What the Pandemic Taught Me About Work, Life, and Community
Early in the morning on the last day of 2019, Christine and I met outside The Haven, a coworking space in Bend, Oregon, that represents the promise and the peril of the future of work. Everything about The Haven feels perfect: the Deschutes River views, the thoughtfully appointed office spaces with funky lamps and practical whiteboards, the room temperature. There’s beer and kombucha and cold-brew on tap. The restrooms are gender-inclusive. In the lobby, a selfie wall with neon pink lettering invites you to Make magic happen!
But it also feels not perfect, like The Haven is selling an ideal of work that’s exclusive. Not everyone can work how they want, where they want, when they want, on what they want. Not everyone is cared for and welcome in their workplace. Not everyone’s job is to make magic. Even as a writer, which some people call a craft, I spend most of my time typing boring old words. Now especially, the idea of making magic on your passion project in a cool coworking space seems like a quaint before-times dream.
Eva and Christine in the before times, after a Life I Want book brainstorm.
But on December 31, 2019, all of that still seemed possible, and Christine and I sat in an Ideation Room at The Haven, away from our respective husbands and sets of twins, to brainstorm a plan for our book about a future of work that delivers the life you want.
Early in 2020, we finished a first draft of our book proposal. Then COVID hit.
By mid-March, I was locked down in my home in Australia with my husband, Adam, and our twin fourth graders, Madeleine and Jackson, trying to work, learn, and do all things together. We live in Victoria, the state hardest hit by COVID, and we spent nearly 150 days in two periods of lockdown. Our kids were in home school, and we were allowed to leave the house for one of four reasons: to shop, exercise, get care, or give care. In our rural part of the state, we are lucky to have miles and miles of dirt tracks and empty bushland to explore. But for nearly five months, we saw almost no one outside our family.
Before COVID, I planned to spend the year reporting and writing the Life I Want book. Instead, I spent it probing my own relationship with work: how it formed, what work and life during a pandemic taught me about what I’m missing, and how we need to rewrite the rules of work.
Not My Mother’s Daughter
Just as our second lockdown ended, Christine and I joined a writing workshop led by Carrie Frye, an editor I think of as a book whisperer. She helps authors bring their books to life. We joined because we were stuck: We had finally wrestled our idea into a proposal, but when COVID got serious, it felt like we had to rethink everything: What does it mean to imagine a better future of work when the future of everything is uncertain?
Carrie asked our group to set intentions for the program she called “Beastober” in honor of the beasts we were taming during the month of October, which would end with a blue moon on Halloween. I decided to focus inward. If I could write about my journey, that might illuminate a narrative arc for our book.
In preparation for our third weekly Zoom call, Carrie invited us to bring an object that’s emblematic of ourselves or our writing project for a show and tell. I racked my brain about what to share. The Mont Blanc pen that Adam gave me that I didn’t use for years because it was too fancy and I wasn’t that kind of writer? The penguin tchotchkes I have collected because, to me, the short, fat, black-and-white animal that lives in snow, mates for the long term, and equitably divides family labor is the perfect creature?
Notecards and newspaper clippings from Eva’s birth and early childhood.
I rummaged through the everything drawer in my office and found a large envelope my mom gave me years ago. It contains a jumble of items from my birth and early childhood. There are notecards congratulating my parents on their new daughter. There’s a hospital card listing my birth details: I was delivered at 2:03 a.m. in room 565 by a doctor called Jorgenson. There’s also a booklet I made of construction paper for a first grade Mother’s Day project. It’s a mix of childhood growth data (I stood 51 and a quarter inches high and weighed 53 pounds) and sentimental messages my classmates and I were instructed to copy in our neatest handwriting (“To my Mother, very fair, who gives her children tender care”). There’s also a ditto-machine copy of a classroom fill-in-the-blank writing exercise: “Mothers are for…”
Jimmy: “Helping you when you’re hurt and when they tell you what to do and what not to do.”
Beckie: “Talking to you when your Dad is not home and you want to talk to her.”
Eva: “Loving and caring for you.”
