My husband and I have, until now, never spent this much consecutive time together. We are, like the rest of the world, stuck in the house 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It’s been an interesting experiment in getting along, but also investigating one another’s coping mechanisms.

We seem to take turns having bad days. He’s having a bad day today: quiet, grumpy, and a little mad at the world. He never liked being listless before the coronavirus and would invent all kinds of tasks to keep himself busy on the weekends. But I’ve been impressed with his quarantine temperament.

Unlike him, I’m used to being home. Home has been my life for 31 years for the most part-cooking, cleaning, raising kids, and balancing the myriad demands of family life in between writing or touring jobs. So, being here so often isn’t all that unusual for me. But I’m more inclined to openly worry about our kids, our cash flow, our food status, our health, his career and my mother.

Women have always been good worriers. We’re adept at picking up clues from our environment and transmitting danger to the outer world when necessary. I think we’re made this way. So while women have historically been the gender to keep the home fires burning and feel more comfortable staying within our own four walls, we may also be feeling more anxious.

Our antennae are receiving an overload of signals. It keeps us up at night. I guess that might explain why I’m not being the quarantine partner I’d like to be.

If you’d asked me before the pandemic how I’d handle hibernation, I would have told you I’d spend the time making gourmet meals and brushing up on my cooking skills. I would have suggested that I’d be learning bridge, teaching myself to paint, or studying French. I thought I’d create a beautiful garden or wallpaper the bathroom.

None of that has happened.

I guess it has a lot to do with feeling unsettled. This isn’t a vacation, after all, it’s an emergency. Making a chocolate souffle doesn’t feel inviting.

Having all the time in the world for self-improvement projects hasn’t resulted in anything concrete for me. Instead, it’s been a big deal to score Lysol, or a bag of rice, or to manage a walk and some exercise.

On Easter, I planned to do what I always do-make a dinner fit for the Puritans with a roast and potatoes and a green vegetable. But the roast showed up from Instacart as sliced lunch meat, so Plan B was a roast chicken.

But I didn’t have all the ingredients I needed and so we ended up just making a picnic with whatever was on hand and drinking Bloody Marys in the afternoon. And I’ll tell you, it was fun.

I was able to shed my traditional expectations of what a holiday should be and throw the proverbial apron to the wind. Be spontaneous! Life was saying, ‘Stop trying to make everything perfect. Eat potato chips and have a drink!”

Truth: I went through a Cheetos stage for a week and then a chocolate ice cream cone stage for another week, and also a popcorn stage. I’d never been a snacker before, so God knows where this is coming from.

I went through a watching the news stage and then a Netflix stage and now I’m in a Masterpiece Theater stage.

We are still in an online family conference stage, although as the weeks have gone by, we have less and less to report to each other. We still conference anyway, our little faces ensconced in boxes on the computer screen, everyone that I cherish most in the world in Hollywood Square rows.

‘What world are we living in? I asked my husband last night when we signed off. Everything has changed, but then nothing has changed. The world has virtually stopped and change nor momentum can happen in the vacuum it’s created.

I believe we are going to have to open the country back up at some point before civilization breaks from the weight of our inactivity. There are risks to that-yes, but I think that is the price we have to pay to ensure the continuity of our world.

I know I will look upon this time in the house one day with fondness for some things: hearing the birds every morning as I put the tea on, making pancakes for my husband, watching intently as spring tries to break through the drudgery.

But mostly I will remember the hope that I carried around inside my own four walls, that feverent prayer I kept saying for all of this to end.

And I will think of the way my love for my family became so crystallized, that I could almost put it on display on a shelf and admire it.

My hibernation never yielded all the accomplishments that I hoped it would: no chocolate masterpieces, no second languages.

But it sure let me know, without a doubt, what really matters to me.