By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (4)

April 13, 2020

If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?

Current total: Lakota, $640.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.

Weeks 3 and 4 of shutdown in the Bay Area.

This is a record of our weekdays. We are attempting to set up the occasional video call with other kids so that they can socialize that way.

Week 3, Day 1: Why are Mondays always just the worst? They just are. It’s not even that I dread work, it’s just the day always starts off with me feeling physically slow and sluggish and often also mentally slow and sluggish. My 5yo coworker also complained of being tired but they mostly didn’t want to leave the cozy bed. Me neither, kiddo. Evidently my Monday woes stem from not feeling well on Sunday carrying over. I had to crash for the morning for a while. JB brought their art to hang out bedside with me and narrated their art projects for an hour. I mumbled barely coherent responses most of that hour, they didn’t care.

Seamus just keeps on trying to force us all to be in the same room together.

Week 3, Day 2: Our leadership has confirmed that they think we should be financially ok for several months and no one should be worried about layoffs and that is a huge relief. I’m so grateful to know that I just have to worry about making it day to day with our million concerns and not about losing this job. I was definitely not lucky in job security during the Great Recession so I have a great deal of empathy for the people losing their jobs now.

Since they could be wrong, since we can only make our best guesses on the information we have now and that keeps changing (and is likely inaccurate), I’m doing a lot of balancing of our budget day to day to both be supportive of the local economy and communities in distress and to bolster our own finances.

We’re looking at all the ways we can put cash back in our pockets: requesting our cash back from cash back sites, submitting requests for our dependent day care reimbursements, following up on FSA reimbursements, requesting refunds for services that won’t be rendered for a while from very large corporations that can bear the costs, filing our federal tax return now (we’re due a small refund).

This cash gathering is to balance our spending ahead on services we won’t be getting from smaller businesses until much later to try and help keep them afloat.

Other places that need help:

• Tadich Grill won’t lay off any employees if they can find a way and their GoFundMe.
• Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank To Help An Estimated 1,700 Families In Duquesne (their site for donations)

Week 3, Day 3: This was a really tough day. I felt sick all day, PiC was tied up in meetings, I had to mind JB’s activities and work full on. It was relentless and I wanted to scream. My full body itch was back, it’s been a problem for over a year and my allergy doc is basically useless. I was going to ask for a second opinion last month but I waited too long and now I can’t.

I keep bouncing between telling myself self soothingly “this is the new normal” and “there is no normal about this!!!” I’m also bouncing between “we are very lucky” to “ARRRGGHHHHHHHHHH“.

It’s been nine days since we went to the grocery store, so that’s a bit of a record considering how much my instincts are screaming Stock up on food! You may run out!

There is a lot of internal screaming right now given my utter lack of alone time.

Week 3, Day 4: I had to take a 7 minute walk with the dogs alone to get some quiet time. Things ramping up at work means I’m being bombarded with questions throughout my day that are frustrating interruptions (they always are but it gets under my skin a lot more now that I’m under this much extra stress. I just needed to be away from humans, all humans, for a while.

I’m also feeling this a little bit …

Week 3, Day 5: I’ve never disagreed with Abby that quarantining with family is easier than quarantining solo but I felt it viscerally today in a way that surprised me a little. We finally found a bit of balance!

JB was with me in the morning through lunchtime, I wasn’t pushing myself too hard to be uber productive at work plus I’d scheduled things so I could be distracted in the morning by JB without too much impact on the work, and PiC took over after lunch for a couple hours so I could focus on work and brain therapy. We set JB up with a solo activity so we both had focused work time for an hour and then we all took a break to go outdoors. It was my first non-dog walking outing in 21 days. Yes we’ve taken this very seriously. PiC has been out twice for groceries in that period but otherwise we’ve stayed housebound. They did discover the local soccer fields are still open and people are going there but staying 20+ feet away from others so it was a decent place for them to get away. We indulged in take out and I thought about how lucky I was to be able to get a bowl of pho AND a rice dish I love knowing it won’t go to waste between the three of us. It’s been hard not having alone time but at least occasionally I have the chance to get an hour here and there to myself if we are mindful.

Our science hour was watching Dolphin Reef on Disney+. It was really good! But there were some tense moments. I was definitely yelling at the humpback whales for terrible defensive strategies that stressed me out…. You had to be there.

Week 4, Day 1: I was treated to the sounds of Cosmic Kids Yoga’s “Hot air balloonin’!” this morning. A lot of it. It’s stuck in my head forever. Arghhhhhh.

I’m fraying around the edges today. I found my work headphones which I haven’t had to use for ages because I am usually alone, and that helped a little. I can still hear my family but they sound like their underwater.

