COVID Bonus 2

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vanderkam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is our second bonus episode as part of the COVID nineteen series. All our lives are changing. Because of that, we continue to release regular episodes every Tuesday, but many of those were recorded in advance and so sounds a little different and are dealing with different issues than we've all found ourselves dealing with these days. So one of the topics that has come up a lot as people are navigating working from home, dealing with childcare changes, or not having available school or childcare is how this winds up splitting and what sort of division of labor issues that maybe didn't come to the surface when school was there suddenly boil up when it is not. We got an interesting question from a listener that Sarah is going to read from us for us. Yeah, okay, here we go. This comes from listeners slash reader Stephanie. She says, I'm in a two income family with a three and a half year old, and I'm in my third trimester of pregnancy, and I earned more than my husband, but we both have time intensive careers that typically require lots of interactive work. We're only one weekendto our official quarantine, though we did only work in daycare the prior week, and she said she already has lots of thoughts on the division of labor. She linked to the recent Atlantic article called something like feminism is coronavirus, the death of feminism or something like that, and then she wrote, it is one thing to divide tasks more evenly under regular circumstances, but I am definitely picking up more of the childcare and household responsibilities in the new world order. Our daycare is closed and we are both working from home, and a lot of the previous advice, like higher help doesn't really apply right now. We are taking social distancing and isolation recommendations and government orders very seriously, both because it is the right thing to do and add of an abundance of caution given my pregnancy. Any advice or thoughts other than just talk to your spouse and work it out, well, that is part of the advice. I mean, that's never a bad thing to do, because I assume that some of the ways people fall back on old stereotypes, for instance, is because there are unspoken assumptions, and so rather than leave them unspoken, you can talk about them and say, well, okay, what happens if we both have video calls at the same time. You know, what happens if the kid is yelling for help on an assignment, a school assignment in the middle of a conference call, who goes and deals with it? If we both, you know, would like to have time for deep work and thinking, like who deals with the kids? Like do we assume that if one party is in charge during that time, that doesn't just mean generally wandering around the house. It actually means keeping them away from the other person, like the These are various assumptions that people are not used to because they're not necessarily working from home. So you know, those are good conversations to have. Yeah, I think there's never been a better time to like sit there. And I actually the other day just there's been all this focus on kids schedules and was like, I need to figure out what my schedule is going to look like. And mine didn't really involve my husband all that much because we are currently in the situation where we still can have our child provider come. But if we weren't, then that's exactly what we would probably be doing is each week looking ahead and drawing out these are my work hours, these are your work hours. You know. It's funny because we can't really plan events and fun stuff and travel and all those things I like to do right now, but we probably still do need to put some effort into really thinking about how we can use the blocks of time that we do have, especially when they're multiple kids of different ages running around and you're trying to help to some agree with their instruction if if that's happening, so I know, I feel like that's this reader's asking for something else. But for me, the biggest armistice has been like, okay, like objectively, look who can do this hours? Who can do this hours? And there is something calming to knowing like, Okay, if I know I'm going to be able to work from ten to two or whatever, then I might as well sort of turn my brain off the rest of the time because I have a chunk that I can count on. Yeah. I think frustrations often come from a mismatch between expectations and reality. And if your expectation is that you'll be able to work with no noise or distract action from eight to six, well that is probably not going to happen in this current environment. But if you to agree on say, you know, I get eight to two and you get one to six or whatever, you know, to overlap with quiet time that everyone can have, then you feel better about the hours you are not working because you weren't planning on working those hours, so you're not feeling guilty about them. And then you could also truly focus during the hours you're supposed to be working because you know that there will be time you're not and so it's not like, oh, well, you know, my children's schooling going to fall apart and I have no idea what's going on with them. Well, you're going to figure that out in the hours that are yours. And again, also having that conversation about when a parent is covering certain number of hours, what that means when everyone's working from home, because this is something people don't necessarily know. It means keeping them out of your office. It might mean keeping them quiet. That may not be possible, but if it is, what does that mean. So yeah, having those