By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (7)

May 25, 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, $1,570.70; Rural libraries, $321.62.

Weeks 9 and 10 of shutdown in the Bay Area.

Week 9, Day 1: Having geared myself up for a total shutdown to last several months, or even the rest of this year, I can’t quite wrap my brain around the idea of CA moving to Stage 2 of reopening. It feels like it’s must too soon when we still don’t have that much testing or any known effective treatments. My friends outside of CA who have been ill for weeks still can’t get tested. As a complete pessimist, I think this is my gut trying to protect me from getting my hopes up too soon that things will start to get better.

Related: I can’t think about the things I miss or how I want things to be later.

Also related: I’m worried about getting sick when things open up more because my immune system is trash. When I get sick with even mild viruses, I get hit really hard. It takes me 3-4x as long as normal people to recover. A 3-5 day illness for a normal person is a 3-5 week illness for me.

Week 9, Day 2: All the little things that bother me popped up today: I hate the way the wires under my desk are dangling, I hate our old round wooden chopsticks that hurt my hands when they’re swollen. I determined to fix those things NOW. I taped up the wires … but the tape that I had wasn’t strong enough. I searched and found replacement chopsticks but the shop wanted $20 for shipping – that was too rich for my blood. I guess it’s not my day for resolving issues.

I did order a gift of delicious small business cheese to a loved one sheltering in place alone who was recently hit with some additional bad news, though. One right thing was done today.

My workload was a bit lighter than usual so it was rather annoying that I couldn’t focus well enough to blow through the workload early and take the rest of the day at my leisure. But I suppose the upside is that I didn’t have to stress over the work piling up at lightning speed while I worked more slowly than I preferred?

Week 9, Day 3: Dammit-Sera is her official name now. I’ve cleaned up 11 piles of vomit and 1 massive lake of pee on my rug this past week. What’s going on, dog??

Continuing my streak of not getting things checked off my list – I waited too long to submit my Scholastic order and every single paperback I wanted to pick was out of stock. I grumpily taped up the wires under my desk with an absolute overkill of heavier duty tape.

My mood all day:

Week 9, Day 4: I don’t generally feel the need to go out … ever … but this whole being-cooped-up and feeling sick (just my stuff, not COVID related) thing is getting to me. I even felt the urge to go by Starbucks. A, I don’t even know if they’re open. B, I don’t drink Starbucks. There’s just nothing there I can have. Strange times.

I DO miss browsing books and crafts in person but it’s not a need. I just miss it.

I’m also finding myself mentally window shopping global cuisines. Arepas. Tamales. Australian pocket pies. Ceviche. Sashimi. Shawarma. Poutine. (Never had it. Very much want to try it.) Jamaican meat pie. (Found a recipe recently, want to try it.)

Even if we weren’t homebound because of COVID we would be to a greater degree because of caring for Seamus as his health wobbles, but that’s not stopping my mental taste buds going on a whirlwind world tour. It’ll have to do for now.

Week 9, Day 5: I’m so scattered mentally these days. I get my work done but I absolutely cannot multitask like I did before *waves hands* all this. I used to be able to work and keep track of JB and ponder on stuff we needed to get done in the background. Now? It’s just one thing or nothing. At night I normally dive right into a book..now it takes me 45 minutes or more of faffing about on Twitter. Of course that’s how I find gems like this:

Once I might have run myself down mightily for my inability to focus, day or night, but between accepting there is a whole-ass pandemic on and learning to be kinder to myself via therapy, I’m letting what must happen, happen. I settle down into a book eventually.

Lots of visible clutter knocks me off balance and clutter we have a-plenty with a child at home who is constantly producing craft projects. I’ve instituted a Choice Board where JB can choose from three categories of things to do: Helping, Movement, and Quiet (really self directed) Activities and you’d better believe that “clearing up your mess” shows up in multiple forms. It also includes putting away everyone’s laundry and unloading the dishwasher because they have capable enough hands and plenty of energy to be doing that stuff solo now.

Week 10, Day 1: Coping mechanism: Cash. Cash cash cash.