Week 4, Day 2: New coping mechanism! I’m listening to a lot of old country music I haven’t listened to in years: Shania Twain, JoDee Messina, Dixie Chicks, Mindy McCready, Reba McEntire, LeAnn Rimes, Kelly Clarkson, Trisha Yearwood, Pam Tillis.

I am desperately missing my massage therapy that keeps me function.

It’s extra hard today because my people are leaning on me EXTRA HARD for support with their personal and professional needs and there is not enough of me to go around.

Week 4, Day 3: My focus is ALL OVER the place today and I feel useless. I’m not allowed to call myself useless, that’s being unnecessarily mean per brain therapist, but I have to acknowledge that’s the flavor of my feeling so that I can remind myself that some days are going to be harder than others. This is one of them.

I proactively set limits on how much people are permitted to draw on my brain and energy today.

But true to the spirit of this effin’ pandemic, Seamus seems ill and I can’t figure out if he has a new problem, if it’s “just” heightened pain, if it’s “just” nausea. Please let it just be nausea. Please.

Week 4, Day 4: It may have just been nausea. *tentative sigh of relief*

I had three nightmares and woke up fighting mad each time. With every wake-up I would realize all over again that the quarantine is not over and we’re still stuck in limbo. It didn’t have to be this way!!!

Lots of grumpitude today from me and floppy whining from JB because I couldn’t pay much attention to them. They’ve generally borne up really well under the strain so I decided to remove myself from work and them for a while to let myself rest. The bad sleep was certainly contributing to my bad attitude and bad parenting. I felt so ill that I had to put myself to bed for an hour to rest and try to recuperate.

Pondering on the small things: it’s nice not having to get ourselves up and out of bed and out the door on any schedule, to rush to work and school. PiC doesn’t benefit from the latter. He has to get up and walk the dogs and he doesn’t sleep in anyway. He does benefit from not having to rush to get JB to daycare and then himself to work, that’s a minor nice thing I am appreciating. Our weekday screen time prohibition has been lifted to allow for some movie or show most nights. It’s kind of relaxing.

JB is mostly handling this quarantine with good grace for which I am grateful. They aren’t very stressed in part because PiC is more available to them for play and games than usual, even with work because his work is so odd right now, and in part because they are enjoying doing all the things at home they feel like they’re missing out on while at school. I suppose this is balancing out a bit. If we fail to enforce a midday rest period, there’s usually a mini incident in the late afternoon when tempers flare. They do not take their rest period with good grace, there is sulking and stomping some days but I do not care. The benefits far outweigh the bit of sulking.

Week 4, Day 5: We haven’t been spending money on sanitizer (occasionally, it can be obtained). We stay in and wash our hands with soap frequently so there’s no real need for us to have more than the two small bottles we already have on hand. We are spending on food for ourselves, food banks, bookstores (City Lights in SF and Marcus Books are institutions in Bay Area and need help), and supporting loved ones. We’ve been worried about small businesses that were abruptly closed for the shutdown where we know some employees and can’t contact them to see if they’re ok. I really hope they’re ok and we can figure out a way to contact them soon.

I continue to worry about the supply chain. I’ve been doing that since late January, but now it’s specifically about food as the chain is disrupted by consumer demand and lack of ability to process supplies meant for commercial use over to consumer. Meat and eggs and more perishables are going to waste and I have to assume that that will eventually further affect what can be supplied to consumers in addition to costing the suppliers, potentially so badly they may go under. I worry about a chain reaction where a couple of seriously broken links in the food supply chain reverberates up and down the chain. I don’t know enough about how everything works to game it out so instead I need to think about how we might compensate in our daily lives for disruption.

Last month’s spending comes home to roost in this month so I’m feeling the pain twice. I knew it was coming because I talked about it but seeing the numbers made me twitch a little. We’re ok for the moment but I still instinctively dislike seeing large bills.

We’ve detected some minor signs that PiC’s job could be at risk. Nothing is certain, nothing is out loud yet but there’s something in the wind. I can’t get much more hypervigilant than I am right now without just snapping so I’m working on pushing myself the other direction instead. They say drunk people survive car crashes better because they’re limp, don’t they? Without the imbibing, I’m going to take a leaf from that book and go metaphorically limp as much as I can in the case of any disruptive crash in our lives, whatever that may be. It’ll be a change from my usual anyway and maybe it’ll reduce the scarring. I’m still quietly traumatized by my lengthy stint of unemployment during the last recession, and I don’t even want to think about it really actually happening again this cycle. But I can’t not. So as I consider our options and monitor our spending and savings as usual, I will actively try to relax. Even if it doesn’t help, it can’t hurt, can it?

:: How are things in your neck of the woods? How are you?

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