My son and I were in our computer room on one of the early days of quarantine, him watching a video on my computer and me typing away on my iPad at my work table behind him. Sitting at my computer desk is a treat for him since it doesn’t happen often, and his excitement at the event of it gave me some time to sit and write peacefully. The late afternoon sunlight came through the window blinds in a hazy orange-yellow glow and the whole situation felt surprisingly calm and picturesque.

I didn’t know what to expect when school closings were confirmed and an undetermined amount of days at home stretched before us. When he started going to preschool a couple days a week at nearly two years old, it was a welcome and necessary break for me, a time to breathe and do what I wanted for a few hours at my own pace. Before I had my son I thought I might be the kind of mom who keeps her kid at home, doing all the school prep in their earliest years, but anxiety and a severe bout of postpartum depression showed me I wasn’t. As days and weeks and months of social isolation stretched before us I wondered if things would be hard again, if my mind would be worn down and exhausted as the days built up. If the anger and hopelessness would build up, too.

But I guess I have come a long way with my anxiety and PPD. Even with all the fear over Covid-19 and what our world might look like even into summer and fall, I went into this with some kind of determination to survive. Not meaning scraping by, but trying to go into each day with positivity and hope, looking for good and making happy moments.

Some plans made at the beginning fell through, like sewing plans. A pretty ruffled tank top in one of my own prints from Spoonflower sits in pieces nicely folded together in a pile, all cut out the first week but not yet sewn together. It seemed silly to make something I don’t know when I’ll get to wear, and maybe the act of making it to me feels like a bit of a false hope because of that. Illustration, on the other hand, has been a much easier escape. It feels helpful, too, since I can, and have, shared coloring pages. I even found myself working on a surface pattern design one night and realizing that I was so engrossed in the puzzle-solving work of fitting all the pieces and colors together that the stresses of our current reality weren’t on my mind at all.

In a way, it helps having a four-year-old – he’s old enough to be a bit independent and enjoy different projects and activities but not quite old enough to grasp the gravity of the pandemic. I can fill our days with baking, art, blanket fort-building and home movie nights, drawing chalk cities on our patio and video storytimes with his teachers. He misses his friends and grandparents and doesn’t quite understand that he won’t be going back to school this year, but for the majority of it he’s happy and excited to see what new activities I have planned each week and present ideas of his own. There have also been extremely less meltdowns than I expected, as in maybe two in the past six weeks.

My husband is still going to work and has also been doing all the grocery shopping for us. His job can’t really be done from home, but his schedule has been altered to be at work one less day than normal, so for the past few weeks we’ve had a long weekend. It’s bit of a joke that we have a whole extra day each weekend, but aren’t able to go anywhere, ha. Still, we’ve enjoyed the time and have spent lots of hours outside while the weather has been nice playing and setting up a garden – which we haven’t attempted in a couple years and haven’t kept up well in the past when we have had one, but seeing as we’ll have a lot of home time this year made for an opportunity to try again.

While the fear of new symptoms and side-effects that are update daily and stories of people my husband’s age, my child’s age being ravaged by worst case versions of Covid-19 sometimes cripple my mind and the unknown length of un-normal days stretching ahead of us keeps me from dreaming of the days when this is over, day to day feels mostly peaceful. We’ve settled into new routines and habits, like baking something different each week, school time after quiet time in the afternoon, and my husband plays games our son enjoys watching, like Animal Crossing and Kingdom Hearts, in the evenings after dinner, And if I look out across each new week, I see it tinted in that hazy, orange-yellow glow.