7 Ways Coronavirus Is Transforming How You Experience 'Home'

Pre-coronavirus, our homes were not a mandatory office, and we were not confined to those homes. In some ways, these facts made home, home. When I wrote on March 6 that: “Every home is a foreign place at first…,” I couldn’t imagine how different the world would look today. On that day, Cameroon, Columbia, and Vatican City confirmed their first coronavirus cases. They were among seven countries to do so. Iran topped 7,000 cases, and Italy took center stage in an increasingly grim turn of events. Colleagues in China joined calls from their studies, living rooms, and bedrooms - anywhere they could find some quiet. Still, home remained unchanged for most people. 

On March 9, Italy told its 60 million residents to stay home. South Korea held its breath as it reported a 10-day decline in cases. And in America, a basketball star touched microphones at a press conference. Days later, the NBA canceled games and Broadway postponed shows. More countries imposed travel restrictions and people panic-bought. Since then, ‘home’ has become ubiquitous: stay-at-home notices, home-schooling, work-from-home, even home delivery. And with that, coronavirus is changing the way we experience, think and feel about home. 

1. Rediscovering Home, Family and Self

More than one billion people are on lockdown due to the pandemic. For many of them, gone are most kinds of trips - business trips, vacations, work and school commutes, trips to places of worship or entertainment, and even walks to the park, playground, and the neighbors'. This means the vast majority of people are spending almost all their time at home. If this applies to you, home might become a great catalyst for change. You might start with noticing things. First, you'll notice the small things that need fixing - a blown lightbulb in the hallway; a crack in the bathroom wall; a loose doorknob. Then it'll be your family or people you live with. Your partner’s new hair color, your kids' sudden growth spurt, or that your roommate is actually nicer than you thought. Then there'll be you. If you live alone, you might question that decision or reaffirm it. You will also learn who and what you value if you pay close attention to how you're spending your free time. For example, how are you using the time previously reserved for commutes and errands? Are you learning a new skill? Watching more TV? Reading or connecting with friends? Or are you working more? More than anything else, being home all the time under these circumstances will test your mettle. For parents with school-aged children, how is your parent/employee/teacher, all-in-one gig going? Not so well? You’re not alone. If you’re knocking it out of the park, do share your tips and tricks in the comments section.

Then you'll evolve. And when you do, you might notice for the first time how strangely familiar, yet foreign, your home seems. You may even admit to yourself that you’re gone from home way more than you'd like. And you might do something about it. Like have more meals with your family, and without the distraction of incessant texts and emails about work. Or you might not. Maybe you've been doing these all along. Either way, you will notice. And noticing, like awareness, is an essential catalyst for action and therefore, a gift unto itself. The point is, you will experience home under lockdown differently because pre-coronavirus, you actually had the choice to leave. Now, you don't.

2. Carving Out Office Real Estate in Your Home

If you’re among the tens of millions of people required to work from home due to Covid-19, you've had to reconfigure your home to include a short-term work space. This space will need to be somewhat professional - especially if you’ll be on videoconferences. It could be a room, a hallway or just a corner big enough to fit you, your computer and notepad. If you have children, especially small ones, the space needs to be quiet, and one you can use alone from time to time. But when you factor in a partner or other roommate who also needs to set up shop at home, and children who need to actively participate in their online classrooms, office real estate in your home - a study if you have one, the dining table, even bedrooms - starts to take up a lot of physical space. Soon enough you might have to take turns using the lone quiet corner for sensitive calls. This whole thing might take some getting used to because as a practical matter, most workers don't buy or rent a home anticipating the regular use of a home office. Not unless they are remote workers, mid-management or executives. But in the wake of Covid-19, you now need to make a little room.

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

3. You May Have To Share A Little, Thanks to Videoconferencing

As work transfers home, videoconferences are replacing in-person meetings. For many workers, this is new. For others, it is likely to become more regular and frequent. So, many workers will find themselves opening up their homes, albeit virtually, to colleagues. This obviously has implications since home for most of us, is still a private, sacrosanct space. But with your virtual front door cracked slightly open, colleagues will get a glimpse of you. Yes, you. Family portraits and paintings on your walls, books and mementos on your shelves, even the sounds coming in from outside your door. You might find this degree of closeness between your two worlds uncomfortable at first. However, videoconferencing offers the possibility of connectedness at a time when we're living in greater isolation. And there's something about seeing a familiar book on a colleague's shelf, or their child kissing them 'goodnight' that makes them more relatable, familiar, accessible. So much so that where you may once have rolled your eyes at dogs barking, children screaming, and birds twittering in the background during a call, now you may dismiss it as background noise. Maybe even white noise. These days, feeling the weight of too many things on your shoulders, you may respond with “How are the kids coping?” or “I can reschedule if you need to go,” instead of gritting your teeth.

4. The Vanishing Corridor Between Home and Work

Pre-coronavirus, workplace experts debated whether organizations should promote work-life balance or work-life integration. That debate now seems a pre-coronavirus luxury. For those who still have jobs, one of two options exists - you either live at work or work lives at home. Sometimes the personal and professional so closely cohabit that it’s difficult to know where one ends and the other begins. This is perhaps clearest in the case of essential service providers, and in particular, healthcare workers. If this is you, maybe you're like other healthcare workers among my family and friends. For them, long hours on the job don’t end when they go home. Sometimes they shuttle between work and home, carrying invisible knapsacks of the overwhelming emotions they're holding. Home for them has become an extension of work. This is the case with my close friend who’s an ICU nurse in California. She’s scheduled to work 16-hour days for four days, and has 3 days off. But she often returns to the hospital after her first day off. “Every time I’m home,” she told me, “I keep getting calls asking if I can come back in. Just not enough of us. So we do our best to pitch in.” I asked how she’s processing everything. “Honestly, I don’t have time to think,” she said. “I can’t process anything right now. I’m working or I’m exhausted from working. And if I stop working, I feel grief. Just grief and anger. And then I vacuum this place like a dozen times. It’s just better to go back in.” With work serving as a constant companion in the apartment where she lives alone, work-life balance or integration has little relevance for her.

