When my toddler was born in 2018, I happily took my 12 weeks of maternity leave and my husband took off one week from work to help out at home and bond with our son. We had no idea what was coming. Fast-forward to the end of those three months and I quickly learned that my job wouldn't be as flexible as I needed at the time and my husband's career was just as demanding as ever. As an agent in the entertainment industry, he'd often leave for work at 8 a.m. and return home around 8 p.m.—and that was an early day. I didn't know how we'd make parenting and working actually work—and I made the difficult decision to become a stay-at-home mom for a while.
I know I'm fortunate to have had a choice but, as all moms know, it's not easy. I eventually started working part-time again, albeit remotely, but I was still lonely and felt like I was often parenting all by myself—managing child care, daycare drop-off and pick up, squeezing in a toddler music class, and handling responsibilities around the house in between finishing assignments since I was the one working from home—until the weekend hit. My husband felt guilty for how much he had to work as the breadwinner and missed spending time with us and getting to form more of a relationship with our son.
And then the pandemic hit.
My husband's office closed last March and he's been working from home for over a year now. With daycare closed too, we took shifts watching our son: He'd handle mornings and I'd be on toddler duty from nap time up until bath time, when my husband would handle bath and I'd do bedtime. He paused working to eat dinner with us as a family. My son got to experience this whole new side of my husband—and he relies on both of us now. And as a 9 months pregnant soon-to-be mom of two, I rely on him more, too.
While so many people have struggled this year—us included, and we're counting down to the pandemic finally being over—we're so thankful for this time spent together and the opportunity to have a "redo" on the work-life balance we thought we were stuck with. Our lives have changed forever. How do we go back to the before? And, more importantly, why do we have to go back to how things were?
My husband's office doesn't have a reopening date yet, but we're already talking about options for him to work from home more when it does and create a flexible schedule that allows for more family time. We're not the only ones having these conversations.
The Post-Pandemic “New Normal” Parents Really Want to See
COVID-19 has been hellish for so many Americans and I'm looking forward to a time when people are no longer suffering or in pain or worried about how they'll make ends meet, but there have been some changes that parents hope last even as the pandemic comes to an end.
Here's what we hope stick around after the coronavirus is a thing of the past:
We were forced to change our lives when the pandemic hit, and it's time to reassess what "normal" means for American families when it's finally over.