”This affects everyone,” is a common phrase I’ve heard during the COVID-19 pandemic. As it continues to affect the masses, most people find themselves facing a new normal.

The definition of work and home lives have become skewed. Perhaps where people thought they’d be is not where they ended up. 

For instance, take Caroline Horne — director of the United Way of Colquitt County and the mother of one. She’s been working from home for the past few weeks and though it has been a dream, it comes with its own follies.

It’s hard to balance family and work when they’re in the same place, especially when being online allows you to be a workaholic.

“Know the difference between work life and home life and make sure you’re not working 24/7,” she said. 

While working from home she homeschools her child too. Being an only child and out of school before the summer, he’s dealing with his own version of the new normal.

 “He gets really bored when he’s been so used to being around his friends every day at school and having that interaction with other kids,” she said. “He doesn’t have that so I have to constantly remember that I need to give him something engaging, but I also can’t devote all my time to him because I’m working.”

Horne and her husband try to tag team in this effort, but it can be hard considering her work and his work at the Colquitt County Board of Education. It’s an attempt to work in shifts.

It’s a similar scenario I’ve seen online and via family members with their own kids. My father, Lawrence Ethridge II, posted on Facebook and Instagram a message regarding my youngest sibling, Latice. 

She’s 10 years old stuck in her house bored without anyone to play with. She cried as she told our father this. Children are struggling mentally and emotionally as they struggle to understand what’s happened to their way of life, he wrote.

“The separation of their day to day interaction with their friends can also lead to mental health issues as well as their disruption to the day to day pattern of home, school, after school and then home,” he wrote. “Our children experience anxiety, depression, loss of hope and other mental, emotional health issues just like adults.”

Even my second youngest sister, Brooke Waldon, 15, just wants to hangout and have a water gun fight with her friends.

This, alongside the financial loss and change of pace, is a part of the new normal most adults are facing.

Dallas Dickerson, owner of Mama D’s Sweet Shop, opened her shop a year ago as of April 9. She expected to have a “big shindig” on the anniversary, but wasn’t able to do so due to COVID-19 and Moultrie’s state of emergency.

According to her, working the shop will be a huge struggle until things go back to normal. Mama D’s foot traffic accounts for 60 percent of its business, so at this time, she’s losing major business.

“This business is the only thing that provides for my family,” she said referencing financial loss. “It’s more of an inconvenience to travel things out the door for curbside pick up versus customers coming in and impulse buying with their eyes.”

Dickerson was used to arriving at the store between 7-8 a.m. to prep the store’s opening at 8:30 a.m. 

Now, since the store is order only, she and her staff would arrive only a couple of hours before an order needed to go out. It’s a slight sense of uncertainty, but it feels like summer, she said.

“There’s still a modern amount of traffic,” Dickerson said, referencing people’s thrifty habits. “It’s essentially the same thing people do during June – July when they go on vacation.”

And when they go on vacation, they aren’t spending money in town. People are out of jobs right now, so they must conserve. It’s a scary time for them and their livelihood and the same goes for Dickerson and Mama D’s livelihood.

“It kind of sucks that for my business, Easter and graduation would’ve been two of the main events that would’ve carried us through the summer months and those were canceled on us,” she said.

Though stimulus checks have started to come out, adults and parents are still trying to find ways to take care of themselves and their families through this pandemic.

Bryce Ethridge is a reporter for The Moultrie Observer. This is the second of two columns in which he compares the outlook of different generations as they face the coronavirus. Click the link at left to read Part 1.