The booklet reminded me how awkward I felt during grade school “Maple Bars for Moms” celebrations because my mom was never there.
I was 3 when my parents divorced, and not long afterward, Mom moved to Portland for medical school at Oregon Health Sciences University, which was heavily recruiting women in the early ‘80s. OHSU may have wanted more women, but attending its program wasn’t possible for mothers with young children, so Mom went to Portland and my brother, Kurt, and I stayed with Dad in Medford. Every designated holiday, Mom would drive five hours south on I-5 to pick us up, and then turn right back around to drive north, stopping once for double scoops of bubble gum ice-cream at Rice Hill.
After medical school, Mom moved to Seattle for her pediatric residency. Our five-hour drives stretched to eight, and we traded summer day camps at the Portland Parks and Rec for the overnight YMCA camp on Orcas Island. When Mom took call, her roommate Cindy looked after us at Mom’s house in Capitol Hill, or we went with Mom to the hospital and slept in an on-call room. One summer evening, when I was 11, Mom and Kurt walked to Volunteer Park to play tennis, leaving me home alone. At the time, the Green River Killer was still at large, raping and strangling women and girls across Washington state. I was terrified I would be next, so I decided to hide in my bedroom until Mom and Kurt returned. Walking up the stairs, my eyes fell on a pair of men’s shoes on the landing. By the time I realized the shoes were actually the metal base of a vacuum cleaner, not the Green River Killer, I was already sprinting to the park.
I spent a lot of my childhood afraid of being alone. In a recurring dream, I was sitting behind my dad, who was driving our old Dodge van north on I-5. We didn’t speak. At some point, Dad always disappeared, and the van kept going, with me sitting alone in the back. It didn’t take much to interpret my dream: I felt abandoned by my mom. She left her kids for her career. Did that mean Dad would leave, too?
He never did, but I resolved that when I had children, I would never let them feel alone. I would set up my life and work so I had ample time to be with my family.
Pandemic Season 1: Energy
In the beginning of the pandemic, Adam joked that Australia would do just fine. “We know how to quarantine,” he said, looking at our Australian cattle dog, Daisy, whom we adopted in California and repatriated to her native country. Before we moved here, she underwent a series of shots not required in the States and spent her first two weeks in Australia in a quarantine kennel just for pets. During the height of panic-buying, I overheard Adam on the phone with his sister, reassuring her that he wasn’t worried about the empty meat shelves at our local Woolies. “Lots of roos in the paddock,” he said.
Adam working in the winery he built one piece at a time. Photo by @artisanalphoto
Adam was right: We had almost everything we needed for the pandemic. We live on a rural property with plenty of space for social distancing, and we both work for ourselves, so we have been able to scale back work to take on new home-teaching responsibilities. We also live in a country that has taken the virus seriously, and Australia has a strong social safety net, including affordable healthcare.
Not that we were planning for a pandemic, but we did set up our lives for this five years ago, when we made the move to Australia from the San Francisco Bay Area, exchanging our full-time jobs for self-employment: Adam works as a winemaker running his own vineyard and winery, and I work as a freelance writer and editor. We met climbing and both love the outdoors, so when we had kids, we intentionally decided to build work around our lives so we had time and space for family adventures.
I started thinking about crafting my life this way when I was 25. I had just moved from New York, where I was friendless and bored, fact-checking at a women’s magazine, to San Francisco, where I got a job at an investigative reporting magazine and found my people through a local outdoor club. I was happy and wanted to identify the fundamentals in my life that I needed to stay happy. Sitting with a friend at the People’s Café on Haight Street, I sketched out a rudimentary pie chart illustrating the three things I thought I needed: people, for proximity to friends and family; place, for how close I was to nature; and profession, for job fulfillment and income. I imagined I would eventually go freelance so I had more time for life outside of work.
