Quarantine is tough for everyone. We are all currently living in this suspended time, just waiting for Governor Phil Murphy to lift the social distancing order. The teachers are working hard to keep up with their classes, students are trying to cope with losing the remainder of the school year, and pets are beyond excited to have someone to cuddle with at all hours of the day.
While my situation is similar to others, I have been living a little bit of a different life than most. My household consists of three people and two dogs. Those other two people include my mom, the Upper School Director, and my sister, a senior. And then there’s me, a sophomore.
Everyone in the house is working from different rooms, yet the tension is still finding a way to float around. During the day, while my mother is in meetings with faculty members and parents, my sister and I attend virtual school. The house can become pretty chaotic between all of us all working hard to try and make it through the end of the year. None of our schedules ever line up, which means there is a lot of yelling while trying to coordinate schedules.
Conversations usually pertain to “who woke up for their class?” and “who’s still stuck in bed?” or to ask “who can take the dogs out?” As one might imagine there’s a lot of “can you turn that down? I can’t hear my own class/meeting!” The overlapping noise of two classes, one meeting, and two dogs wishing they had a lap to sleep on can get pretty loud and overwhelming.
My mom is always busy in meetings, which means I rarely see her during the day. However, she still finds time to yell at me when she finds out from Ms. Medina that I overslept. She is working hard to make sure that all the students in the Upper School, including my sister and me, are in their classes and everyone is doing their work. The only times I see her are when she leaves her office to get food or to run the dogs outside in between meetings. To me, it feels like she is working from 7 a.m.-7 p.m. everyday nonstop.
She gets bombarded with questions from the community during the day, and I am sure that some of them linger in her mind while she goes from meeting to meeting: Will school start in the fall? Will there be a prom? How is graduation going to work? How do I make sure the seniors are able to have a semi-normal year? At night, the questions she has as a mother of two high schoolers come to mind, like, how do I balance work and family every day? How many different variations of dinner can I make? When will I be able to let my kids hang out with their friends? How can I keep everyone happy? How can I keep my family safe and healthy? Why did my daughter’s senior year get canceled and how do I make it better? Will my daughter be going to college next year?
My sister has been attending Moorestown Friends School since she was three-years-old, and now she is eighteen and about to say goodbye. That means that she has been waiting for this senior year for fifteen years, only to have it cut short in March. I sometimes wonder how she can keep her spirits high. I think that she deals with it day by day, trying to make the most of her time at home, but definitely struggling to maintain a smile. In the back of her mind, she knows she can’t be with her friends during her senior year and knows she might not even start college in person.
My sister spends the day in art classes, considering she is going to college for fashion. As one might figure, virtual art is interesting for all students. It is a mixture of her making stuff out of whatever she can find around the house, and frequent activity on her sewing machine. My mom and I try to fill our free time with activities, like tie-dye or games, but it’s hard for us all to pretend that one of the best years of her life wasn’t just canceled.
Life in my household isn’t just sad though; there are also incredibly fun moments. Quarantine has given us a chance to all be together one last time before my sister heads off to college. It has given us a chance to get annoyed at each other, but then recover by laughing it off over dinner. We have found new series on Netflix to bond over, new workouts to do together, and most importantly, we have formed new memories to cherish for the rest of our lives. We have been able to find time in our not-so-busy schedules to do things we haven’t been able to do previously. Some of these things include having a bonfire, eating lunch together, baking new treats, and bringing our dogs to Meeting for Worship!
I don’t want to say thank you to COVID-19, because that wouldn’t be true. It’s brought bad times upon too many families for me to thank it. What I do want to do is show the world what it has given to my family, so that everyone can try to find some positives at a very negative time.
