Pandemic has opened our eyes to life lessons

Working from home … Where do I even begin? If you have a small child like I do, it’s a Herculean task.

It has been a week now and some days, and every one of these days I have had to walk out of the gate with my handbag, tell my 18-month-old son goodbye and walk down the road a bit to convince him I’ve left then sneak back to the house.

It is either that or him crying outside my bedroom the whole day. And to think that I will do this for the next I don’t-know-how-long.

If you have a child around this age, then you know that they are very clingy, and have no idea what coronavirus is or why you have to spend the whole day hunched over a laptop instead of spending time with them.

Did I hear someone ask why I can’t just work with him? Well, forget it because it is impossible — he will want to keep tapping on the keyboard or sit on the laptop and try to eat the mouse.

As it is, I have become a hostage in my own home because once I sneak back into the house, I have to tiptoe and open doors in slow motion and speak in whispers just in case he hears me and realises that I am around, after which there will be no peace until I emerge from hiding.

DISTRACTIONS

And he is tall enough to reach the door handles now, therefore I have to lock myself wherever I’m hiding for the day because he might just bust me.

Please, if you have a child around the same age as mine and have devised a less constricting working-from-home model, share it with me so that I can apply it too because the one that I’m currently using is a bit suffocating.

My tribulations aside, my experience working from home has been an eye-opener — I never thought that it would be possible for me to actually get any meaningful work done in such a laid back environment — there are simply too many distractions in homes.

And then coronavirus happened, forcing us to adapt and do things that we would never have thought possible to try and retain some semblance of normalcy in these unfamiliar times.

I have also realised that almost all my Saturdays every month were clogged with back-to-back activities, starting with a trip to the market and supermarket — I haven’t been to the market or supermarket in the last two weeks, which tells me that I can do without frequent visits to these places by planning ahead and making do with the supplies I have.

FAMILY

My two monthly chama meetings, which I used to look forward to thanks to the unpretentious no-holds barred conversations I would have with old friends, have also been put on hold, yet I have no withdrawal symptoms to report. My, wonders will never cease.

I will confess that the first three days of staying in the house all day long were tough — I felt restless, like I was supposed to be elsewhere, but gradually I began to enjoy the benefits of working from home, which, among other inconveniences, is saving me from the taxing and time-consuming daily commute to and fro work.

I also have more time in my hands to put in more work and actually meet deadlines.

The coronavirus pandemic has really opened up our eyes to how differently we can live our lives, but even more important, it has reminded us of the importance of family, those people that we have neglected all these years in the name of work. What’s your story?

The writer is Editor, Society & Magazines, Daily Nation; [email protected]; @cnjerius