This week marks the seventh week of quarantine, social distancing, and the general havoc that COVID-19, has wreaked on our professional and personal lives. As a professional and a parent, this chaos is further pronounced as the façade of separation of these roles came tumbling down, with the closure of schools and non-life-sustaining businesses. There are no boundaries between work and home and school anymore. Today, I made breakfast, worked on a draft of this article, organized a birthday party for our cat, helped my daughter with her online school lessons, did legal research, navigated a fight between my kids over how to make slime, took them on a hike, reviewed client e-mails, and attended a non-profit board meeting via ZOOM. It is not yet dinnertime and there is still more work to do.

As a parent, I struggle with the day-to-day worries of trying to maintain some semblance of a routine for my 5 and 7-year-old; with trying to limit screen time while still managing to address my clients’ needs and deadlines; with trying to make sure my 7-year-old is keeping up with her assigned lessons as the online programs crash regularly. As a family, we struggle with the uncertainty of how long we’ll have to maintain this “new normal.”

These struggles extend to my professional life, as well. I am fortunate, because I work for a firm that recognized the importance of family and a flexible schedule before the COVID-19 outbreak. I have all the equipment I need, access to necessary information, and can easily contact clients and attorneys through a myriad of methods, including e-mail, voice mail, ZOOM conferencing, and more. Trying to do all this while parenting, however, presents unique challenges.

As attorneys, we carry the responsibility of not only advising our clients regarding their legal issues, but also of the many and varied personal issues that arise throughout their respective processes. Clients’ legal issues and concerns don’t stop, just because the court system may be temporarily halted. Small businesses must file for aid; parents with shared custody have to navigate an entirely new set of variables; those incarcerated have to come to terms with even more delays to their respective cases.  And it is our ongoing job to distill and relay information to our clients in ways that are informed and, to the extent that we are able, reassuring.

Children, especially young ones, don’t fully grasp this duty and responsibility. We’re now conducting business while “Frozen 2” plays in the background. Small heads appear reflected in our ZOOM windows, asking for cookies or to be taken for a bike ride. Meeting the demands of both children and clients can be overwhelming in ordinary times, but with no separation of these duties, how does the working parent hope to even come close to fulfilling their responsibilities adequately?

The answer is that there are no definitive answers. We are living through an unprecedented time in our lives and working parents face many of the same struggles. But we can get through this by working together and by not being afraid to ask for help, be that from our partners, our friends, our families, and our co-workers.  When we have an ever-shifting target of when schools and businesses may re-open, I argue that there is no “normal.” What we experience is shared upheaval. The best way to navigate this, personally and professionally, is flexibility, communication, and taking comfort in the knowledge that we are not alone.

Kelly Jurs is an associate in the Family Law practice at Lamb McErlane PC in West Chester, PA.  She focuses her practice on compassionate and efficient advocacy specializing in all aspects of pre-nuptial planning, divorce, equitable distribution, child custody, property settlement, and related litigation and mediation of issues. kjurs@lambmcerlane.com.