It's been a hard year for relationships with people. Some friendships are the same as ever because we always had long pauses. We chat online and check in like it's no big deal. Other friendships have almost faded out without the frequent in person meetings.
The pod thing is like playing "who would you want to be marooned on a desert island with?" only you really do it. There was no way to include all our close friends here and I really felt that the decision of who to quarantine with with came from being in lockstep with another family in our circle. When people ask how we decided I have to really think about it. Basically just before the whole world went crazy we were on a ski trip with a family we had become quite close with over the past couple of years. Their two kids were the same age as ours and the two younger as well as the two older were already best buds and classmates. The 8 of us found we traveled really comfortably together and while on that trip we plotted how we might team up if/when America locked down like Asia was doing at that moment.
And so, when the lockdown began we rode out the first couple of months in isolation and then, the moment the local county said that we could, we podded up. It took a few weeks to hit our stride but eventually we began to live communally. Taking turns cooking and hosting dinner in the evenings, and eventually, putting all the kids to bed together almost every night which oddly enough makes bedtime easier. We spend the evenings with cocktails and games or sometimes just sitting on our phones in that comfortable silence between good friends.
The key to happiness in a communal living pod like ours doesn't lie only in friendship but also in how people cope with the pandemic stress. I'd say most people would probably find our habits pretty hard to roll with. Because we have two members with high levels of health risk, we are at the highest level of lock down measures all the time. We all have 0 direct contact outside the pod. Everyone works from home, kids homeschool and we only go inside a business if we have exhausted every other means of getting that item. It's something that might happen once a month and undertaken with the solemnity of performing surgery. We don't grocery shop in person, we don't eat on cafe patios, use public restrooms or take public transit or taxis.
We're also all news junkies and among us we cover a mix of British, Canadian, French, Singaporean and American news. We read a lot of scientific papers and have been focused on the impressive research going on. It's helped keep the focus away from the scary headlines and on the progress instead. I find being focused on the goal of ending this pandemic to be very centering. Some people find the news keeps them up at night and makes them upset. To each their own. I think part of me would be happier if I could somehow be a scientist right now pulling long shifts trying to save lives. I've always been good in a crisis, not so good at riding out monotony.
In the autumn we added a third family. This was is another classmate of the older two kids and her parents who are part of our mutual parent friends as well. They were also keeping their daughter home when school resumed and maintaining a similar level of lockdown at home so it was a good fit for us all.
We know we are fortunate to have found a pod life that feels right for this adventure we are on. Where this will go or where it will end, we don't know. But I hope when we look back we'll see the growth that happened.
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