Welcome to the Commune podcast, a global wellness community and online course platform

featuring some of the world's greatest teachers, usually hosted by the intrepid Jeff Krasno,

but occasionally I push him out of the studio and offer up something a little different.

This is Skyler Grant, and today's podcast goes out to my fellow mothers in quarantine.

We, who so badly need not cold coffee and scrambled eggs in bed, not flowers delivered by a

masked stranger, but an uninterrupted week of reveling with our dearest friends.

No children, no partners, no kitchens, no newsfeed, no Clorox wipes.

But ladies, here we are, settling once again for disembodied connection.

All in this together, but so fucking far apart.

Perhaps you, like me, vacillate between gratitude and misery for these days, weeks, months

of unrelenting motherhood. Our tiny ones with their crushing needs, so sweet, but so boring. Our teenage children reverting to

mulling infants, squalling about the tragedy of a springtime with nowhere to prance in a crop

top. Our babies returned home from college, so wonderful at first. But then didn't they learn

to clean their own kitchens out there in the world?

And we are their mothers, so we will always be responsible for life's vicissitudes,

each of us the chef of that bat soup. But though they're making us pay in ways big and small,

would we really ask for a refund, this strange time stolen from their friends and

teachers? I wouldn't. This attenuated moment of quarantine reminds me a bit of the bleary and

blissful days of early postpartum, cloistered indoors, the alchemy of a new self being born along with

the creature we just grew, the mind-numbing sameness, the sweet newness, the anxiety, the fragility,

the closeness, the frustration, the love, days and days that stretched on forever. But then, where did they go?

Then, too, we had to reimagine our relationships with our best friends, as well as our partners and

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