A note before you read — I wrote this in December 2020, in the thick of it. My children were small, my maid and nanny were gone, and my husband was working from home. I am sharing it now because I suspect I was not the only one who found salvation in the most unexpected place.
When the lockdown began I said goodbye to my maid and nanny with genuinely teary eyes. I told myself it would not be long. A few weeks, perhaps. We would all be back to normal soon.
Little did I know.
The fear of the virus kept me from calling them back for months. And so began the season of doing everything myself — cooking, cleaning, feeding, playing, teaching, bathing, potty training — all of it, every day, around the immovable schedules of two small children who were, and remain, absolute sticklers for routine. Any deviation meant double the work and twice the tears — mostly mine.
My husband was working from home. Which sounds helpful. And was, in the ways it was. But anyone who has shared a home with a working spouse during lockdown knows that present and available are two entirely different things.
The only breathers in my day were the hours after the children went to sleep at night. And when that is your only window of quiet for months on end, something starts to shift inside you. The tiredness stops being just physical. It gets into your emotions, your patience, your sense of self.
On the positive side — I lost a few kilos. Every cloud.
Then one night, somewhere in the blur of identical days, I discovered K-dramas.
Korean dramas — if you have not encountered them yet — are television series produced in South Korea, ranging across romance, thriller, historical drama, and everything in between. They are beautifully shot, emotionally intelligent, and thoroughly addictive. I cannot fully explain what happened when I started watching them. It was not just entertainment. It was something closer to restoration.
I have always loved international dramas, films, and anime. But the lockdown had stripped away most of what made me me outside of being a mother and a manager of a household. Getting back to something you genuinely love — something that belongs to you, not to your role — is a feeling that is very difficult to put into words.
The K-dramas gave me that back.
Happy hormones are a real thing. The anticipation of sitting down with an episode after the children were asleep became something I looked forward to all day. It made the hard hours easier to get through because there was something waiting at the end of them. My stress levels dropped. My emotional needs — the ones that had been quietly going unmet for months — started to find some relief.
This is what kept me sane. And honestly, still does.
One more good thing came out of that period — I reconnected with a long-lost childhood friend. We found each other again through the strange intimacy that lockdown created, and discovered we share an enormous number of similar interests. Some connections that life interrupts have a way of finding their moment to resume.
Looking back at those months now I can hold two things at once — they were genuinely hard, and there were genuinely happy moments inside them. The K-dramas. The friend. The kilos I did not miss. The quiet hours that were entirely mine.
If you are in the middle of a hard stretch right now — whatever it looks like for you — I hope you find your K-drama. The thing that belongs to you. The thing that makes the difficult hours worth getting through.
Fighting!