**3. Results**

As indicated above, summaries of the interviews of the four participants are presented below, followed by an elaboration of the subthemes and superordinate themes that emerged from coding the interview transcripts.

## *3.1. Tammy*

Tammy is a mother with three young children who, at the time of the interview in December 2021, included a girl aged 3, a boy aged 8, and another boy aged 9. Her husband works for the US government. She currently has a job and works from home three days during the week and two days in her office, which is several miles away. When lockdown started in March 2020, Tammy's 8-year-old son was in first grade. He

subsequently completed second grade remotely, and he is now back to in-person school in third grade. Her 9-year old son was in second grade at the time of the lockdown, completed third grade remotely, and is now in fourth grade. Her daughter was an infant at the beginning of lockdown and started preschool two days per week in March 2021. Tammy and her children were locked down at home for 18 months during the pandemic, from March 2020 to September 2021, when children were allowed to return physically to school. Still, even after returning to school, children were sent home again for virtual schooling every time there was a COVID case at school. This, of course, happened randomly.

In March 2020, in the wake of lockdown, Tammy lost her two jobs, one as a preschool teacher and the other as a sales associate in a retail store, because both establishments were forced to close down. Her three children were suddenly at home because both preschool and public school were closed. The school system had not yet figured out how to educate children virtually, so Tammy immediately began to collect homeschooling resources so that she could homeschool her sons and keep them on track. After one month of the lockdown, the school district provided two hours of online instruction on two days of the week for her older son's grade and two hours of instruction three days a week for her younger son. Tammy filled in the gaps with homeschooling materials, some of which she was familiar with because she had been a preschool teacher. A friend of a friend who worked as a substitute teacher came every Friday to help her younger son with reading. Tammy also hired a babysitter who had been homeschooled, and she helped teach her younger son also. Tammy continued homeschooling over the summer and joined a pod of parents who were also homeschooling their children. The pod employed nature as a learning environment and explored things and places in the environment. Meanwhile, Tammy was interviewing for jobs in the fall of 2020 and took a job for an international development company, the profession her education prepared her for. She kept delaying her start date and finally began work in November 2020.

In the fall of 2020, the school district finally developed a virtual learning routine, providing online instruction four days a week and designating Wednesday as an independent learning day. Her older son could handle the routine, but her younger son could not adjust and was extremely emotionally distressed, screaming violently every morning. "He wasn't like this before the lockdown", Tammy explained. "This transition in life has really impacted him and I have to work with him daily to help him feel better about school".

Tammy finally decided to pull her younger son out of school, and she had to find an alternative. She sent messages to mother groups on Facebook asking if anyone knew of a mother who was teaching her children at home who would be willing to take her son as a student. A Montessori teacher who was teaching her children at home responded and agreed to teach Tammy's younger son in her home three days a week for a half day. Her son thrived in this environment, which lasted from January to June 2021. Unfortunately, her homeschooled babysitter left in January 2021 to return to college, so Tammy was left again with full responsibility to help her older son's online learning, to support her younger son's learning journey, and to care for her infant daughter, who had tight muscles. Tammy hopped off and on the computer all day to fulfill her work responsibilities and her mom responsibilities. Her husband worked from home, but she did not let him share in childcare or cooking or housework. She "let him do his thing" and took it all on herself because, as she said, "He is our breadwinner".

Tammy explained her river of experience, which started on New Year's Day in 2019 prior to the pandemic. She started the river at this point because this is the day her 70-yearold mother fell down the stairs and broke her neck, represented by a waterfall on Tammy's river. Tammy represented each crisis point during this time as a waterfall and each time someone "saved" her as a life raft. At the time of her mother's near-death accident, Tammy was spending considerable time providing physical therapy to her infant daughter, who was born with muscle tightness. After her mother's recovery, her mother moved in with Tammy and her family in March 2019. In May 2019, Tammy started a new job with an international development company. After moving in, her mother had three strokes and

Tammy had to fight the medical system in order to save her mother, causing her to quit her job in June 2019, represented by another waterfall in her river. In August, her mother moved to Tammy's sister's house across the country. Tammy depicts her sister in a life raft in her river. Tammy began a new job as a preschool teacher. In November 2019, Tammy's mother became septic and almost died, and Tammy had to fly out to be with her at her sister's house. While there, Tammy bought "her special object", a framed print of the following phrase: "You can't go back and change the beginning but you can start where you are and finish the ending". Tammy explained that she keeps the print near her bed and reminds herself of this every night.

When COVID hit right after her mother experienced one death-defying accident and health crisis after another, Tammy said she cried out "Oh my God, now what?" Tammy depicted the loss of her two jobs in March 2020 as a waterfall. The waterfalls continued as she homeschooled, and her homeschooled babysitter showed up in a life raft in November 2020. Tammy experienced another waterfall in January 2021, when her babysitter left, but then the Montesorri teacher showed up in a life raft in April 2021. From then on, Tammy depicted her life as a waterfall when her sons returned to school in September 2021, when she started a new job, and when her toddler got COVID while her younger son was forced to stay home because there was COVID in his class.

Tammy related that she is in therapy with two therapists, one to help her cope psychologically and the other to help with nutrition and exercise, since during the pandemic she had become very sedentary, she chagrined. Looking back, she said, "I don't even know how I did it I juggled it all . . . Everything was on me and I had to do it . . . ".
