Taking Care of Time! Four Facets of Enduring Time Among Three Generations During a Global Crisis

In this chapter, we explore how individuals and families responded to the disruption of routines and expectations of everyday life during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Denmark in 2020. The COVID-19 crisis interrupted daily routines, which had implications for the trajectories of individuals and families. An analysis of the changed routines alerted us to the changed rhythms of everyday life (Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis. Continuum, 2004; Lyon, What is Rhythmanalysis? Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). Drawing on the work of Lisa Baraitser (Enduring Time. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), we ask what happened to self-care when the rhythm of everyday life was no longer under one’s control. We use Baraitser’s work to notice how individuals and families engaged in ‘acts of maintenance’ (Baraitser, Enduring Time. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, p. 51), and we operationalise these different forms of self-care as four facets of enduring time: staying, delaying, persisting and ending. Our longitudinal and cross-generational design enabled us to see how the intersection of life circumstances, life stage and family resources influenced how the crisis is experienced and acted upon.