When I met Adam two years later, I found a kindred spirit. After a career in the Australian Navy and then in corporate winemaking, Adam dreamed of running his own wine brand in Australia. In 2005, he bought an old sheep paddock in western Victoria, less than an hour from a national park, and we began making plans to have a family and eventually move there to raise our kids. Over the next 10 years, Adam traveled from the U.S. to Australia, planting vines and slowly building his winery. When he came across deals in his corporate winemaking job, he bought equipment and carefully packed everything into a black suitcase he lugged to Australia. He was like the Detroit factory worker in that Johnny Cash song, building his winery one piece at a time.
In 2016, we made our move, and while there have been some kinks, for the most part, we have life balance. Rather than working 50 hours a week, I end my work day when the kids get out of school. I like to say I’m ambitious till 3 o’clock. Free from employer constraints, I can select the projects that are fulfilling and pay me what I need to earn, so I’m making more money in fewer hours. Rural living is also less expensive than urban life.
Madeleine and Jackson waiting for Eva at the tree at the junction of the short loop.
In a normal year, I take time off when the kids have school holidays. When our first lockdown started in mid-March, I was able to switch gears and be the parent my kids needed when their school went remote. I threw myself into the role of homeschool teacher, enthusiastically making plans not just to help my kids learn but to learn with them. Together, we researched the seven highest summits on each continent, trying to decipher technical papers on the geologic formation of Vinson Massif. We did a deep read of Bruce Pascoe’s Young Dark Emu and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The kids biked with me on my daily runs, riding far ahead and climbing a tree to wait for me at the junction of our short loop. Eventually, the kids and I wanted more independence, so they took the dogs and rode home via the short loop, while I continued on a longer run, returning home to find them snacking on their post-ride Tim-Tams.
There were some revolts. My daughter pointed out that if she had to read my books, I should have to read hers, so she loaned me her prized copy of A Dog’s Life, by Ann M. Martin. Madeleine also didn’t want to ride for exercise every day, so I endured an embarrassing 3 minutes and 24 seconds trying to learn the moves to “Boot Scootin’ Baby.” To make sure everyone was on board with all of our activities, the kids and I created a chart with a column of different things we should do every day (exercise, read, cuddle) and things we should do a few times a week (dessert, writing, laundry).
It was my first season of the pandemic, and I was full of energy. Of course that didn’t last.
Season 2: Conflict
In May, I decided to take on some paid work. I missed tapping into my professional identity, and I was terrible at teaching my own kids. Most of our lessons ended in a yelling match. I wanted something to feel good about, something I could accomplish. But as I devoted more time to work and less to my kids, trouble started to brew.
One morning, I walked out of my office and straight into a mini mystery: In the dining room, a chair was lying on its side, a large kitchen knife was in the middle of the table, and my son told me there was a hole in his bedroom wall. I hastily emailed a client to say it was unlikely I’d get to his edits: "Just me and some kids who are fighting a lot today, but I’ll see if I get a chance to look at this. Sorry I haven’t been more present. Juggling remote school and work has been very, very difficult."
The same month I sent that email, 865,000 women left the workforce, and one in four women were considering downshifting their careers or leaving work entirely. When I tried to find the source for the second factoid, I stumbled upon another telling data point: One in four working moms cry alone at least once a week because they’re so overwhelmed with work, childcare, and household chores. That survey was conducted in 2014.
I don’t count myself among the women who have been pushed out of the labor force, which is the extreme outcome of work-life conflict. But I have cried alone because that conflict became untenable during the pandemic. When our second lockdown began in July, I started to feel unsuccessful at everything I used to do well: parenting, writing, even running.
I didn’t know myself anymore; I was having an identity crisis. Every time I sat down to write, I was distracted by the unruly home school outside my office door. When it was my turn to teach, I was impatient for the kids to finish their school assignments so I could get back to my unfinished work assignments. In pre-COVID times, my identities at work and at home were neatly cleaved, existing in distinct spaces and organized into tidy blocks of time. Now all of my identities were colliding under one roof.
In 1985, the social psychologist Roy Baumeister wrote that there are two kinds of identity crises: an identity deficit and an identity conflict. The first is a crisis of motivation: What are my goals? What do I value? What should I do? That crisis sounds like writers’ block. The second is a crisis of overwhelm: How can I possibly do it all? Baumeister points out that identity conflicts “may tend to result from extraordinary developments.”