discussions, it's been interesting. We're all, you know, working from home right right now, and I would say I definitely pop out a lot more often than Michael does, but that's it's also because my office is closer to where everything else is. He's holed up in the guest room, which is up on the second floor and off toward the corner, whereas I have my office that I always use, which is the standard home office, which is usually on the first floor of a house, and so it's slightly more central. But what we've been dealing with lately is we still have childcare too. You know, it's great, she's actually been you know, staying here for a little bit, but it's never quiet. I'm feeding Henry right now, I can hear the kids in the background. So that's been an issue for say, recording, because one of the projects I'm doing right now is a lot of recording and having to record new episodes of various things because of what's going on in the news. So yeah, it's it's a bit of a challenge. I think now might be a good time to also implement a little bit of tag teaming bedtime. I had a lovely zoom chat with my college girlfriends last night, and our kids actually ended up staying super late, so it was kind of a moot point. But when I thought back on it, I'm like, oh, that should have been a night that I said Josh, like, you're doing bedtime and I'll do bedtime the next night and kind of give him a night to just play guitar and relax, because compared to how it was before, we don't have date nights, we don't have the ability to like just disappear by ourselves as often, especially when we're both currently doing things mostly remotely. We'll be in the hospital a little bit more soon, but that hasn't happened yet, mostly because we were both supposed to be on spring break, so we didn't have a bunch of impatience time scheduled. But I think I think now is probably a good time to start working on that. I've seen a couple of my friends whose marriages maybe didn't have a lot of discussion about this, or where there was a lot of assumed inequity, or maybe the male had the much bigger career. I've seen people really struggle and I don't know. I mean, I don't like an answer. I just I hope that they can sit down together and really talk about, like, hey, our balance really worked when I had somebody helping me and I could get a break sometimes, but now it doesn't work because I'm twenty four to seven with the kids and trying to work from home. So your mode of like coming home and expecting to relax is no longer going to fly. So that's not my personal story, thank god. Yeah, but I've been hearing it from some others and it sounds tough. Yeah. I mean there's been some definitely upsides too. I mean, we had family breakfast this morning. You know, we have family lunches on occasion. I mean, this is stuff that never would have happened on a Tuesday, and now here we are well. And the funny thing, I know everybody's kids have different reactions to this, and I would anticipate probably the teens are taking really really hard. I have like a cousin, second cousin who's a senior in college, and she was just super sad all the time because this is supposed to be her moment, right, But man, my kids, I'd love it well because they're not having to get up early. I mean, I know that was a source of major frustration for you guys. We record the whole episode on morning issues and things like that. You don't have to get them out the door at seven to twenty anymore. I'm sure that's like a major plus for general. Yeah, and I think just having us around, especially my husband around more, which is like an exciting novelty. And they've been doing stuff like skateboarding and working on computer programming and like all kinds of stuff that we normally wouldn't you know, have time for. And Josh joked, he was like, you know, this was supposed to be our family vacation this week in North Carolina, but this is pretty much what I wanted to do. He's like very He's like very much less. I don't know, Like he's like, oh, I don't miss anyone, this is good. This is actually like the life I want. I'm like, oh, okay, introvert like this, this is what I did anyway, So it was just a call it quarantine or something else, but it was perfectly fine. I never left the house anyway. It turns out so not that big a difference. Yeah, Now we've been doing a lot of backyard time. The hope schooling continues to go decently. We've been in the rhythm of trying to get up by nine o'clock in dress by nine, which I know sounds ridiculous, but there's no point in getting up any earlier. For some of the kids, they do school in the morning, and I still write down each kid with a checklist of what they're going to do. But for Jasper and Sam, one of those checklist things is your school assignments, and so their teachers are sending stuff fairly regularly. Roots teacher is sending stuff, but sort of the more open ended that we would have been doing any like read for thirty minutes, do thirty minutes of math practice on one of your online programs right from a prompt, which is kind of the same things we were doing before we got official assignments. So we just kind of continued with what we've been doing. But it's been fun to see her create. She creates little books every day from the writing props and illustrates them, and then she and Annabel like they're the same thing. That's so funny. It is so cute. All day. She actually asked me, She's like, well, so what's my writing prop for tomorrow? She asked me on Friday, and I said, oh, it's Saturday, so you don't have to do one tomorrow. And she said, well, we could just write a book for fun. I'm like, well, there we go. I love it. Annabel has been reading we got from the library