Alone in the Time of COVID19

BY KCY

In January of 2020 I traded the insanity of working motherhood - shuffling my four-year-old and one-year-old from daycare to activities to dinner to bed, and repeat - to the insanity of a new job in a new city. My husband and I flew in for a whirlwind weekend of house-hunting and ended up with a three-bedroom condo not too far, but not too close, to the beach. As planned, I moved in and started working while he and the kids stayed behind to finish out the school year. Every two weeks I’d hop on a plane and spend the weekend with them.

At least that was the plan. COVID-19 changed everything, and quickly. Sunday night I was running through the playground with my kids and later that week all nonessential travel was shut down. I found myself alone in an empty, largely unfurnished house.

I am an introvert by nature. I have friends but I’d rather be at home reading a book than going to a party. And, quite honestly, since becoming a wife and mother, I’ve dreamed about being alone, not having to pick up dirty gym socks from the floor, listening to stillness instead of screaming. Family life can be overwhelming for us introverts.

Now some people may argue that visiting my nuclear family is essential travel, but, as a health care worker, I’m still going to the hospital and potentially being exposed to the novel coronavirus. I don’t want to risk contaminating my husband, daughter, or son. Also, without them here, I can focus on my work: keeping people healthy in the midst of unprecedented sickness.

So, I go to work and come home to an empty house each night. I eat prepackaged salads and watch teenage romantic comedies to decompress. They make me relive my own high school days and think about the type of person I was then, the type of adult that teenage me thought I’d become, and the person I actually am now.

This introvert has discovered that while she loves her children, she’s perfectly fine being away from them. “Doesn’t your heart just ache for your babies,” a friend asked on the phone one day. I miss them, but I’ve been deployed to the front lines and that takes priority for now. Maybe that makes me a bad mother in some people’s eyes, but the honest truth is that I’m perfectly okay with that.