Sorry, we're still stuck at home together

Voices of the Pandemic features people in the Seattle area on the frontlines of the coronavirus outbreak in their own words.

A lot of us are spending a lot more time with our families due to the pandemic. Mattie Mooney, who works at Seattle's Ingersoll Gender Center, can relate.

Usually, work and school provide families with a short vacation from each other, every day.

But Mooney is working at home, and shares that small space with a partner and a tween. All that family togetherness has brought them closer together. But it’s also put them at each other’s throats.

Like this one time, during what Mooney called their "supposed-family-bonding-time." They were trying to play the board game Sorry.

I actually didn't really want to play it first. But I was like, "Oh, my daughter really wants to play. My partner really wants to play and says it's not really that fun with two people." So I'm like, "OK, I'm gonna do this."

My daughter, she’s 11. Around puberty time. And she really has just this wild attitude and needs to argue or rebut everything that's said by anyone who's like over the age of 18.

So I had the the game box. And every two minutes, it would be like, “Well, this rule is this," and my partner, Nanta, would be like, "Well, I've always played like this.” And Zaiya was like, “We can play however we want to” and I'll be like, “I have the rules. Let me read.” And so, it was just so ... it was so ridiculous.

And it was like, this is this is what we're having conflict about right now: a game of Sorry.

There are some times where it's almost like the Twilight Zone. My kid is crying, doing chores and my partner's locking themselves in an office. And I'm just like, “Oh my gosh, what's happening?”

We're just like, we're trying. We're trying so hard.

We're definitely having to come up with ways to understand and realize why we love and care about each other.

We've been going for walks a lot. We've just kind of sat and talked more, and not just like, BSing but just talking about how we feel.

After this experience, I think that the relationships that I have with my family is definitely going to look different. It’s both something that’s great and something that’s going to bring us closer.

But it’s also something that’s really irritating at times.

You honestly can’t live with them, and you also can’t live without them.

We're collecting first-person accounts of the pandemic. If you have a story about a moment when you faced something new, or a moment when you faced a difficult decision with no clear path forward, consider sharing with us.

You can reach out to this reporter, Joshua McNichols, directly at jmcnichols@kuow.org, or fill out our story form.

Alec Cowan composed music for this story.