Pandemic Silver Lining: How Social Distancing Re-invented Community

Are pandemic silver linings a thing? 

There has been very little about this last year that has been easy.

If I look for the silver linings I would have to say how it has simplified things in my life. 

When you rarely leave the house, your world, and what you do in it, becomes artificially small. I haven’t taken my kids to school and all of their extracurricular activities have decreased or have even straight up disappeared.

Given how my world, our worlds, have shrunk, I think the most difficult part, and one of the biggest challenges of this last year, has been the lack of connection and community. I hear it from the parents I work with and in the support groups I host.

Not being able to see people is difficult. 

Being isolated and alone with your family is difficult.

Not being able to introduce your babies to extended family and friends is difficult.  

There is little relief from the monotony of every day with a baby or small children, not even library story-time.  

While I don’t know if we will ever have a return to “normal”, I we need each other. 

Becoming new parents is a challenge in the best of circumstances and it is definitely made that much harder when your inner circle shrinks because of a global pandemic.

 Even before the pandemic, there was a loss of “the village.”

I believe that the pandemic has only magnified how hard it is to be a parent, new or not. I know that asking for help as a parent is already tough enough. The feeling that we must do it alone or risk being seen as incompetent.

The truth is we can’t do this alone, any of it. 

Parenting, being a professional and caring for those we love, requires that we are fortified by our inner circle. Support and connection is imperative for our health and well-being. Our inner circles help us when we are struggling or need encouragement to do something outside of our comfort zone. It is the support systems that rally around us, keep us going and help lift us up when everything feels too big.

When we hold on to what we have always known for fear of creating new and different forms of community, we create barriers for letting new possibilities emerge.

Communities survive separation just as long as we find new ways of coming together, and that is one of the biggest pandemic silver linings I can see.  

Zoom communities have been created to offer support. 

Social media communities have been created to offer support. 

I created my Calm By Design Course and Collective to offer support.

 This is a reminder that you are not alone.

New time mama!

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