March 13, 2020 - A Day I Will Never Forget
A Six Year Anniversary that Changed History
A Six Year Anniversary that Changed the Course of History
There are certain days you never forget.
You remember exactly where you were, what you were doing, and how the world felt in the moment before everything shifted.
For me, that day was March 13, 2020—the day Governor Tom Wolf announced Pennsylvania schools would close.
It started as just two weeks to “flatten the curve.”
Two weeks to “slow the spread”.
We all remember the language.
But that two weeks stretched into two months, then two years, and now six years… and it ultimately rewrote the script of my life.
In the beginning, it felt surreal. News alerts pinged nonstop. Grocery shelves emptied of toilet paper, flour, yeast. Parents raced to master Zoom before most of us knew what it was. Churches shut down. Playgrounds were cordoned off with caution tape like crime scenes. Everywhere, the same anxious question hung in the air: How long will this last?
Life before that announcement had been beautifully ordinary. School drop-offs, dance recitals, packed lunches. Homework folders crammed into backpacks. Moms chatting in parking lots while little siblings darted around us. My biggest worries? Remembering library day and making sure everyone left the house with shoes on.
Savanna, my oldest, was thrilled about qualifying for the Math Olympics—the top three from her class of 19, and the only girl. She beamed with pride. My middle daughter thrived in preschool snacks, crafts, and show-and-tell. My youngest, two and a half, kept our days revolving around potty-training negotiations and retrieving lost toys from under the couch.
It was normal life—the kind you don’t fully appreciate until it vanishes.
The Unexpected Homeschool Journey
If you’d asked me then whether I’d ever homeschool, I would’ve laughed.
Hard.
The “Absolutely not—have you lost your mind?” kind of hard.
Yet when the shutdown dragged on and schools never quite returned to what they’d been before, we did the unthinkable. We started homeschooling in the fall of 2020.
And the mom who once swore she couldn’t teach her own kids math, now teaches Algebra II at Arise Classical Academy three days a week.
Oh the irony!
Blessings Versus Burdens
With that shift came some beautiful, unexpected gifts but also some unasked-for challenges.
The gifts are the easy part, like meeting new friends in the homeschool community who now feel like family—friends, partners, entire communities that didn’t exist in my world before March 2020. God wove new relationships and opportunities into my life that I never could have planned. That part has been a tremendous blessing.
But looking back on that pivotal time frame can be hard too.
Life was simpler then. My mom was still here. My kids were little. Friendships that I thought were lifelong have since faded into the distance. I hadn’t yet stepped into activism that sometimes keeps me up at night, wondering how I ended up here and questioning whether I took the right path.
From Rule Follower to Rebel
Before that fateful day, I was definitely a rule follower. Not rebellious and not the least bit skeptical. If the government said something was required, I assumed there was a good reason.
Civil disobedience?
Questioning authority?
That wasn’t me.
But somehow over the course of that year, I found myself going into grocery stores knowing that I wasn’t going to put on a mask and not caring if I got thrown out for standing my ground… which I did a couple of times. By the grace of God, I didn’t end up with an ulcer in my stomach from the emotional stress of it all.
And if I’m being honest, there are days now when I feel weary. I half-wish someone in a black suit would show up with a Men in Black memory eraser stick thingy and send me back to the peaceful ignorance of 2019.
Those are the days when I think, “How in the world did I go from being just a mom raising three little girls to someone who felt called to understand—and speak up about—what was happening in my community and country?”
I never planned to become an activist, dive into politics, or write about Senate procedure and cloture votes. (Honestly, I didn’t even know which branch the Senate belonged to.)
But I realize now that something fundamental changed in me that day. The people pleasing, rule follower became like the Riddler with a never-ending stream of questions and each corresponding set of answers led me down a path where eventually, I became a Rebel.
Life Today and the Way Forward
Six years later—March 13, 2026—my daughters are 15, 11, and 8. I’m teaching math, running an election integrity nonprofit, and trying to build a professional speaking career as a brand ambassador for Patriot Academy.
None of that was on my bingo card back in 2020, and on the days when the fight feels overwhelming, the problems too big for one person, I lean on Scripture and study history.
One of my favorite Founding Father letters is from John Jay, the first Chief Justice to the US Supreme Court to Welsh philosopher Richard Price. He was writing on the subject of slavery back in 1785 and he said this:
The Cause of Liberty like most other good Causes, will have its Difficulties and sometimes its Persecutions to struggle with. It has advanced more rapidly in this than other Countries, but all its objects are not yet attained and I much doubt whether they ever will be in this or any other terrestrial State. That Men should pray and fight for their own Freedom and yet keep others in Slavery is certainly acting a very inconsistent as well as unjust and perhaps impious part, but the History of Mankind is filled with Instances of human Improprieties.
The wise and the good never form the Majority of any large Society and it seldom happens that their Measures are uniformly adopted or that they can always prevent being overborne themselves by the strong and almost never ceasing union of the wicked and the weak. These Circumstances tell us to be patient and moderate those Sanguine Expectations, which warm and good Hearts often mislead even wise Heads to entertain on these Subjects.
All that the best Men can do is to persevere in doing their Duty to their Country, and leave the Consequences to him who made it their Duty; being neither elated by success however great nor discouraged by Disappointments however frequent or mortifying.
What amazes me the most is how the principles in this letter still apply to today’s struggles, even though it was written for a different purpose addressing a totally different topic.
The lesson we can take away is this—We keep going whether the moment looks like triumph or defeat because self-government was never meant to be comfortable.
It was meant to be ours.
Ours to earn.
Ours to lose.
Or hopefully ours to keep.
For everyone in the Keystone state, March 13, 2020, was the day the Governor shut the schools down, but for me, it was way more than that. It was the day one ordinary mom began a life altering journey that I now call, From Mom to Patriot.
