The irony of creating a blog that contains the word “reinvention” in the middle of a worldwide pandemic that changed everyone’s lives overnight is definitely not lost on me.
We are all in the middle of reinventing our lives as I write this. We’ve been at it for a few weeks now. When the scare of COVID-19 started to spread, the nation just sort of, shut down…with absolutely no warning.
We are all hit with unexpected things in our lives every day. If you think about it, not a whole lot goes exactly as planned. That’s why, sometimes, the best things in life come when we least expect them. Spontaneity often pays off well.
But this pandemic we’re all in together is one of those things we just couldn’t see coming. It hit fast and it hit hard, and while at first it seemed like nothing good could come from this new way of life, I’m a person who likes to find the silver lining.
My family – a husband and three children (10, 8 and 4) – were used to a robust schedule of school and sports and piano lessons and dance classes, and on and on. I had a day-planner filled to the brim with appointments to get to, and on most days, I found it hard to keep up. The days blended together and before I knew it, Mondays turned into Fridays, the weekends came and went, and we were starting another week.
And then one day, life stopped. The announcement came that school was out for three weeks. Restaurants were starting to close. Then most businesses followed shortly after. Then we were encouraged to stay home. Then we were required to stay home.
Our mindsets started shifting, naturally. What choice did we have? At the beginning of all of this, there were some complaints coming from people I talked to. There was disbelief. We were suddenly forced from our fast-paced lives to what seemed like some sort of twilight zone. It’s all that people talked about.
My neighborhood is filled with families, and we all started hanging out in the street during walks and bike rides rather than at barbeques and happy hours. We talked about missing those times, talked about how long we thought things would last this way, and then something shifted – we just started talking about regular stuff…how we were homeschooling our kids; how things were going working from home; what projects we were working on; what we were doing to keep our kids occupied. It became the new “norm” – a norm literally nobody thought could possibly ever become a “norm.”
Group texts started floating around the neighborhood – put teddy bears in your windows so we can take our kids on walks to find them! Create sidewalk art so we can read them as we pass by! Facebook became flooded with ideas about living life in the confines of home and occasional walks.
Kids started begging to go back to school. Teachers reinvented their way of being, almost overnight. My son’s teacher recently said during a Zoom class meeting, “Bear with me, I never thought I’d be teaching online…but here I am!” She smiled and the kids chuckled. It’s not something any teacher – from elementary school to college – ever anticipated doing. And for those of us who enjoy the routine of getting a few hours of the day to ourselves by sending our kids to school – we never had any interest in becoming homeschoolers. But we all became homeschoolers overnight.
The thought of teaching my kids scared me. My 5th grader’s Common Core math is completely over my head without Google by my side. How was I going to manage the schoolwork of two kids, in two different grades, with a 4-year old in tow saying, “Mommy” every three seconds? But I plunged in and did it, because I had to. All of us moms and dads have had to. And those who work full time? The process of transitioning from an office to a home-office with noise (lots of it, if you have kids) in the background must have been so overwhelming. But just like my husband did it, so has everyone else.
I have become a math teacher, an art teacher, a science teacher, overnight, as well as the mediator of three kids who love each other but have become sick of having each other around 24/7. But they have adjusted, too. My daughter (the four year old) has stopped asking me to take her to the park or to Michael’s Crafts or to the movies. She is used to those places being shut down. And it’s only been a few weeks.
The evolution of our mentality, as a society, has shifted, rapidly. We have all been forced to reinvent our lives, quickly. And if you are healthy and together with your family, then that’s really all that matters. So many lives have been lost. So many have been affected by this virus. Healthcare workers are going to work every day, worried that they’ll bring the virus home to their families. Grocery store clerks and bank tellers and healthcare professionals and all the other essential workers out there who are keeping life’s necessities going, are probably living in the same fear. But they are surviving.
We are all in this together, we are all reinventing ourselves every single day. And look how well we’re doing it, because we have to. Please stay safe and healthy, everyone.
Mid-LIFE Reinvention 