The first six months of 2020 have been… well, the descriptors we have for the beginning of this decade are not suitable for polite company and would get you demonetized on YouTube. That said, there have been a lot of advances and changes that have made mom-life quite a bit easier than it’s been in the past. Here are our favorite mom-life upgrades that have started to make an appearance this year, and a few things that we should be focusing on to make mom-life easier for everyone.
Pandemic Parenting Brings Us Closer Together
The first months of this new year were pretty normal, and then we all spent three months locked our homes in the midst of a global viral pandemic. Schools and offices were closed and instead of doing our own things during the work and school day, we suddenly found ourselves spending all of our time together.
We’re sure that this drove plenty of people straight into the bottle but for my household, it’s actually turned out to be a good thing. It made us all slow down a little bit and spend some actual quality time together. Sure, we were all in lockdown and didn’t have the option for anything but quality time, but we didn’t have any schedules to worry about. No one had to be anywhere. No one had clashing schedules. We don’t have to run around like headless chickens trying to keep up with everything.
There’s no telling how we’ll adapt when things start to go back to normal but for now, we’re all content in each other’s company.
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Grocery Delivery Makes Shopping a Breeze
We don’t know about you but we hate grocery shopping. A simple exercise ends up taking hours — especially with the kids in tow — and we always end up spending more than intended, even armed with a grocery list and a meal plan. It’s not an exaggeration when we say that grocery delivery has been a literal lifesaver. Instead of trying to navigate crowded grocery stores and ending up with way more than we actually need, I can place my order and have it delivered right to my door.
It’s been an actual blessing as we’ve learned to navigate our new normal during the pandemic. Many grocery delivery services offer contactless transactions so you don’t even have to worry about talking to your delivery driver. If you live in a household with someone who would be vulnerable to the flu or viruses like COVID-19, grocery delivery gives you the option to have fresh food delivered to your door without worrying about getting sick.
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The Year of the Meal Prep
Like many families, we’ve been guilty of ordering a lot more takeout than we normally would during these first few months of 2020. Sure, we can blame it on needing to support local restaurants that are currently closed due to the pandemic, but in reality, no one wants to cook when they’re stressed out. Of course, there is only so much takeout that our budget can handle, so once we got tired of pizza and Chinese food, 2020 became the year of the meal prep.
And what a difference it has made.
Instead of stressing over what we’ll make for dinner on any particular day of the week, we can go through and prepare a week or a month’s worth of dinners, throw them in the freezer and have everything we need for a tasty and often healthy meal in a fraction of the time. As an added bonus, it’s given us the time to try a lot of new recipes that we never would have attempted during our normally busy work-weeks. We’ve added more than a few new favorites to our weekly rotation.
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Things We Should Be Focusing On
While meal prepping and pandemic family time might make life easier for moms everywhere, they aren’t the only thing that we need to be worried about in 2020 if you’re going to improve mom-life for everyone. The title of Mom doesn’t just include biological moms. It encompasses step-moms and adoptive moms and biological moms who have transitioned, and dads pulling double duty and grandparents and other family members who have stepped into the role.
Modern mom-life should be a lot easier than it was 10 or 20 or 50 years ago, but it seems like we’re spending a lot of our time fighting against things that should have been resolved decades ago. The United States, for example, has one of the worst rates of maternal mortality in the world. You read that right. One of the world’s most developed countries and it can’t figure out how to reduce the number of women who die in childbirth every year.
The current presidential administration is slowly chipping away at the rights of moms who are members of the LGBT+ community. States have been passing laws to ban adoption by same-sex couples during the first months of 2020 and most recently, President Trump rolled back all protection for trans individuals previously provided by the Affordable Care Act. That means if a transgender individual needs health care, medical professionals can refuse to provide it based on their own personal or religious beliefs.
Mom-life can be amazing, but there are so many things that we have to fight in order to make it easier for everyone who has earned that title.
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Mom-Life Is Never Easy, But It Doesn’t Have to Be Hard
Being a mom is never easy, but it doesn’t have to be hard either. Little things can make our day to day life easier but it’s the big things where we need to work together. We need to stand shoulder to shoulder and work together to make the big job of being moms a little bit easier and safer for all of us.
Jennifer Landis is the founder of Mindfulness Mama, a blog where she talks all things #momlife, marriage, mindfulness, and everything in between. A thirty-something mom of two, Jennifer spends her limited free time practicing yoga and pilates, sipping tea, and reading with her littles. You can find more from Jennifer on Twitter, @JenniferELandis.
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