right before this happened, a bunch of choose your own adventure books Tomember. Those from the eighties, yes, yes, did she like them? She did the girlier ones, Yes, And then she was trying to write her own, which was pretty fun. Fun, it's fun. And then Alex has actually had sort of the most formal distance instruction of anyone because his preschool set up virtual circle Time and then Virtual story Time. So every morning at around nine to twenty, we sign on for virtual circle Time, and through zoom he sees all his friends and they discuss the day, what day of the week it is, and what the weather is outside. And sing the songs that they would through circle time in preschool and then at eleven twenty they have storytime. So he's been checking in with his teachers and his classmates twice a day. So that's that's actually been probably the most formal time bound of any of them. That is so cool. I think annabel and Carameron are going to have like live stuff, but I'm hoping not tons of it. Well, yeah, you do have to then manage the time, which is I know because they haven't released it because again, this coming week is our spring break, so like the teachers were supposed to be off, and I think some of them are taking the time to obviously figure out what they're going to do coming up, but we Annabelle's anxious about like, well, what's the schedule going to be, and I'm like, I actually don't know yet. We were gonna have to figure that out. Genevieve's school has promised to be doing something, but I don't know that that's gonna that would be so funny but kind of ridiculously we've sort of figured out that because so it's on Zoom and he sits on my lap and watches the story or watches this circle, and I figured out today that I was best off having him have a pen and paper while it was going on, so then he has something to do with his hands, as opposed to hit my computer and knock stuff off my desk, which is the other option that you could do with your hands if you're a little boy who likes to move around and do stuff with his hands. So now he's coloring while listening to the story, and that's actually worked quite well. Listens learned. I've discovered that. So I know you've talked about how like your toddlers wouldn't sit down and watch screens, Genevieve will watch like a feature length movie. Really, well, lucky you, that's fun. No, but it's just so funny. It's like such a temperament thing. And I and I'm sure there you know it's not gender specific obviously, but they're probably averages. And she's just like, well, she's just more sort of socially emotionally advanced, so she can actually follow the plot right that that's well, And she's just lazy, like I don't think she's driven to like get up and run around and move like some kids are. And she's just like, oh, the big kids are sitting there. I'm going to sit there, and she'll like sit like three inches from the screen and it's just like she'll just sit there like yeah, So it's it's really funny. Well, and how are you holding up? Are you okay? My job has just become very stressful and I can't like talk about details really because at this point, I think, you know, everyone gets judged for whatevery program is doing. And I don't even want to open the door to to that basically, but I'll just say that I liked my job better before before you suddenly had to do it all or learn. Before I couldn't talk to anybody in person, and before our entire curriculum got ripped a shred by like what residents can do and can't do. And then you know, the clinical part of my job we still haven't officially, like we keep saying we're going to do, tell it what we're going to do. Tell my practice, Like I didn't have a lot of patient schedule because last week was match week and again this week was spring breakcess to be off. So it's actually nice because we have that ramp up time for them to hopefully figure out all the details because my hope is that when the patients do start up in earnest, which is like around the thirty first, I think is my first clinical day, that I'm going to be able to just see them all through a digital format. But there's like a little bit of a chasm that has to just technical difficulties that have to be worked out. Yeah, I'll probably feel better once we're in the rhythm. I'm also feeling like, God, I already wish we had an end date, like the planners. Planners like to know the end day. Well, it's just even just from like cause if I knew the end date, then I could know, oh, well, these patients can wait because I can see them in person in a month and it's fine, and I don't need to spend like half an hour doing a phone call with a growth visit for a kid that I can't measure. But if I knew it's going to be four months, and I'd be like, no, I have to do the visit, do you know what I mean? Like it just makes even like the everyday decisions about like what to do now and what to put off very difficult when you just don't know the scale of what we're getting into But I guess there's just not really a way to know. Yeah, well, I mean you could guess on probabilities, right to mean life, I guess you want to save it for possibly sure, I mean, you know, a month, there may still be a reasonable number of restrictions. I think four months. No, So I hope not. Oh my no, I got I hope not. There's these things can't last forever. They can't last forever. They better not last forever. Yeah. Well, I guess we'll see. We'll see how many COVID nineteen bonus episodes we end up putting out. I'm laughing because Henry is making very rude noises right now, trying to mute mute the own Oh my goodness. Yeah, that's how he feels about all of this. That's how he feels about all this. But he did sleep