Updated – 24.4.2023: When we reflect on the pandemic, especially the first year of it, it may seem impossible to feel any sense of hope or gratitude. But I want to reflect on this in today’s post.
You see… on the 20th of March 2020, everything changed.
Okay okay… let’s get into it. If you’d rather listen to this as a podcast, please do so using the player below:
All Change Please!
I was a little reluctant to share my thoughts on this, mainly because it was difficult to process on so many levels…
Our home lives, work lives, social lives, and even the plans we had for our future lives were all facing unprecedented change and adaptation, situated in a realm of uncertainty, for the foreseeable future.
Who would have imagined that we’d ever live through a global pandemic?
Without much notice, the world came to an abrupt halt right before our very eyes.
It was difficult to phantom the thought of having to adjust to that new ‘normal’ of lockdowns and social distancing. It forced us to all change. We spared our thoughts for the many lives stolen by that virus without much warning. Lives were lost in every almost corner of the world, with so many grieving families and horrifying stories of people taking their last breaths alone in isolation.
It was truly a tragedy of unimaginable proportions…
Then there were our front line essential workers, our healthcare professionals, and our supermarket employees. Our delivery drivers, our cleaners, our social workers, our probation workers, and our teachers. And of course, we couldn’t forget our refuse collectors, and our postal workers. Our police officers too, and everyone else who kept society running while science tried its best to defeat this virus.
I was so grateful for every one of these brave individuals, for those who put their lives at risk by facing the outside world every single day to make sure that we all could still enjoy some version of normality.
They were reporting to work every single day to care for, to feed, to protect, to teach, to deliver to, to sanitise for us and our loved ones.
Now when we look back at the gravity of this pandemic, the enormity of the sacrifices made, the tragic losses suffered and the pain experienced, suddenly, having to adapt to our then daily realities really seemed nothing more than a minor inconvenience in comparison.
It was a small sacrifice for a greater good.
Without a doubt our lives changed drastically.
Impact on Academic Life
As Scholarly Mamas, I’m sure we all have our stories to tell.
At the start of the pandemic in the UK, I began working from home only.
I was no longer traveling into London. No longer was I meeting students or colleagues face-to-face, recruiting patients for my research study, or planning for conference trips and research symposiums.
An upcoming conference I was to attend in Ireland in March 2020 was cancelled after a few weeks of limbo as we came to terms with the gravity of the pandemic. Then the decisions were made for us all. Flights had to be refunded and hotel accommodation cancelled with immediate effect.
There was no face-to-face clinical research, no in-person teaching, no in-person meetings, seminars or any other academic activity.
Zoom and MS Teams became our most used and treasured modes of communication.
Some suggested that this was the perfect time to get on with remote tasks like writing my thesis, preparing high quality research publications and finishing up those competitive grant applications we never had time for.
Personally, I struggled to see this effectively translating into practice. This would have been impossible for me, especially when I was also expected to do justice to an overnight transition to home educating our two boys (at the time, our third son wasn’t born yet).
Plus, my husband was still seeing patients every day on the front line of a healthcare crisis, so I was on my own with the boys at home during the day.
It was simply unrealistic.
Grateful For The Little Things
Despite the challenges, there was still so much to be grateful for.
I was thankful. Firstly, for my awesome husband who tried his best by doing ALL he could at home when he was not at work. This allowed me to do what I could for my research.
Secondly, for my PhD supervisor, who had been nothing but supportive and understanding. Seriously, we need more like her! She urged me to do what I needed to do to look after my family and myself. This certainly relieved so much of that pressure.
Thirdly, for my funder, a wonderful organisation that has also supported me through so many challenges of my PhD. They reached out to me directly and offered their tangible support during the pandemic. This took the form of additional funding and fellowship extensions, if needed.
In this situation, all I felt was gratitude.
It gave me hope.
Most of all though, I was grateful for life itself.
And where there was life, there was hope.
But Something Had to Give
For a couple of months, during the day, I continued home schooling our boys. At night after they were in bed, in early mornings or on my husband’s days off, I did what I could for my PhD.
This presented it’s own challenges and the main one I recall was fatigue.
I became so exhausted running on little sleep. This was hard on top of the anxiety I began to feel as the pandemic raged on.
I soon realised this system of working was unsustainable in the long term.
Around that time, I also found out that we were expecting our third child (which probably explained the extreme fatigue). I felt incredibly blessed by this wonderful news! However, the worries of being pregnant during a pandemic compounded an already emotionally charged state.
My hair suffered as well and one by one, my dreadlocks began to weaken and break.
I couldn’t get the hairdressers.
Reluctantly, I had to cut them but that’s a whole other story!
Something had to give, right?
A break from my PhD was the only way to get through this difficult period, so that’s what I did.
I was furloughed from my research post and had to temporarily ‘interrupt’ my PhD studies.
But my perspective on this is not what you might think!
Sometimes we feel like we’re drowning under the pressures of everything. That’s when we have to do what we have to do save ourselves.
Sometimes this may mean stepping away for a bit and doing something completely different for a while to keep us emotionally above water and that’s okay.
Be gentle with yourself, Mama.
