COVID Life: Phase (whatever?) Updates

Have you ever run a long distance (by which I mean, like, two miles)? Have you experienced that moment when you just can’t possibly imagine going any further at all…lungs are on fire, legs angry, eyes stinging with tears from physical exhaustion…then, all of a sudden, there is a burst of energy that inexplicably chugs down into the depths of your belly and you have NO IDEA WHY, but you are inspired to sprint on, faster, stronger and more powerful than ever before? And you feel amazing because you went further than you ever could have imagined?

Well, that’s what we need right now, parents. We need our inexplicable burst of energy. We need to go further than we ever could have imagined.

COVID life has been absolutely draining emotionally. My family is safe. We are lucky. Mr. Family Trip and I both have full-time jobs we’ve managed to keep. We are some of the rare blessed ones.

But we are also exhausted. My eyes are stinging with tears from the exhaustion, just like on those runs I used to take.

Feeling both lucky and also stretched to the end are both allowable feelings. They are not mutually exclusive. They can exist together, at the same exact time even.

This article on NY Times here about how we are being forced to make tough decisions; and this article on Mommy Shorts about losing stamina; they allowed me to believe that sharing the struggle is okay and, perhaps, even needed.

It is time for our community of amazing families to come together and figure out how we continue to run these miles (and miles and miles) together.

We’re in a different phase of Coronavirus life now. We’re in the one where we need to figure out fall school (the biggest, single stress point in our lives right now) and how we continue to do all of this when it is no longer like a “snow day.” When the kids are throwing stuffed animals at ceiling fans and schools and summer camps aren’t even pretending to provide useful online content anymore, we need to figure out how we get ourselves to the next phase.

We’ve got to power past the exhaustion. It’s not a choice. We’re parents. It’s what we do. We run for miles carrying little ones on our backs. And there is pain in that, but there are also gems of joy. After all, how lucky are we that we get to be relegated to social distancing with little people who think we are amazing because we built a fort out of sheets and know how to rip Scotch tape successfully off the wheel without hurting our thumbs? They worship us and they haven’t even seen our Excel spreadsheet skills yet.

I have been trying to think of ways I can help – both myself and my community. How can we help each other power through to the next phase of this mess and even conquer it? It’s not time to give up. It’s time to reach down deep in the belly and conjure up some running magic.

I decided to share with you some of our successful activities we’ve engaged in while home-bound and navigating COVID.

We haven’t been traveling the world (as planned when I started this site) and I definitely haven’t been writing (also as planned when I started this site). But there are some things we’ve done that have helped our mental sanity (I shudder to think what a mess our family would be in WITHOUT these measures).

Maybe, hopefully, one of these things resonates for you and your family. And you can pick up the baton on one activity, carry it to the next runner, and allow it to give you another breath of wind for your sprint forwards.