Working and Parenting in the Pandemic: There is No Such Thing as Balance

by Erin Lunde, MT-BC
​Sound Matters Music Therapy, LLC

I write this as we approach the holiday season for many. As a parent to a Minneapolis Public Schools student, we are tasked with 100% distance learning. The COVID-19 pandemic is a worsening threat. My 83-year-old mother-in-law is in our quarantine pod, and we five in my immediate family hardly ever step foot out in the community. Not until there is a vaccine available to us all.

Knowing this, we are bracing ourselves for an entire academic year here at home.
What does that mean for my kids? For me? And yet another challenge: What does it mean for my private practice?
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I know I am not alone in this.

​In many senses, we are all doing this together. So how does a working family do such a thing? I asked some other music therapist parents out there how they’re handling this crisis.
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“Our training in music therapy has helped because we have to be adaptive all the time,” says Sarah Woolever, MM, MT-BC. The mother of two boys, four-year-old Elgin and seven-year-old Declan, Woolever had to scramble this spring when the shutdown hit. She works as a music therapist at Children’s Minnesota in the NICU, and she had to take days off the first few weeks to accommodate her two little boys at home. She was able to have a nanny two days a week and have the grandparents watch the kids some, too, but her work at the hospital was necessary.

Woolever says that one of the harder changes that COVID-19 brought to her workplace was seeing families kept apart. Having a baby in the NICU has of course its own set of precautions and adding to that what the pandemic threatens kept many parents from even being able to see their baby for days while they quarantined elsewhere. Technology like FaceTime offers only so much connection, but likely any is better than none.

In all of this change, Woolever says that her boys’ relationship has changed for the positive. I see that in my own kids, too. My seven-year-old Sam and his sister, five-year-old Alice, play together much more often now than they fight. Their baby brother Frits is a shared object of affection for the two, which has been really nice.

Twin Cities Music Therapy Services music therapist Steve Sullivan, MT-BC notes that he is grateful for the time his family has spent together. “Work and school can be such a rat race,” Sullivan says, “where the minority of your time is actually spent all of us together. So this is a gift of time that we wouldn’t have had otherwise, with many good memories being formed.” Sullivan lives with his wife Laura and seven-year-old son, Jeffrey. “I am surprised how fast we all adapted to the change. If things ever get back to normal, that will be a big adjustment too.”

But I have noticed changes in my first grader that haven’t been all positive. The coronavirus, or just “the virus” is a big stressor for us all, but to my Sam it is an anxiety that keeps him from any little bit of live interaction with others. When we went to the park in nice weather, he wouldn’t leave my side. Yes, this was very safe and wise of him. But he also has trouble sleeping at night and worries about death.

Beth Engelking, MT-BC and Neurologic Music Therapist has a five-year-old daughter who also expresses anxiety about this time. “When I would leave for work,” Engelking says, “[my daughter] would try to block the door. She’d hang on me and cry. She said that she was afraid that I’d get coronavirus and die.” Engelking works as a music therapist at Gillette Children’s Hospital. In the spring, her hours were cut in half but are now back to normal. She sees patients in person and also shows a weekly Facebook Live music therapy session to help patients and community maintain some kind of social connectedness.

Because Engelking works out of the house and her husband, a software engineer, works from home, she is the one to do the errands and shopping. She showers upon coming home to try to avoid transmitting anything she might have picked up outside, but is then attending to her daughter, Amelia. “Amelia doesn’t have siblings to interact with, so she’s completely dependent on us for socialization,” Engelking explains. “She needs constant attention, especially from me, which makes it hard for me to get anything done. Amelia particularly hates it when I’m on the computer and she’ll do things like push buttons on the keyboard and shove me away from my desk.”

Now that the holidays approach, the struggle is new again. The spring was strange, to be sure, but there were only a few weeks of distance learning to endure before summer arrived. Summer happened for us with very little travel to see family and no camps or sports that we enjoyed in years past. After the first few weeks of school for my first grader, I confess I was heartbroken and discouraged. My little guy’s teachers seemed to be on top of all of the technology and are all very communicative. I am happy that they are trying to achieve community, even if it’s through screens. But my child requires peer modeling. He craves social support and outlet. Having recess with kids other than his little sister is necessary to him. In the first few days I adapted on the fly all of the tools I have for him; seating, writing, rugs, etc., to fit his needs. And I have a long list of other tools I need to acquire, all of which would be ready for him in the classroom.

I can’t provide him with the other kids or the teachers who know how to educate him. 

And what about work? The clients I had been serving in February and March were ready to start back up in August and September, but now that is certainly not going to happen. I see adults with development and intellectual disability in group homes and day programs. Right now, even if the pandemic were under control, I cannot see a way for my work to survive while my son and I “do” school. The other night while I was awake with my baby, I thought, “This is the year of No.” The year wherein I say No to anything that is not the family. Does that mean I cannot work outside the home for months to come? Maybe. I don’t know yet. My practice is surviving, but only just. Some of my contractors were able to provide outdoor sessions this summer. But with the cold weather, this has changed. Only a couple of my clients were able and willing to participate in virtual sessions over the summer and fall.

But telehealth is going to be the only way to go for now. Mike LimBybliw, MT-BC works at Twin Cities Music Therapy Services. He says, “In my work, I have had to shed my expectations even more than I used to. I have had to be a quick study with Zoom and Google Meet. I have had to rely more on recorded music than ever before and not beat myself up about it.” LimBybliw has three kids, a six-year-old son, a three-year-old daughter and an 11-month-old baby boy. He sees two music therapy clients per week via telehealth and has also taken on one Generation POUND®️ Group on Zoom. He has had to learn numerous new skills fast.

“I think it’ll take several months before I’m ready to reflect back on all the changes and things that I had to learn quickly without getting overwhelmed,” Beth Engelking says about her own work. There is a lot of flexibility that we music therapists inherently have, and the independence that our kids may hopefully learn in this time.

We just have to make it work, Sarah Woolever laughed. We’ve always been adaptive. We are music therapists who walk into rooms and have to assess the needs in a moment. In a sense, we had to do that with our families and our work in this time.
       
My kids and I have found something of a rhythm in all this. Somehow we are all still speaking to one another at the end of the day. Somehow we all continue to try our best. Patience and grace are hard skills to master, but if anything hopeful comes out of this crisis, maybe it’s the proof that we as music therapists, as parents, as people in this community, can do hard things.