Weeks later, single mother strives for normalcy in abnormal times
“Check back in three weeks,” Rhonda McDonald, a single mother, told me last month. “See if my hair is standing on end.”
It was still spring break then: no schoolwork, no working from home. Instead of traveling, McDonald, her three kids and her mother were all at home, getting the hang of social distancing.
Structure, McDonald thought, was key to making stay-at-home life work. It gave a rhythm to their days, an appearance of normalcy.
Each spring-break day at 9 a.m., she had the boys, 15 and 16, run five laps around a park near their house in Third Ward. Then they were given assignments, such as organizing the medicine cabinet.
Their toddler sister had two story times per day, plus craft time and instruction, things like tracing her letters. There were movie nights. There were board games.
But how, McDonald and I both wondered, would that structure hold up once the boys resumed schoolwork and she restarted her job? How much normalcy could she build in these abnormal times?
Sebastian, 16, had liked the idea of home schooling. Away from the noisy distractions of Lamar High School, he predicted, he’d make all A’s. Nigel, 15, wasn’t so enthusiastic: He likes noisy distractions — the trips to meet friends at Dave & Buster’s or the movies.
Divya, the 4-year-old, bridles most of all at being cooped up. “The bad germs are still out there,” McDonald tells her.
McDonald put everyone on a strict schedule. They were all supposed to go for a walk early every morning. And sometimes the boys do join her and Divya; usually not.
Then it’s time for work. McDonald goes to her home office. And Divya hangs out near her or upstairs with McDonald’s mom.
Schoolwork, she told the boys, was their job, and now they were to treat it like one. They’d home
school from 8:30 until 4, with an hour’s break for lunch. (Sure, some of their friends don’t wake up until 11. But the boys knew better than to try that.)
They do at least start each morning on time, teeth brushed at 8:30, opening their schoolissued laptops and checking in for “office hours” with their teachers.
Mostly they work on their own. After awhile, they get drowsy. Sometimes they fall asleep.
To rouse them, McDonald has instituted “class changes” — an hourly schedule where the boys pick up their laptops and move to a new spot in the house. “You’ve got to keep your blood circulating!” she tells them.
If a snack would help them stay awake, she says, then fine: They can snack.
Now the problem is that they stand in the pantry, both of them together, munching, for 15 minutes at a time. “Get out!” she shouts, when she notices.
She’s been cooking them lunch every day, too, but she’s threatening to quit that job. “I’m fine with being the home-school principal and IT person,” she says. “But the lunch lady? The lunch lady isn’t being paid enough.”
McDonald is a private client manager for Moët Hennessy USA. In normal times, she travbeen els frequently to Europe, and to the company’s U.S. headquarters in New York. But mainly she works out of her home office.
Her days feel different now, though — and not just because there are teenagers grazing in her pantry. Suddenly, the rest of her company is working at home too. And now, instead of talking with her on the phone, they’re in Zoom meetings.
Moët Hennessy is a luxurygoods conglomerate, and normally, its employees look as composed and coolly perfect as a flute of champagne. The coronavirus, though, has upended that.
Moët Hennessy, she says, has good about recognizing that employees have real lives, and that working from home is necessarily messy. On company Zoom meetings, it’s fine that her colleagues have to get up to tend a fussy baby, or that McDonald’s daughter suddenly decides to crawl into her lap.
She has Zoom meetings with clients, too. “There’s no makeup!” she marvels. “None of us is wearing it. Not in Italy, France or the U.K.!”
Free of foundation all these weeks, her skin glows.
On Friday, she’ll host her first social-distancing event for clients: a Zoom champagne gathering for women. That, she thinks, calls for making a new effort at her appearance — on getting at least somewhat closer to her old self.
She’ll curl her hair, and wear some big, bling-y earring, a nice top, and eyeliner and lipstick. She’ll move her laptop away from her desk, where the Zoom view is of a stack of boxes, and to a spot at the dining-room table, where she’s carefully staged the room behind her.
Things won’t really be back to normal, of course. But at least on the laptop screen, they’ll look that way.