Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (9)
June 22, 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 13 and 14 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
Week 13, Day 87: Mondays. Are. Terrible. PiC’s got half a day of meetings and I’ve got a full day of work every day, and so I have to oversee JB most of the day since my work doesn’t interact with other people. It’s fair in that when he didn’t have so many meetings, he’d take them all day but it’s also so frustrating to barely have the patience to deal with work nonsense and at the same time be patient in any way with JB’s shenanigans. They’re just being a typical 5 year old but my patience bucket has nothing left.
My sanity fraying is most obvious on Mondays.
Maybe it’s because I completely let it all go on the weekends now instead of trying to keep on top of some work and household stuff. Especially this past weekend. I did next to nothing because I felt terrible. Ten word searches, managed JB for some hours on Sunday, a fair bit of Sesame Street when I couldn’t get out of the recliner, started working on PiC’s Father’s Day gift.
PiC did all the grocery shopping and food prep both days.
Week 13, Day 88: After a few good weeks of practice with the activity board, I thought JB was ready to go live and earn prizes. But, to my frustration, they immediately lost motivation this week. This was supposed to be a linearly increasing habit of more autonomous responsibility. This isn’t how it’s working out. I should have expected that, shouldn’t I have?
Week 13, Day 89: Checking in on dear friends is incredibly depressing this year (month, week, pandemic…) They’re not doing well and I am at a loss for what more we can do to support them. I wish we could take the burden off them but I am finally learning to accept that I can’t do that.
Week 13, Day 90: JB woke up before I did today and shocked me with their initiative. While PiC walks the dogs, normally I get together the dogs’ breakfast (food, supplements, meds, etc, it’s a whole thing). JB came in to prod me and say: I made the dogs’ breakfast! And lo, they had done it all correctly.
On the other hand, I was frustrated to see that I had overlooked the fact that one of Seamus’s as needed medications was not only running out, the refill had expired. Sigh. I called in for multiple written prescriptions so I would have them all on hand or can send them into the mail order company ahead of time and not have this problem again. I’m normally much better at logistics but there are so many of them, invariably something gets dropped every so often. At least it’s not a critical one.
Week 13, Day 91: TGIF!! All Fridays have this push/pull conflict of “I can’t wait to be done with this day” and “I need to get all these things done before the end of this day!” I would rather work late into Friday night to get everything done so I can mostly ignore it for two days.
Early on in the pandemic, days lost all meaning but weekends are increasingly precious as this drags on. Since we know now that PiC likely won’t be back at his work site until the end of the year, that’s really changed our outlook on how we get through the days. Preserving our two good days a week for fun and only some necessary chores is important. We’re in this for the long haul.
This weekend was mostly about rest and recreation. PiC got two significant amounts of morning time for exercise, then a couple hours for work that he couldn’t get to during the week. I took JB out for two very long (for me) play outings and then rested for hours after because it was more than my body was prepared to handle.
Week 14, Day 94: Work on Mondays suck. Have I said that before? Because it does. Today, it sucked enough that I was ready to throw in the towel at 3:30 because what’s the point? I’m not going to clear this inbox anyway!
I’m not usually known for my defeatist attitude but it was ringing in loud and clear today. So I stopped work early and took the dog for a walk at 5:30.
My whole body had been crunched up with tension all day and that one walk wasn’t nearly enough. But it was better than the nothing I was going to get if I’d kept cracking the whip on myself.
My attention is also lamentably scattered. In a night when I’m in bed, insomniac with pain, I can get through 3 books. These days, insomnia or no, I can sometimes only manage several pages before my brain wanders off.
Week 14, Day 95: It’s almost certainly because I forgot something big and important and time consuming that I caught up on most of my work and inbox, but I decided that as part of self therapy, I was just going to roll with it. I took JB and Sera for a walk, made dinner, laid down for five minutes while JB read several pages of an easy reader book to me. We sat down to dinner an hour earlier than usual, finally, and I couldn’t remember what I needed to check off my to do list. But instead of aimlessly spinning my wheels inventing work, I … didn’t.
I’m pretty sure I’ve paid all our bills due this week so if I overlook something for a day or two, what matter? Better that I learn to breathe when I can have a minute to, than get caught up again in that unhealthy cycle of my norm which is to go off and invent more work.
Also my dominant hand was so swollen today that holding a pen was incredibly painful so while rest never makes that better, the swelling being an autoimmune/anti-inflammatory type problem, it sure doesn’t make it worse. Usually. Sometimes. I don’t know, it’s weird.
Week 14, Day 96: Discovery. I’m not the only one who’s perpetually angry and *kermit flailing* mentally and emotionally. Why am I always part of the worst clubs? The people are great but the clubs are awful: Dead Parent Club, Narcissistic horrible parent club, Pandemic Parent Club…. are you in any GOOD clubs?
Week 14, Day 97: I was physically miserable all day and JB displayed a surprising moment of emotional awareness when they finally noticed that their constant chatter during my Do Not Interrupt work time was getting deeply under my skin and removed themselves to self entertain for a while.
I had no appetite and PiC’s had a sore throat all week, and in this day and age those most definitely made us both paranoid. But for some reason, at the end of the day, I actually felt the actual gratitude that we’re all still reasonably healthy right now that I keep telling myself to feel. Emotions have been hard lately. It’s been a battery of all the negative ones leaving no room for joy or levity, and it’s really nice when one or two good ones peek through the storm clouds.
Week 14, Day 98: WE MADE IT, Y’ALL. ALSO for once I actually got through a much deeper pile of work than I usually can on a Friday despite having 3 calls scheduled. Pretty good way to end the week. I do have a nervewracking negotiation going on right now and I am hoping to have a resolution in a couple weeks. Cross your fingers for us?
PiC had to get tested for COVID which came back negative, thankfully.
We’re now finally working on organizing the kind of house maintenance we should tackle this year since we’re assuming that this is going to be a long term situation with some level of isolation and SIP.
I’ve been reading and re-reading this post this last week. I don’t often think about my health — or rather, I think of my health as a kind of “to do” project (gotta exercise today; need to prep the veggies for dinner; etc). You remind me that I have a lot to be grateful for, and also to remember that my students and friends will often have challenges I don’t consciously think about. Thank you for this reminder.
I love the concept of a “patience bucket”.