It’s okay to do what you must.
Do something that sparks your creativity, and gives you a renewed sense of self and purpose. Amidst the challenges, you can still find space for hope and gratitude in this Scholarly Mama journey.
Give yourself permission to focus flexibly.
That was exactly what I did.
I changed my perception of this ‘interruption’ from my PhD. I embraced the time it afforded me with my boys, as we were able to do some amazing things together!
From celebrating a ‘lockdown birthday’, to publishing my first children’s book, to welcoming our third son, to setting up my blog and so much more…
There were still things to celebrate, despite the pandemic going on.
What’s interesting to me, is that most of these things were outside of my PhD!
If anything, it reminded me that I was more than my PhD.
I was not defined by it.
Please don’t allow your PhD to stop you from devoting time and energy to the things that bring you joy and fulfilment.
Yes, you’re a Scholarly Mama. But don’t let that rob you of your sense of hope and gratitude for the people and things you love.
On the blog, I’ve shared some of the things that kept me going during the most challenging times on this journey.
These were the things that gave me hope and purpose.
During that ‘break’, I was also able to focus more on my personal well-being, like getting back to walking for exercise, which I hadn’t even noticed I’d neglected as much as I did.
I was able to reflect deeply about how I wanted to change a few things about how I navigated the juggle-struggle.
I was able to find myself again!
Worry Within Us, Oceans Between Us
It wasn’t hard to see the impact the pandemic had in nearly every country around the world.
News broadcasts were inundating viewers with pandemic updates.
You’d have to be living under a rock, buried beneath the surface of the earth, to not know what was going on.
If you are like me, with close family all around the world, you were compelled to also follow international news networks for those updates. Plus of course, your regular telephone or video calls to family abroad to check how things were ‘on the ground’ for them too.
You appreciated those virtual interactions more than ever before because you couldn’t help but wonder just how long it was going to be before you or someone in your circle caught it.
As a Scholarly Mama, it was so hard being separated from my extended family at a time like this.
Health and safety concerns weren’t limited to those in your immediate household, but extended across the seas.
For me family (whether immediate and extended) is everything.
We didn’t need a pandemic to make us close, we’d always been, even if we were not in the same physical location.
But it did make us more appreciative of the technology which allowed us to stay in regular contact during these hard times.
Hello again, Zoom!
Never before did we need technology this much.
Living in Hope
Have you noticed how the changes imposed on us from the pandemic didn’t just alter the world around us, but had a significant internal impact?
Or is that just me?
The pandemic taught us that we are all connected, we all need each other and that the artificial barriers we construct do nothing but divide us, leading to regression rather than progression as a society.
Sadly in many ways, we’ve still got a long way to go with this, towards freedom and equality for all.
But we lived in hope.
We were reminded of the true value of human interaction and connection.
Our longing for these during a time when we couldn’t have it, forced us to immediately innovate in ways that would have taken us decades.
Literally overnight, we were forced to change our ways of life and this presented a unique opportunity to do so for the better and not the worse.
Did we emerge on this side of the pandemic with a determination to do better? Did that horrific experience bring out the best in us!
Amidst all that happened, I found myself imagining that perhaps the world emerged a better, kinder place.
Maybe it was my way of coping, as we all found new and innovative ways of doing that. But the dreamer in me, even then, desperately tried to find the silver lining in all of it.
As a Scholarly Mama on journeys of becoming, I needed to hold onto whatever hope and gratitude I could muster.
My wish was that in the aftermath of the pandemic, the world would have emerged a happier and better place.
That people would interact with each other more and show more kindness.
That academia would be more sympathetic to the needs of working parents.
That families would seek to spend more quality time together.
That we would all chose to live a life of purpose. No more putting off all the things we always wanted to do.
I hoped that we would we seek more joy in the present moment, rather than thinking that joy could come only come from finishing that PhD, getting that promotion or securing that ideal academic job.
I lived in hope that we would wake up from our comfortable slumber and rise to the challenge of creating a better world for our children to inherit.
That period of global vulnerability gave us so much to reflect upon and taught us so many lessons.
That old way of life was no more, at least for those who were insightful and reflective enough to see and learn from those lessons!
This experience gave me fresh eyes and a new perspective so I’m holding onto my new specs like my life depended on it.
Because it really does…
Over to You
As I close, it’s been hard to think about living through the pandemic.
But these were just some of my personal reflections, I’d love to know yours.
What were you most grateful for?
If you’ve lost a loved one during this pandemic year, my heart goes absolutely out to you. I sincerely hope you received the support you needed to help you through the unimaginable pain of your loss.
If you didn’t lose a loved one, did your life change drastically in other ways? Did you revert back to your ‘old life’ or did you move forward with a new outlook?
And now, what are your hopes for the future?
What do you want to implement them in your life today?
Challenge those comfort zones and unhealthy work tendencies and join me on the journey of becoming the best Scholarly Mama you can be, full of hope and gratitude!
Much love and gratitude,
[…] Back to school 2021 is finally upon us, and it presents a new and interesting dichotomy. COVID-19 has caused us all immense turmoil over the past 18 months. […]