For many other workers, the corridor between home and work has simply vanished. In its place is a boundary-less reality where work has no stop signs. No kids to drop off or pick up. No coworkers to go to lunch with. No bus or train to catch, and no traffic to beat. Sometimes, not even a get-out-of-pajamas day. If this is you, chances are you're working more than you ever have. It could be because you're worried about job losses in the future and want to demonstrate your value. It could be that work is a relatively easy and accessible coping mechanism. It could also be that you just enjoy your work. But it's critical to remember, (now that you're working from home), that as productivity increases, home will start to feel less like home, and more like a workplace with food and a bed. If not carefully managed, home could morph into a place that no longer provides respite from work.

5. So Close and Yet So Far Away

For essential service workers with families, Covid-19 is forcing another configuration of home. It's one that sometimes demands a separate living space for these workers in order to limit the risk of exposure to family members. Another good friend who’s a doctor in Georgia speaks practically about the risk of exposure. She has a husband and two children, but little protective gear. She does the cooking at home, but as her hospital welcomes an overflow of coronavirus patients from a nearby hospital, she’s rethinking living arrangements. She and I contemplated the oddity of that version of ‘home’ - one in which she cannot hug her children or be with them in the same room. That version of home can feel foreign because it begs the question, can home be home when you are physically removed from the very people and things that make home, home? 

An article by Joy Engel and a tweet from Rachel Patzer highlight this stark reality. Both are married to doctors who treat coronavirus patients. Their husbands made the choice to move out to protect the family from potential exposure. CNN anchor Chris Cuomo’s sojourn in the basement after his coronavirus diagnosis has been sobering. He’s publicly shared: “I can’t be with my kids. I can’t hug my family…” and “Don came by today with his fiancé, looking at me like I’m in a zoo, you know, behind a glass door. This is a weird existence...” and just one iteration of home in the time of coronavirus.

Photo by Jed Owen on Unsplash

6. For Some, Home Is Not A Safe Place Or A Place They Chose

This pandemic is challenging the assumption that home provides succor. There are millions of people who count on being outside for survival. For them, being at home may create new problems or worsen existing ones. Consider unskilled workers, hawkers, and street vendors who depend on being out and about proffering their services, food and other wares to sustain themselves. If this is you, stay-at-home orders might ring hollow when stacked against the more visible and long-standing threat of starvation.

Photo by AB Mambo

As many countries moved to close their borders, home took on new meaning for migrant workers. For many, the question was "to stay or to go?", and decisions were made and acted on within two or three days. In a time of crisis, how do you define home? Is it where family is? Where you feel safest? Or where you're accepted? When Malaysia announced it would close its borders on March 18, thousands of Malaysian migrant workers in Singapore had to decide whether to go home, risking their livelihoods, or to stay on in Singapore and work at a time when families were gathering. Neither choice came with a clear end date.

Other times, whether you love your home or not is besides the point. With lockdown and social distancing, what matters may be whether staying home limits your risk of exposure. Consider that your family shares tight quarters in this era of social distancing. What happens if someone gets infected? How to socially distance? This is the reality facing millions upon millions of people from India's slums to South Africa's townships, Brazil's favelas and other informal settlements around the globe.

Then there are those living in difficult or dangerous situations in homes to which they must be confined. In her poignant essay on the impact of coronavirus, the Italian novelist, Francesca Melandri warns: “Many women will be beaten in their homes.” And children too! I wonder about the passengers and crew on the Princess Diamond. When they cried out for home at their most desperate, what did they mean? Their houses, country or any nation that would allow them to disembark? For those in collapsing marriages, home might feel like a trap from which there is no escape. When help or the solution to your problem is ‘out there,’ home can feel at best like the place we sleep, and at worst, like the enemy.

7. Home Can At Times Be A Lonely Place

Many East Asians living in Europe and America report that they have been victims of racist and xenophobic attacks in the wake of the outbreak. They say they're being blamed for the spread of the virus. One of them, a 23-year-old Singaporean student in London, claims his attacker screamed: “I don't want your coronavirus in my country,” during the attack. Similar reports have emerged across America. Meanwhile, the last several days have brought widespread reports of discrimination and attacks on Africans in one of China's Southern cities. These students and expats say they are being evicted from their apartments, unfairly tested for coronavirus and not shown their results, and that shops and eateries won't serve them. They say they are being blamed for an increase in the number of reported coronavirus cases in Guangzhou.

These events are deeply troubling even when viewed solely in the Covid-19 context. Cast in a broader context, they are reminiscent of attacks on Muslims post 9/11, Africans during the Ebola crisis, and gay men during the AIDS pandemic. What do these have to do with home? Many of the victims were on home soil or had made these places their home for the duration of work or study. If this is you, you could be feeling a deep sense of betrayal - as if you are being attacked or turned on by the very same home that is meant to protect you. In its wake, this could cast a version of home that seems uncomfortably fluid and susceptible to underlying sociopolitical currents. That too, at a time when stability and personal security are critical parts of the infrastructure needed to contain the virus.

What about you? Has the coronavirus pandemic changed the way you see or understand home? Please comment below and share with your connections and followers.

Bio: Abam Mambo is a lawyer, writer, speaker and avid traveler. She hosts a weekly podcast, MamaTokTok’s A Different Take.