I have a visceral need to have at least 1.5 months of cash on hand, even though we are currently relatively stable, because A) it’s comforting and B) I don’t want to spend any brainpower on the usual month to month making ends meet dance that I was doing every month last year. I used to do a version of “spend to zero” budgeting where all the cash we were allotted per month was in checking and I had to make it work. I always did make it work but it took a bit of stretching and creative shuffling. I don’t have the brain cells to spare for that in this mess. I take comfort in knowing I’m setting aside a lot of cash as a buffer so that I generally won’t have to worry about accidentally overdrawing our account.

To combat the negative feelings, I made three donations today.

Week 10, Day 2: I was bemoaning my lack of readiness for JB to move into kindergarten (while they’ve been crowing for months about starting kinder “soon”) and now I find that we may be fortunate with the timing. I’m hearing that our daycare won’t open until something like August at the earliest. If that’s true then we aren’t stuck between the rock and the hard place that many American parents are stuck where daycares are opening despite having no truly good mechanisms to protect our kids. We need the childcare, all of us, to work like normal but like us, they’re not at all comfortable sending their kids back to daycare in the next month or two. Unfortunately, many daycares have a use it or pay for it anyway or lose it policy. Either you pay for your spot whether or not your kiddo is attending or you’re out. Some can be flexible but that’s a common enough policy that fellow blogger parents are in a tough situation and I’m so empathetic to that. We’ve been hanging tight knowing we might have to make that call and it’s been a bit nerve-wracking just not knowing. For now we still don’t know what on Earth our late summer and fall will look like but the compass is at least leaning towards not having to juggle paying for childcare we don’t think is safe to use yet. That would be one minor relief.

Then we have to figure out how we manage the kindergarten year. Will they be open? Will it be all remote? Will it be semi remote and semi physical attendance with some kind of rotation? Can we risk JB being out there as a disease vector when my immune system is compromised? What kind of set up do we want to see and how do we advocate for it? Who knows?

Week 10, Day 3: WAVES of anxiety today. Partly for our own uncertainties, partly for all the tough things our friends are going through as they update us.

I keep seeing “how I learned / earned / saved / what I learned about myself” posts about COVID. I myself have nothing to say on that front yet.

I’m dealing with my health issues and we’re trying to keep sane. We’re working full time, PiC is taking the bulk of childcare because his full time is substantially lighter than mine and he’s also willing and able to do his work in the third shift period which I can’t do right. (I did that shift in our first year of JB’s infancy when we didn’t have childcare. It’s not fun.) We’re here for family and friends, we’re eating every day, caring for the dogs, trying to make sure each of us gets a little alone time. We’re coping by trying to keep everything else as normal as possible which may or may not be a good way to do things. We save and spend approximately the same as before. We are practicing our resilience. We aren’t always good at it.

Week 10, Day 4: A bad night of sleep turns me into….

I think we’re both feeling that way because PiC hasn’t gotten any exercise this week which helps him keep an even keel.

I have a fun new symptom just to really make this pandemic more fun: restless legs syndrome! It makes me grit my teeth and want to screech at everyone in sight. It hurts in a really bizarre and unsettling way.

We’ve had limited success with the Choice Board but we’re plugging away at it until they earn a reward and then we’ll see if they’re more self motivated.

Oh there’s this: I used to say I needed 40-45 hours of alone time during the week to feel good. I can definitely confirm that that was not an exaggeration.

Week 10, Day 5: TGIF!!!!

For the first time in ten weeks, though time still has no real meaning otherwise, I felt that huge relief of ending a workweek going into a weekend. And a holiday weekend at that. I did have to work late to make up for all the hiccups during the week – this has been my hardest week to date since lockdown – but it was well worth it to get my files in order and settled. I normally don’t take Memorial Day off but this year I am.

One of the reasons this week has been so hard is my depression has been creeping back in. It’s increasing so slowly that I didn’t even realize it was happening until today, I just assumed I was cranky and angry and irritable because life is legitimately extraordinarily stressful right now and my health is all off kilter which is no help at all. Thankfully, it’s still light because it’s just the anger and irritability, and numbness, and not the deep despair and feelings of failure. I’m working with a brain therapist already for my pain issues so this is of a piece with it all. Cross your fingers that brain therapy alone will keep it at bay, medications are not an option right now.

:: Does time have meaning anymore? Can you handle thinking about “normality” and what you’d like things to get back to or move forward to?

Sharing is caring!

Email

Twitter

Pinterest

0