What Should We Preserve from the Pandemic?
In our year of emergencies, some norms shifted. How do we build back better?
This Thursday, I’ll be sharing your recommendations for charities that take interdependence seriously, so please send me your suggestions by Wednesday.
Also on Thursday, I’ll be part of an event co-sponsored by Plough, Breaking Ground, and this newsletter to discuss my piece “Dependence” for Plough’s family issue. You can register for the event here, and we’re taking your questions ahead of time, so they can help shape our remarks.
One of this newsletter’s readers sent me an instagram post by Meg Conley, which begins “I think the thing I am most ashamed to say out loud right now is: I am afraid of what my world will look like when the pandemic ends.”
Meg, who has an excellent substack of her own on stay at home motherhood, goes on to reflect on her experience of having her husband work from home. I’m excerpting her thoughts below:
Riley’s been home with me since March. He doesn’t go back to work in an office until September 2021. My life is better with him home. I used to think I hated being a stay-at-home mom. I thought it made me desperate, made me stare at ceilings, made me call therapists because I thought too hard about turning my car wheel the wrong way, even just once.
But I just hate stay-at-home motherhood in America. I hate that every government + healthcare benefit I access is dependent upon me being a “dependent” to Riley. I hate the isolation. I hate an 80 hour work week that requires partners to excuse themselves from the daily practice of caretaking. I hate feeling outside of the good gates of American Aspiration when I feel I aspire in the work I do in the home. I hate witnessing without ever being witnessed.
With Riley home, I am not alone. He still works but comes in to make the kids lunch. I write while he plays UNO with the kids. The sounds of the triumphs and failures of our home break under his office door. We are better for it. The world doesn’t have to go back to the way it was before Covid-19 brought us all to our knees.
The coronavirus pandemic is a national tragedy. But I don’t think Meg is the only person who has received unexpected gifts in the middle of this terrible year. Because of the emergency, many rules didn’t make any sense, and some employers allowed a much greater degree of flexibility than they ever would have in normal times.
I hope that not all of these good things will fade away when the vaccines are widely distributed and we can gather safely, both at work and with friends. In my own home, I made a mutual aid listserv for my street and got to know my neighbors (and one of them lent us medical supplies when I had a sprain), and I joined the larger, more active mutual aid listserv for the whole town.
I’ve admired the work of Breaking Ground, a site that began in the midst of the pandemic to collect ideas about how we can do better than returning to normal. (And I contributed a piece on the way the pandemic restored some vulnerable people to visibility).
I’d like to hear from you about what, if anything, changed for the better for you in the midst of the disaster—some way the normal rules shifted and made space for something more humane.
One of the things I’d like is for remote working and flexible hours to be a plausible option at most jobs (and not a perk that comes with canny negotiation or seniority).
If an employee can get their work done in less time than a full work day, it’s good for that to be treated as a victory, rather than stretching the work to fill the day. And it’s good for employers to cultivate resilience through flexibility, so things don’t fall apart when an employee is sick, or needs to take time off for bereavement leave.
People aren’t clockwork, and reliability can look more like adjusting well to disruptions than never deviating from the schedule or the quota at all. And that’s a skill that all parents (stay-at-home or otherwise) have to learn.
P.S. If you’re an employer or a manager who is planning to make permanent changes to how you manage your employees after going through pandemic-related changes, I’d be interested in doing a Q&A with you.
Neither of my jobs allows for remote work just by the nature of the thing (cleaning floors in the wake of several busy bakers is not something you can do over Zoom, for example), but two things that have made this year much easier for me have been because of COVID.
At one of my jobs, part-time workers (which is almost all of us) get paid sick days if we have Covid-like symptoms. This means if we get sick, even if it's just the less deadly flu, we can stay home without worrying about our paychecks. Which means fewer sick people have been stuffing themselves with medicine and dragging themselves into work (and sharing germs with the rest of us), and so we've actually seen less sickness overall. Also, people have actually been washing their hands, people give each other personal space, we're not handling items from members of the public. . . and so, I've gone without catching an infectious disease (and I say this without exaggeration) longer than ever before in my life. If people could remember the benefits of just these two relatively simple things when the threat of death is no longer attached, the future could be noticeably better.
The flexibility of working from home has meant that I've been taking care of myself much better than I was before. Now that I'm just walking into the living room instead of riding the train to work, I'm getting more sleep and have more time in the morning to spend in prayer. I can eat dinner when I'm hungry instead of commuting home with a growling stomach, and even when they're quick, my dinners are healthier and more filling. I'm exercising more often because I don't have to fit a trip to the gym around my work schedule. I hope post-COVID there are companies willing to accommodate this kind of work-life balance--sometimes it seems like "work-life balance" at many companies just means "we won't force you to work after 6 pm and also there are some good restaurants in the area you could go to at lunch".
I've also been a better worker while working from home, without spending extra time working. I write marketing copy, which means I spent most of my day staring at various Google docs. But while working from home, if I get stuck on an assignment, I can go unload the dishwasher or take a walk to get my brain moving again. I have the silence and space that creates better writing, which is so difficult to replicate in an office. I loved my office and miss it, but it's undeniable that offices are bad spaces to nurture good writing. My dream office would make space for people doing creative work to get up from the computer and do something else for a while, instead of monitoring whether or not we're sitting at our desks. (And writers would get big signs we could put up on our desks that said "IF IT'S NOT ON FIRE, ASK ME LATER".)
Lastly, the pandemic has exposed to me how much of my life in public was driven by FOMO, jealousy, and other people's expectations. I work(ed) downtown in a major city, so every workday was like being bombarded by tempting possibilities: I should get a new leather bag, I should buy a fancy sandwich in the food hall, I should take an international vacation like my coworkers, I should upgrade my phone... The things I actually wanted and needed were being buried under my attempts to resist these tugs at my desire, I was grumpy and restless, and I questioned a lot of my choices. Now it's all just...gone. No one is doing anything to be jealous of, and spending time with myself has made my actual desires and longings easier to identify. It turns out when I'm not exposed to this flurry of alluring objects, they lose their allure and my real hopes and dreams are more solid and wholesome, like "write something great" and "be a mom". I hope that when I'm back out in the world, I can hold onto this sense of my true self and not get sucked in again by everyone else's choices.