The end of quiet.
I used to savor the quiet in the car. Or the early morning moments before the kids woke up. Or the heavy silence of the night, wrapping me in a comforting embrace while I wrote out my thoughts, the complex emotions, the things I was struggling to understand.
That’s what I miss the most right now. The quiet. It feels like every moment from eyes open to collapse in bed is filled. With screens or chores or requests to build a fort or help with math.
Time has slowed, that’s for sure, but it hasn’t left any pockets of quiet or solitude or solace for that matter for all the parents and caregivers of the world. For us, it’s a seemingly endless groundhogs day, same day, praying for a different outcome but knowing deep down it’s not coming.
It’s not all bad. This week I feel like we’ve started to figure out who we’re going to be as a family in these times.
Maybe that’s what’s been so hard. Just like any company going through a rough patch, we’ve had to come back to our values and our core and dig in and say, this. This is how we’re going to figure our way forward. But there hasn’t been a lot of time to do that consideration. It’s all felt like keeping our heads above water while we’re talking big gulps of water in.
So yeah, I miss the quiet. The times of reflection that help me process the hard, the complicated, the unknown, in the best of times.
So I’ve had to pry some room into my day for this thing that is as essential to me as breathing. As I write this the clock is hitting midnight, ushering another day in. I should have been in bed long before this - my glorious plan for a 6 am workout is looking slim.
But I feel the quiet settling in all around me. It’s comforting and beautiful.