No wonder I had an identity conflict: COVID thwarted my very intentionally planned system for work-life balance. This felt terrible, but it gave me empathy for the situation my mother found herself in so many years ago. Among the things I found in the envelope Mom gave me with the Mother’s Day booklet was a newspaper clipping announcing my birth. The entry is short, but it includes my dad’s full name and professional credentials: Recently board certified in internal medicine, he was working as a cardiology fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. There’s just one line about my mom, and her identity is completely erased: “Mrs. Dienel is the former Barbara Cloyd.”
“I became outraged by the news stories of women downshifting from work. Where were the stories about work downshifting for parents?”
It makes sense that Mom wanted to reclaim her professional identity when she was newly divorced. What doesn’t make sense is that in order to do so, she had to sacrifice her identity as a mother.
Like many problems, the pandemic has highlighted just how unfair the system of work still is for working moms—even for me, who put strict boundaries around work. As tensions from work-life conflict boiled in my home, I became outraged by the news stories of women downshifting from work. Where were the stories about work downshifting for parents? I felt a ray of hope when I profiled Leslie Forde in August. Forde, who started a business in the middle of the pandemic to help companies fix work for working parents, has a theory: If we can fix work for moms—the people most marginalized by the system of work—we can fix work for everyone.
Around the time I sent my “sorry I can’t be more present” email to my client, I decided to have an honest conversation with him about my work-life conflict. The cofounder of an urban school in Brooklyn with a mission to help high-needs students, my client had hired me on a retainer for a certain number of hours per month. Any hours he didn’t use would roll over to the next month, and I was worried about the accumulation of work hours I couldn’t fit in. A father of two kids himself, my client told me not to worry. Just do the hours you can. One of the first projects I helped him write was about how to reimagine education. His theory about education echoes Forde’s theory about work: If we can fix education for those who are most marginalized by the system, we can fix education for everyone.
Season 3: Community
In mid-September, I was spending sleepless nights doomscrolling Twitter. I lived with a constant sense of dread, my heart a deadweight sinking into a pit of despair in my stomach. That’s when I learned my hometown was on fire.
I left Southern Oregon when I was 17 and hadn’t thought much about the Rogue Valley in years. But watching the MedfordAlert tweets about the Almeda Fire decimating whole towns in Jackson County—my son’s namesake—my tears started to fall, and I couldn’t stop crying. That was the community that shaped me.
“Melbourne’s lockdown, which restricted people to a 5-kilometer radius around their homes, made me think about what I would want in a 5-kilometer radius: people who make me feel alive and cared for and places that bring me joy. But do I have that community now?”
Meanwhile, a hemisphere away, we were under a strict lockdown. The lockdown was the most severe in Melbourne: People were allowed out of their homes for just an hour a day, and they could not go beyond a 5-kilometer radius. Even though this rule didn’t apply to regional Victoria (such a restriction would prevent us from getting groceries), it got me thinking about what I would want in a 5-kilometer radius. Who are the people who make me feel alive and cared for? What are the places that bring me joy? Do I have that kind of community now?
That question forced me to confront a feeling of loneliness I have had since we moved to Australia. We live in a rural farming community, and I work for myself, mostly with clients overseas. In four and a half years here, I have made just two close friends, one of whom lives in my town and the other lives a couple hours away, by the ocean. Adam’s family lives on the other side of the country.
During the lockdown, Eva and her family started a tradition of family sleepovers on Saturday nights.
The thing I do have here is my immediate family, and during the pandemic, we developed a Saturday night tradition of sleeping over in our living room. Adam and I drag the mattress off our bed and into the living room, where we situate it in front of the couch. Then the kids push the ottoman next to the bed. When everything is in place, the bed, the ottoman, and the couch are all level, creating an enormous bed-filled room. Then we snuggle close in our messy nest of pillows and blankets, humans and dogs.
