What if I don’t want our normal back?
Every where I see some version of the words, “I can’t wait to get our normal life back.”
I was nodding my head in agreement at first.
But I realized I don’t want it back. At least not all of it.
I certainly pray every day for God to do a divine intervention on this situation, I pray for God to end the spread and heal the sick.
My family rallies in a circle every night in my daughter’s bedroom and we pray those exact words, but it’s not so we can “get our life back.”
Because I don’t know that I want it all back.
The past two weeks my husband and I have prepared every meal.
I can honestly say that has never happened for even a full week before.
We have had every lunch and dinner around the table together.
Saying grace together, chatting together, listening to our oldest talk non stop—the way little girls tend to do.
We are usually a family on the go, over the years it’s been soccer or dance or multiple church activities, so dinner out or grabbing a lunchable in the car has been a normal occurrence for us.
The past two weeks we haven’t been rushed, there is no stress for dinner. We are able to take our time cooking a meal and I will be sad when our normal returns and our current mealtime routine ends.
This weekend we spent ALL day outside both Saturday and Sunday.
It was spectacular!
I am certain we have never done that before. Usually we have dozens of errands, grocery trips, mounds of laundry to do, and cleaning.
Being home we have far less laundry, no ironing to do, I clean a little each day, and we have switched grocery stores to enable us to grocery pickup.
So instead of our normal weekend routine we walked, threw rocks into streams, jumped on the trampoline, sat on the porch swing, and just muddled around the yard for hours and it was perfection.
It’s not just the weekends. Every afternoon when my husband and I close our laptop to “clock out” of our jobs for the day we take the girls outside to play until dinner. They run and explore, swing and slide, and jump on the trampoline.
We have never had this time together. We typically walk in the door at 5:30 after commuting around town for an hour picking up our kids on opposite sides of town and then it’s a rush to do dinner, homework, bath, and bed.
I don’t want my normal back at least not all of it.
Home-school is hard. Working from home is a challenge with a toddler grabbing for our attention all day. Not knowing when things will change makes me uneasy, watching the death count rise each day in the news breaks my heart apart.
I want people to heal and I want to sickness to stop, but it’s not because I want life to go back to normal, because I don’t know how much of my normal I want back.
