March 13, 2020. That is the day our family entered lockdown in support of public health due to the coronavirus pandemic. Frustrated with the inaction of our school district, I woke up that morning and sent an email to my daughter’s teacher explaining that I was pulling her out of school. Later that day the district agreed, ending classes the following Monday.

Homeschooling and working full-time is not a joke. I have been known to work hard my whole life, and I have never been so exhausted. This is a beautiful, impossible situation.

The beauty is that love for each other, our neighbors, our community, our country, and our world is what keeps us home, doing these hard things. My daughter, who is six, and I have never been so close. In this room where I try to work and she works through tears and disappointments and joys and boredom we are seeing sides of one another that had been muted for the other by the school day or the workday, unseen and unknown.

What we are doing is much less hard than others: Neither her father nor I have lost our jobs. No one in our family has been sick with COVID-19. We do not work in medicine, we do not have to face the terrifying situations of first responders — and let’s be clear, that includes not just medical professionals but also people working in grocery stores, funeral parlors, and other essential services — who are exposed to large groups of people, many of them infected, and seeing the hardest times of people’s lives. We are not part of the Black community that is dying at alarming, disproportionate rates, a reflection of the racism that is always there and always making the worst things worse.

For us it is less dramatic but also hard, just as it’s hard for everyone else. Social distancing is exaggerating the pain points of our idiosyncrasies, creating deeply personal and widely divergent horrors. While I get up at 4 a.m. trying to make it all happen and end many days feeling exhausted, defeated, and depressed by the impossible expectations to work and homeschool a delightful and small only child of many urgent needs and feelings (it is cyclical, and I’ve learned to plan for it, accept and honor the feelings, and rise to try again), I recognize that what I am locked in is the exact opposite of others locked in by themselves, haunting to pass the time.

Of course we are inexorably changed, but no, perhaps this is who we are and always were. A mother and a daughter throwing socks at each other for an indoor snowball fight on Spring Break rather than going to Disneyland, frozen in the moment created by leaders who failed us and a horrible disease continuing to rob people of their ability to breathe and stealing jobs people depend on to put food on table. Parenting my daughter is the hardest and most unrealistic and absolutely best part of this pandemic. Because of her, there is no time for fear. Because of her, time that might be spent in sorrow is instead consumed with going off the never-attainable script provided by the school district and teaching her lessons about Chernobyl, because why not. I love her and now we, too, are living through the aftermath of self-absorbed, autocratic leaders who attempted to dismiss an invisible enemy as no big deal until insufficiently impeded scientific inevitabilities took over and showed everyone.