It’s pure love, and my family means the world to me. But they’re also not enough. The pandemic exposed something that’s been missing in my life since we moved here: community—that fabric of connection that makes me feel, at the best of times, that I belong, that I fit in, that I’m seen and valued, and, at the worst of times, that I’m safe and cared for. We are lucky to live in a country that takes care of its citizens, but I still feel like an outsider in my community.
“As Americans, we embrace ideals of self-reliance and individuality that come at the expense of community and connection. But these fundamental American values are toxic, and work culture is at the heart of it.”
The author Mia Birdsong writes about this in her book, How We Show Up: As Americans, we embrace ideals of self-reliance and individuality that come at the expense of community and connection. But these fundamental American values are toxic, and work culture is at the heart of it, perpetuating the idea that we are self-made, that if we just pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and work hard enough, we’ll achieve the American Dream. Birdsong calls out this myth: “The people winning at the American Dream are some disconnected, unsatisfied, lonely people.” She’s right, I am. “We are living in a contradiction,” she adds. “We are made for interdependence, connection, and love, but part of a culture that espouses the opposite.” Birdsong’s whole book is a prescription for a way of living in community that can help us rewrite these values. “Reclaiming and reinventing family, friendship, and community is a process we do with our family, friends, and community,” she writes.
When our second lockdown came to an end in regional Victoria, my friend Ruth came up from the coast to say at her family’s farm near us. On Saturday morning, I met her at her gate, and we slowly walked the short loop that I run with the kids. She told me both of her parents had moved into assisted living facilities, and her work as the head of well-being for a large transportation company had been very stressful. She was relieved to have a weekend away. As we walked, Daisy ran ahead scouting for kangaroos, and Tess, a kelpie pup we adopted after she failed her farm dog test (she’s afraid of sheep), kept dropping a stick at our feet, endlessly hopeful we’d give it a toss. Ruth ignored Tess and asked how I was faring. I told her about my loneliness.
Normally, this time of year, my family would be getting ready to travel back to Oregon for the kids’ school holidays, which last from mid-December through the end of January. We stay for seven weeks in Bend, where my mom and her husband and my dad and his wife have retired. It’s sweetly ironic that my parents grew up together in the same town in Pennsylvania, and more than 40 years after their divorce, they chose the same town in Oregon for retirement.
Deschutes River view from one of Eva’s favorite running trails in Bend, Oregon.
I feel at home in Bend. It’s not where I grew up, but I spent many winter weekends there, skiing at Mt. Bachelor, and many summer weekends hiking in the Three Sisters Wilderness and running the trails around the Deschutes. I spent the summer of 1996 as an intern at the Bend Bulletin covering the wildfire beat. Unlike here, I feel part of the community in Bend. There are places I love: the library, Jackson’s Corner for pizza, Mt. Bachelor for skiing, El Sancho for tacos, South Sister for hiking, Cowgirl Cash for vintage boots, Foxtail for marionberry pie, and Shevlin Park for trail runs. And there are people I love, beyond just my family, people who make me feel at home.
I told Ruth that the pandemic made me feel more homesick than usual. We won’t be able to travel back to Oregon this year, and the isolation of the lockdowns made me question whether this is the place I want to be. I told her I was terrified of sharing these feelings with Adam. What happens if the life he wants is here, and the life I want is on the other side of the world? Ruth encouraged me to talk to Adam anyway. “You deserve to be happy,” she said. “It’s OK to ask for a reset.”
Adam and I have started to have this conversation, and we’re still figuring things out, but one thing is clear: Whatever happens, we will choose the life we want together, as a family, taking into account what each of us needs to be happy. For me, this means living and working in community. I was surprised how much my work was a source of solace this year, making me feel connected with people who value me, not just my work. The magic of my work was less about what I was doing than whom I was doing it with. To live the life I want, I now know I need community, inside and outside of work, that provides support, care, joy, love, connection, and a sense of belonging. That’s what I’ll be looking for in the next chapter of my work and life, and it’s filling me with hope.
The Stupidest Superhero
Victoria is on its 47th day of zero new COVID cases. Our state is fully unlocked, and we have begun seeing friends again. The connections have been a balm. Recently, I was driving my son to pick up his friend for a playdate, and Jackson asked if I wanted to hear about the world’s stupidest superhero. Of course I did. “Once there was a man, who was bitten by a man, and he woke up…a man!”
