My husband went back to work last week. He has the good fortune of having his dental practice located in Idaho, so his back-to-work date was earlier than that of his colleagues in Washington. While I’m happy that he is back at work and will be bringing in a paycheck hopefully sometime soon, I am a little sad to be losing my quarantine buddy.

Having him home more often than not over the past two months has made this whole thing much more bearable. He is the fun parent – the one who will dream up plans to build a play fort, interrupt chore time for a quick game of basketball or decide at 7 o’clock on a Saturday night that he wants to grill burgers and have a family barbecue even though that means we have to thaw 2 pounds of ground beef and he’ll need to run to the store for buns, chips and probably a box of Fudgesicles.

Logan and I have a lot in common but in many ways are polar opposites – he’s easygoing and optimistic; I’m OCD and we’re-all-gonna-die. Not surprisingly, we tend to approach situations from much different angles. For example, back on March 13, we both happened to be at home when we received word that school would be canceled for six weeks because of COVID-19. (If only it had been six weeks. Ha!). We both stared at each other in disbelief.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” I believe were the exact words that came out of my mouth.

I looked at the clock. There were two more hours until our kids would start arriving home from their last day of school and begin the longest spring break known to man (soon to turn into the longest summer break known to man).

“These are literally my final two hours of peace and quiet until the end of April,” I remember thinking. “I’d better get myself organized.”

I felt an overwhelming urge to tidy, and so I went from room to room compulsively clearing surfaces until every last phone charger and random paper clip was put away. Then I addressed the food situation. Knowing that my kids are capable of eating roughly the same daily equivalent as two adult hippos, I started making lists of snacks and meals that I could make over the long and hungry weeks that lay ahead. I wrote down chores I could use to occupy their time and service projects we could accomplish together.

My lists compiled, my house tidy for the last time, I wandered into our home office, where I found my husband sitting in front of the computer with papers scattered all over the desk in front of him.

“What are you doing?” I asked, thinking that he was surely compiling a spreadsheet charting out a plan for how our family could survive the upcoming quarantine.

His answer surprised me, although it shouldn’t have: “I’m researching different apps that can help me keep track of the maintenance done on each of our cars,” he replied. Undeterred by my blank stare, he motioned to the computer screen so I could see all of the magical websites he was looking at that HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT LIFE AS WE KNEW IT WOULD BE ENDING IN APPROXIMATELY 14 MINUTES WHEN OUR ALL OUR KIDS GOT HOME FROM SCHOOL AND REMAINED AT HOME FOREVER.

I shook my head and walked out of the room, dumbfounded yet again that a man I loved so much could think so completely differently than I do.

But I get it. Faced with the same distressing news, we simply coped in our own particular ways. In the end, we were both just trying to take care of our family.

And that’s why I’ve missed him so acutely over the past week. He’s the yin to my yang; the party to my buttoned-up schedule. He’s the guy concerned with routine car maintenance when I’m certain the world is about to end.

I’m glad he gets to go back to his dental practice. I know his patients and colleagues also appreciate his steady, calming, capable influence. But I’ll miss having him around. Good quarantine buddies are hard to come by.

Julia Ditto shares her life with her husband, six children and a random menagerie of farm animals in Spokane Valley. She can be reached at dittojulia@gmail.com.