.

Up until a few weeks ago, our boys were at school all the blissful long day. Finally. We both said it at the beginning of the school year. Finally. A little space. Just a little bit, because we both have daughters with a few more years of preschool left. But still. Space.

We joked when all the stay-at-home orders rolled across Pennsylvania — county by county, as if the novel coronavirus cares about manmade lines on manmade maps — that if anyone is cut out for #QuarantineLife, it’s us. We’ve been cancelling plans and spending nights in and tamping down our selfish desires for years.

We got this.

The Things You Fought For Are Non-Essential

Over the past six years, I’ve followed the voice, sometimes manifesting as a bloodcurdling scream, telling me to write. Being at home with my kids, my ties to the corporate machine cut indefinitely, gave me the space I needed to explore the creativity I’d been suppressing for years.

A child of HGTV, I had my very own home decorating blog. I wrote about pattern mixing and the Pantone color of the year while my son napped. But the deeper I trudged into motherhood, the less I cared about throw pillows. I spent most of my time — on the couch with a baby attached to my boob and The View on in the background —staring out the window, wondering how the hell women manage to do this damn thing without losing themselves.

I abandoned my blog and wrote, instead, about my c-section and mommy wars. I journaled about how it didn’t matter if I shopped organic, my son still threw his lunch on the floor. I began exploring an idea for a novel that swirled around the impact a mother’s resentment has on her children, because it felt easier to write about darkness when everything was made up.

As time passed, I navigated the constant change that came with having a newborn and then an infant and then a toddler and then another when I had my second baby. There were some periods when my “writing” was a daily Instagram post. But, no matter what, my mind was always trying to wrangle prose. I knew I was meant to be writing, even when I couldn’t muster the energy to really sit down and do it.

When it was clear I could no longer fight my compulsion to write, I started fighting for myself. Rewiring my brain to believe my creativity was worth it. Negotiating with my husband for time to attend conferences and critique groups. Being okay with paying a babysitter so I could work in peace, even though there was no guarantee anything I did would lead anywhere.

Fighting is exhausting, but the good news is you only have to do it for so long. Eventually everyone else, even your nasty inner critic, starts to give up. I guess she’s really doing this, they say.

Up until a few weeks ago, I had some things figured out. My son was in full-day Kindergarten. My daughter was in preschool four hours a day, three days a week. I wrote in the morning before they both woke up and then for several more hours on the days my daughter was in school. I was exercising, giving my mind time to wander and making progress, however slowly, on my novel.

I had developed — oh, my God, could this even be possible? — a process. A routine. I had arrived. My novel’s central theme of resentment was pushed aside and replaced, instead, by the struggle that comes with figuring out how to have it all. My story was no longer a tragedy, but a breezy, fun comedy.

Then, like so many others in the country, I was told to stay at home. Everything I fought so hard for, both within and outside of myself, now deemed non-essential by the Governor of Pennsylvania. My gym sessions, my babysitter, my time spent writing at the library and a local café, my monthly critique group, my conferences. None of it matters. All of it is cancelled.

The only thing that matters is taking care of your children.

It’s the thing we were afraid of all along. The fear we, as mothers, fought so hard against when deciding whether to take the class or write the book or join the gym or paint the still life or plant the garden or buy the horse or tell the jokes or join the band or incorporate the LLC. The fear that our dreams, the things our hearts had been calling out for us to explore, are all non-essential.

Back to Where We Started

Yesterday was Saturday. My husband was supposed to be in charge of entertaining the kids so I could have the morning to write, but he was up all night with an unsettled stomach. He was lying on the couch in his sweatpants, hours past my prime writing time and it was clear to me he wasn’t planning to get up.

I knew I wouldn’t be writing. And not because the kids would be otherwise unsupervised, because he could at least be in the same room with them to make sure they weren’t killing each other or choking on goldfish crackers. It wasn’t that.

I knew I wouldn’t be writing because I was angry. Really angry. Not at him, but because, here I was, six years after having my first baby, feeling trapped all over again. My husband, whose business is deemed essential, has been going into the office every weekday. So it’s me, the stay-at-home mom, the default parent, the one whose pursuits don’t earn income for the family so they are easily swept aside for the greater good, who has to fight, once again, to stake claim to that which I’ve already determined to be essential.

Fighting is exhausting, even more so because I thought the fighting was over. I had arrived. I guess she’s really doing this, they’d say. Not anymore.

Now I have to tell them, all over again, that I’m really doing this.

The good news for me and my friend, Jill, and all of our fellow stay-at-home mothers fighting to stake our claim as creatives, is we know how to deal with disappointments and setbacks and dead ends and cancelled plans. We have done this before. We’ve given up everything and we’ve fought our way back to ourselves. Sure, it’s exhausting. No, we don’t want to fight. But we will.

We got this.