A Deeper Relationship with Family: One Potential Reality Through a Pandemic

Staying sane, around family, in the very beginning of a worldwide pandemic. Surrounded, no way out, everything you see is all you’ve collectively created and, if I were in a different chapter of my life, this would be hell. Had I been in my childhood home, or a single mother through this (all you truly single parents out there; I salute you, I know how hard it is especially if you never actually got to be on your feet before kids) this whole ordeal would’ve been a lot harsher. 

Six of us, with one giant dog, live in a victorian town home in a train town. Pre-pandemic, when all of us bused and walked and drove around more than we stayed in one place, our laundry room was in our kitchen, our back yard half garden, half dog shit pile and trampoline, and our back porch covered in rusty bikes that reckoned with the rains. Oh, and, we didn’t have a dishwasher.

I never felt comfortable to rest and restore because something always needed to be done. House, felt like a house. 

Mid-pandemic, while we’re all here, learning to stay in one place, we transformed our kitchen into a room of its own, our entire back yard into a garden (including baby fruit trees), threw out our old rusty bikes and bought a shed. Our porch no longer acting as a pseudo shed, is now, a bird song surrounded outdoor lit oasis with comfy furniture that cuddles us when we drink hot cocoa and look to the autumn colors cleverly decorating the mountain landscape behind our fence. 

We did so much of the work ourselves, together, as a family, that the transformation served a far higher purpose. 

I hear a lot of parents saying it’s very hard to have their kids at home, which is fair but a lot of people are saying this coupled with, I need these kids to be back in school. As a therapist, hearing other therapists agree with this sentiment because of how high the demand is for therapy right now only makes sense to me in one way, and it’s not to put the kids back in school when it gets hard. 

The people who didn’t know how to be with their family, COVID style, were forced to be. 

And that, for sure, in a system that’s terrified to face itself, can trigger an avalanche of untouched territories within the family. 

I personally think as animals, especially if we ourselves didn’t have time with our parents in the way that the human animal would need to thrive in a world it trusts, we all need to be socialized first in this way. With family. In a pack it knows how to work with. But often, I see parents wanting to throw out one of the rowdy cubs to someone who knows them better, or deals with them easier. That parent is usually unconsciously making their kid lead when their kid doesn’t want to. This is also why I personally prefer to work with the parent when I hear of a symptomatic child. 

If we don’t know how to be with our kids, our family, how can we expect to teach them how to “be” in the world? 

As a brand, it’s not considered smart to get quiet. But as a woman my instincts told me otherwise. I’ve never wanted any external thing as much as I’ve wanted my sanity, which always and only ever followed a sense of safety. I got quiet by dropping the reigns on my business, and picking them up to lead my family.

COVID is teaching me something about teaching and about safety.

Sixteen, Fourteen, Five, and One. Those are the ages of my children. 

People might say that the age differences would indicate separation for them but I assure you, it doesn’t, and in part, thanks to the pause that COVID brings. 

We bought new bikes including one of those adorable pull along bike trailers for the two littles. Most mornings, we hit the mountain trails with all four kids. Followed by a juicing fresh veggie/fruit juice (sometimes with our own produce).

Somehow, though Chris lost all of his performance gigs, we managed to switch work shifts when he did work, raise four kids, play musical chairs, get the kids excited about smoothie making in our new long awaited and oh-so-dreamy vitamix, and take the dog to fetch in the river. Never will you see a happier being in motion than my dog Sedona when he’s just fetched his stick in a river. 

Initially my fourteen year old thought “I” was the reason for everything wrong. Including COVID.

But the time we’ve spent facing each other, intimately, not combatively, but really, facing each other, has softened us all, including her. 

We all got to see each other in our own rhythms rather than forcing them all into one connected but disjointed shit show of a cultural rhythm. We’ve had limited social life, which I think is good because we’re learning to really make it count, and make what counts, insanely worth it to us. 

I don’t know what the future holds. I have about a thousand reasons I could be shitting my pants right now, but this, mid-pandemic house, feels like a ‘real’ home.

For the first time in my entire life (and I really do mean this) I feel home. 

I’ve felt at home on the inside, and finally, in my body, but often struggled to make it match with my outside.

I often judged my home. I didn’t want to settle into it. I wanted to be better than it somehow, using it as a symbol of my glass ceiling and my failure up until this point. I felt powerless to it somehow, like I needed it, more than it needed me. Turns out, that’s not true.