The joke got me thinking about the question I used to ask everyone I profiled for my original “Life I Want” blog (the predecessor to this one). I started that blog because I wanted to learn from other people who had gone against the grain to build their work around their life rather than letting work dictate their life. I had a theory that people who were successful at this had tapped into some kind of internal superpower, and I asked everyone what that was. My question was inspired by a character in Ruth Ozeki’s book, A Tale for the Time Being. Jiko, a 104-year-old Zen Buddhist nun, teaches her great granddaughter, Nao, who is lost in life, to tap into her supapawa! and wake up to her life.
When I asked about their superpower, the people I interviewed told me different things: Rue Mapp, the founder of Outdoor Afro, said she has vision. Bill Chambers, an Australian country singer-songwriter, told me he can tell stories from the heart. Rick Ridgeway, a mountaineer who now leads Patagonia’s social and environmental initiatives, said he learned early in life how to activate his passion.
Listening to Jackson’s joke, I realized my question was limiting: It’s true that exceptional qualities (and privilege) allow people to create work that gives them the life they want. But it’s not just superheroes with superpowers who deserve a good life; we mortals do, too.
Reflecting on the three seasons I experienced in 2020, I realize how privileged I have been: to live in a country that provides a social safety net; to have had the opportunity to create work for myself that gives me the energy, time, space, and financial security to downshift when my family needs me; to have a partner who values my happiness as much as his own. I trust that I’ll be able to continue pursuing the life I want, and I recognize that’s not because of any innate superpower I possess, but rather heaps of privilege.
But having privilege shouldn’t be the requirement for living the life you want. When Christine and I started this project, I asked her what it meant to live the life she wanted. She said it meant being able to use her skills and experience to serve, while spending abundant time and energy on herself, her family, and other people and things that she cares about. Then she asked me the same question.
What I want is for my kids to have the option to create the kind of work that will give them the life they want. I don’t want them to have to choose between work and family; there should be good jobs that allow for both professional and personal fulfillment. I don’t won’t them to feel tied to a job for basic needs like healthcare, housing, and education; the government should provide those things. I want them to feel accepted, valued, and a sense of belonging wherever they work. And most importantly, I don’t want this just for my kids. I want it for their friends, and the friends of their friends—for everyone.
“The pandemic has left the future uncertain, and that gives us a critical window of time to rewrite the rules—including the rules for work, and the underlying values that hold them up. ”
Back at The Haven this time last year, Christine and I filled a white board with myths we have accepted about work, like “my work is my identity,” and “my work will provide me with everything I need.” We were puzzling about what we could do to bust these myths, to expose the flawed system of work for what it was.
Then came COVID.
The virus laid bare the grim ironies of our work system: That the people working the jobs deemed essential in a crisis—the grocery store clerks, delivery drivers, childcare providers, and elder care aides—are also some of the most undervalued: the lowest paid, most precarious, and least likely to have health insurance and paid sick leave. The crisis also shined a light on how people charged with saving our lives and caring for our loved ones lack the basic resources they need to do their work. Under normal conditions, work as we know it is preventing many of us from living the lives we want; in a crisis, it’s putting lives at risk.
This is our moment for generational change. The pandemic has left the future uncertain, and that gives us a critical window of time to rewrite the rules—including the rules for work, and the underlying values that hold them up. One thing that needs to change is how we value work. Right now, we define the value of work in strict economic terms. It’s time to redefine work in human terms. After all, work has an outsized influence on our lives, defining our identity, location, community, structure, lifestyle, and purpose. Work forms the undercurrent of our lives, carrying us when it’s going well, and sinking us when it isn’t. Work feeds us, giving us meaning and the means to live. But it also leaves us hungry, for time and space and connection.
It’s time to reclaim the power we’ve given work—for ourselves, our families, and our communities. It’s time to imagine a future of work that gives us the life we want.
Main image by @artisanalphoto.