through the night, so that was that. And I feel like we take a moment of like clapping or something. Hey, Henry, you like when you woke up and you saw that it was morning, where you're just like, oh, oh my god, Like that's exciting. It's very exciting. And he's he's getting bigger, he's growing, he's you know, learning how to do all kinds of new things. Are very excited about that. And hey, you know the fact that I'm never leaving the house means that breastfeeding has been pretty easy. Like you never don't have to time it, you don't have to pump, much easier to do anything. It just feed the baby. It's much more efficient than pumping in my opinion anyway. I mean I pump a few extra hour, extra ounces just to keep the supply of stash. Yeah, stat although again, since I'm not going anywhere, I don't know what we're going to do with this stash. Muse it when he's eleven months old and months old, yeah, eating out of the stash for a while, because no, I mean my line of work, I mean, all my conferences that I was going to speak at are gone, so for a while for a while. It may come back at some point, but that's that's another one that people are uncertain about. And the problem is you have to have a definite go point for any huge conference that I mean, what six to eight weeks or something that you can't be uncertain that far out. So most people are just canceling if that six to eight week window happens. In the next month, because then, because there's no end dated, they could book. If they had an end date, they could book it. They could keep going with it the one they've already planned. But because they don't know that, they are just you know, rather than having a conference, they can't do that. They've ramped up for. Oh well, it's not the worst time to have it. I meant, given that I was on maternity late for part of this, and then you know, thought i'd be sort of starting up with late April May June. Now it's just longer, so it's nice to get more baby time and less pumping, which is wonderful. Yeah, in general, I don't mind that. Figure out the economics of it later. Well we'll be okay, We'll be okay. Everyone here is going to be okay. Yes, we're worth everyone is going to be okay. And again, if you're struggling, our thoughts are with you, and we hope that it doesn't last and that you're able to find some good pivots and get some stuff done during this time so you can come back strong and you know all that, or even use this time as a way to advance in your career. I mean, this is obviously crazy time down time is there there that we might not have had otherwise. And so if you are able to say trade off with your partner, still get the time to, like go out for a walk, unless that's been forbidden by the time this hairs. But you know, just use this time to sort of think forward, like what would I like I've had a forced pause here, and again there's people who are really struggling or have their jobs eliminated or hours cut. That's you know, total sympathy here. But if you're not in that situation, it's just you know, for sort of pause and everything for a while. Take the time to think about what you want life to look like and if there are big projects you'd like to tackle when life gets back to normal, or schedule changes you'd like to make. I mean, boy, now would be a great time to get a two day work from home arrangement, given that you've gotten a five day work from home arrangement. There's just all sorts of things that are going to change, and so crises are terrible, they can also be moments to reevaluate a lot of things, and if we want to, we can see those as opportunities. So I hope that for many of the listeners of this that this is an opportunity for rethinking a lot of things. Well, do you have a love of the week? Oh boy, I mean zoom is incredible, although it's really funny to do zoom sometimes with people who just don't know how to use zoom. There's a learning curve. There's a learning curve, But most people are now farther up that learning curve than they were a week ago, which is wonderful. I'm glad that that people are learning about how to do a video conference. For instance. You know, if you're gonna have social time at the beginning of your meeting, which you always should, that's a good idea, have like five minutes of social chit chat at the beginning. You need someone to direct it. So the person who is running the meeting also then needs to direct the social chit chat, like calling on you, Sarah, tell us about your weekend, great, John, tell us about your weekend, as opposed to having it be this free for all whiplash of the camera going back and forth, which is what happens if it's not directed. My love of the week would probably be I don't know. Rose Wyn is good. Whine is good, you know, it's it's nice thing to look forward to at the end of a long trying to think about what made me happy in the last two day, last pretty much all I could come up with that, and like, not reading the news, I think that's those are those are my happy things. I would be doing great. And then I'll get on Twitter and be like, why on earth did I do that? Like I know better, So I'm just not know me at CNN. I just the less times I go to that website, the better life is, better life is. I'm enjoying Instagram just because I like to see people's smiling faces. There's a way of staying in touch. But yeah, Twitter, that's the social media that's got to be gone now. Yeah, it's going to be all news and not good news. All right, Well, this has been a best of both worlds. Bonus COVID nineteen edition. We'll be back next week, probably with another one of these, but also with our regular episodes on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.