Homes with Heart by Ruth Frost

Author:Ruth Frost
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2021-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

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HOMES OCCUPIED BY WORK AND ELECTRONICS

Working from home, while often advantageous, also presents some challenges to family life. The 24/7 connectivity electronic devices offer provides flexibility of hours and convenience. However, they can also create some issues with respect to time, boundaries, and competition with family life. For families it can be confusing to know if a parent is considered “home” when working from home or “gone” with respect to taking interruptions to their work. If they feel ignored or devalued, young children and resentful spouses may be unable or unwilling to appreciate the difference between being at home and working from home. Pets, too, can act out after waiting in vain for a walk or playtime with their human guardians.

Another challenge when working from home is the issue of how physical space gets allocated to accommodate a home office. While a spare bedroom can be converted to workspace, many smaller homes don’t offer that option. When other space is lacking, the dining room often gets conscripted for work purposes. This can have the domino effect of using the living room as the place for dining. When this occurs, the family no longer gathers around a table together enjoying good food and conversation, but instead sits around the TV. Very often, the quality of both conversation and food suffers, resulting in the loss of caring connections that can occur when people actually listen to one another and know what’s going on in each other’s lives.

What are the recourses? For some it’s finding a coffee shop where they can combine work with refreshment; for others, cooperative use of rented office space works. At home it can easily sink into a “if you can’t lick them, join them” situation where everyone may be in close proximity to one another, but each resorts to their own brand of concentrated distraction. The kids may be glued to video games while a parent is captive to work e-mails. The demarcation between when one is at work and when one is at home fades. So, too, does the attention we all need for our relationships to thrive.

My work in retirement has been providing childcare for our grandson while continuing to write. I manage the latter by getting up in the early morning hours to collect my thoughts before anyone else is awake. Then I snatch the hours of our grandson’s naptime to be as productive as possible in my writing. I know I stand in a long line of women writers who spent lifetimes juggling domestic responsibilities with their passion to write. How people do this with more than one child, I cannot fathom, any more than I can fathom writing without the benefit of using a computer.

While there are occasional lapses, we all try not to bring our devices to a family dinner or accept calls or read text messages while eating together. Cooking is an activity in and of itself for Noelle and Evan, both of whom have worked in the food industry. The rest of us are the lucky beneficiaries of their culinary concoctions.

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