My family of five is a lucky one
My husband and I can work from home and our kids are in classes during the weekdays. We worry about our friends who are hairdressers and waiters, waiting for their unemployment to go through. In turn, we worry about the grocery store clerks and medical professionals. We think of them while we maintain social distance in all areas of our public lives.
I’m not sure if I’ve embraced the five workstations in our home and teaching all of my classes in my basement, but I do know keeping pants on my middle child so his classmates get the respectable version of him and keeping the other two kids motivated can get challenging. We’ve come up with new vocabulary while hiding from this silent threat. Our 8-year-old is a quaran-queen, dressing to the nines despite having nowhere to go. Our quaran-teen’s angst is heavier to carry without his high school sports, and our middle guy can only kind of get clean enough for his Zoom classes. We call it quaran-clean. Besides these small inconveniences, we’ve enjoyed seeing each other more, cooking meals together, and creating new projects to keep us busy at home.
While we wait out this silent killer, I can’t help but wonder about the good things that will stick when this is over. I hope we still cook together. I hope Fontenelle Forest’s trails stay as packed, and I pray Omaha families can rebuild what they’ve worked so hard to create in our beautiful city.
Submitted by Tessa Adams, Omaha