My home really needed me. 

After a few leaks, which often indicate a house capping out on its capacity to hold repressed emotions slicing the air, I envisioned a drain at the bottom of my house, funneling in all of the energy still stored here from all of those years of me resisting “this” reality because I thought it wasn’t good enough because if this was all I could create, than I wasn’t good enough. I let that drain go right into the ocean to disperse in the cosmos, ideally diffused by the holy spirit. 

All those years we treated this place as a spot to lay our heads. Really, we did. I bought it on my own at twenty five on twenty eight thousand dollars a year as a mother of two. I had to, but I resented that I had to, so subconsciously, I suppose I’ve always felt slave to my house though I knew it was in truth, my freedom. 

I don’t plan on staying here forever but wanna know what’s cool? Today, I wouldn’t mind if I did because “I” finally showed up for my house rather than dreaming of my dream house showing up for me. But that’s the settling in part. That’s the point. That’s what COVID taught my family. 

It taught us that when we come back to family, back to center, and we center that system, and center the self within that system (even if it’s hard to actually get there, you go together) peace and connection exist in the most vulnerable of ways, and if we nurture that rather than resist it with busyness and the desire to not have to deal (that culture often propagates), we can turn a house, into a home.

Right now my kids are making lemonade together, the dogs laying in his dog bed, the house is quiet, candle-lit. My daughter just opened the door, handed me fresh lemonade and walked out.

A year ago, pre covid, had we not had this offering of time and space to recalibrate who we are as a family entity, one teenager would’ve had a bunch of friends over, the other, hiding in their room, my toddler would’ve been running around screaming, and I’d have been doing the dishes, cooking dinner, wearing the baby and nursing at the same time while the dog dug holes in the yard. 

We had to relearn how to be together; which a lot of parents are given the opportunity to do right now (though, for sure, it’s not an easy “present” to constantly unwrap if you catch my drift). 

We did it in conjunction with nurturing our home and yard, together.

There was complaining. There was resistance. There was resisting to resistance. There was hard reflections to swallow, and some scary truths to share, but we did it. We didn’t force it. We didn’t force connections, we just...let them be what and when they were. 

Our two collective aims daily were bike ride and juice. Of course we all worked and schooled from home and Chris and I homeschooled somehow in the interim but those two family acts that didn’t take long at all, made the next projects to tackle, easier to imagine, and now, when there’s nothing left to do (which I hope all children get to a place when this is true) they’re left to create and connect organically. Literally, and metaphorically. Tonight it’s over organic lemonade one of them thought it up to create together. 

If every family will generate the level of personal awareness coupled with a sense of belonging that we have during COVID, I believe the world will meet with itself in due time, post COVID in a much more harmonious way. Where family and home means more than just a house and people to protect us. It means, home, and people who fulfill us from an instinctive knowing that, we’re already protected because WE, our full, entire self is here, and it’s safe for that self to stay here.

Here is safe. 

I’ve shed tears for families who don’t have this experience since I was a child, and I still do knowing that now that I’m a child who found it, while there are others just like I was, still lost. 

I’ve created the same sense of home for my children, but to be honest, it took me until my teens were teens. And to be more honest, it wouldn’t have happened this was if it wasn’t for the extra stuff that kept us from looking within that kept us distant from each other and ourselves prior, being taken away. 

It gave us the opportunity to love our actual life rather than strive toward all the extras just for the sake of thriving when all the while, we had a house, asking for us to love on it enough to make it our home. All these years, we’d missed it. This year, our house finally became...a home but that only became true because of the family we became together within its walls. 

My son says COVID taught him personally, the importance of food security, and us as a family “how to deal with each other.” My fourteen year old daughter says it taught her personally that there’s no such thing as silence and us as a family, that we’re very loud. My five year old says COVID taught her to stay away from people. Huge sad face here. But she’ll never know the difference in what this has taught us as a family because consciously, she’s just waking up into it. This sense of safety at home will be her normal because of the atmosphere we’ve created. For me, personally, this sense of home is a new normal I’m happy to revel in before time slips through my fingers and washes this present away.

I couldn’t have anticipated living through a pandemic. I say this prayerfully, for all. I also couldn’t have anticipated ever experiencing such a deep sense of warmth and belonging that transformed us all, as a result. For this, I’m grateful.

As for us, we’ll be coming back out into the world as a more secure pack. I pray the same for you and yours.