By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (87)

January 31, 2022

Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 2, Day 316: We don’t technically live paycheck to paycheck but I sure do look forward to payday as if we do. About six days before we get paid my radar starts going up, every two weeks. Where’s my money. I want it Right Now. I wonder if that twitch will ever wear off…

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I am not sure if the principal is deliberately misleading us but they’ve only notified us of a handful of cases. When I check the district dashboard, that reports 6x more cases than what the principal has reported. This isn’t doing good things for my stress levels.

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Related: I have been noticing the urge to shop more and more often. Not an urge to get something specific that we need – just an urge to shop. Which tells me that I’m seeking endorphins to combat the stress chemicals racing around my body.

The thing is, once I identify the want to shop, rather than the want to acquire things, I remember that I don’t want a quick hit of dopamine. I’m craving more peace and tranquility, more smooth and longlasting doses of quiet and rest and recuperation. The quick hit seems more achievable but it’s not the healthy stuff I actually want.

I don’t know how to get the part though.

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I AM proud of making dinner tonight. I tried this baked panko chicken recipe (thanks for the idea, Hawaii Planner!), with a big salad and roasted potatoes on the side. Everyone liked it, eventually. Smol was my Pickypants holdout spitting out everything I gave them but it turns out they were just being their usual kind of ornery and not wanting much of dinner until JB brought them a banana. That, they ate happily. Pickypants.

Oh but Smol did actually attempt to use a spoon to scoop up food for once. They immediately flung it across the room, thus fulfilling the catapult capability, instead of putting it in their mouth which should have surprised no one.

Year 2, Day 317: A Nicole and Maggie commenter, xykademiqz, said “you can’t keep craving the same high (papers, grants) for 30-40 years.” That really resonated with me.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been thinking about how my ambitions have shifted over the past 20+ years of my working life. My priorities have shifted too. It’s a good thing – I was a serious workaholic to the point of destroying my health. That was for survival and thankfully that level of straitened circumstances are not our life now. It means I can choose not to obsess about the things I once did, I don’t have to keep looking for my next step up.

Intellectually, I think these are good things. Emotionally, it makes me feel like I’m standing still and that that’s a bad thing. It concerns me that I’m not building out an external network for my next job and that I don’t even want to start a new job anymore, I just want to ride this one out and then into the sunset. Then again, relying on the current job being stable for however long, and assuming I can stick it out that long, seems risky too. I have never stayed more than 4-5 years at any job before this one so longer than that feels like stagnation and cause for concern.

I can’t bring myself to care enough to do something about it, though. Not when my real dissatisfaction is related to people being people (aka lying, being entitled, not following directions, etc), and not so much the actual work I do. The work is fine. I do a fine job. I do my best by my people. The company has treated us all reasonably well. I can’t not avoid people forever, especially if I started at a new job.

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I made a best case scenario (and incidentally gluten free) version of Smitten Kitchen’s chicken pot pie for dinner. Since I was using premade gluten free pie crust, the filling proportions of her recipe were double what I needed. That was unintended on my part but perfect for my current strategy of freezing half of what I cook for later! I now have the filling for another pie some other time. We polished this pie off in one sitting.

Year 2, Day 318: HIP HIP HOORAY! Smol slept until 7 am! What a glorious piece of unbroken rest!

Thanks to their lie-in, I got about 5.5 hours of (somewhat broken) sleep. Pain kept me up until around 1:30, so I’m absolutely delighted at breaking the five hours of sleep point.

They only napped a total of 3 hours today across two naps so things were rough on the work completion front but I am accepting that some days are better than others and this was not that day. I got enough done to get by. After setting JB to vacuuming the floors, because they got glitter EVERYWHERE, I got a freezer dinner on the table by 6 pm. The bonus of having JB do the vacuuming: they love it and observing this froze Smol to one place staring in semi detached horror for the entire time so I didn’t have a baby to contend with in the kitchen. Win win!

A dinner that Smol actually ate a ton of, by the by, which was an unlooked-for but deeply appreciated victory.

I chose not to work past 8 pm tonight. Enough is enough.

Year 2, Day 319: Smol made it to almost 6 am which is better than last week. I wished for 20 more minutes but it wasn’t to be so I leaned into the early start. Normally PiC takes the morning shift but he was clearly too tired to hear the babbling.

Looking around the kitchen, as much as I fuss about Smol’s not eating, the sum of the two of these kids makes me think I actually have two swarms of locusts wearing kid suits. We have no more bananas, we’re almost out of oranges again, we’re down the to end of the bread and bagels and

Year 2, Day 320: Why do people have kids? PiC groaned after another 5 am wake up.

Mostly because people told them they’re supposed to?, I reply.

Why did WE have kids?

I have no real answer for why WE had kids. Not at this bleak hour.

What are our alternate reality selves doing, the ones without kids? We had LIVES.

That’s debatable! I counter, as I clean up the clean diapers strewn across the floor. Smol takes this for the invitation that it is and starts flinging them across the room as fast as I can gather them into the basket.

The average of us had a life!

I laugh a bit. Yeah maybe. But even taking into account all the hard stuff we’re still deep in, and even after accounting for pregnancy and childbirth destroying my body as I knew it, I suspect we’re out ahead a bit on the life math. There’s a LOT of hard stuff. And my body … whew. Don’t even get me started.

But I would still be a workaholic if I hadn’t had a hugely compelling reason to evaluate my life priorities several years ago. I wouldn’t have put so much of myself into therapy in an effort not to repeat generational mistakes and not to pass down generational traumas. I probably wouldn’t have even seen those problems like I can now, with offspring causing my memories to replay bit of my childhood.

As stressful and scary and worrisome as it is to be parenting right now, it’s also weirdly restorative.

I am continually surprised that I find parenting every bit as hard as I expected it to be, but also with a lot more good stuff than I ever expected.

:: What’s good / bad / interesting in your lives this week?

5 Responses to “Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (87)”

  1. To answer your Twitter question: how about the dr grip 4 in 1?
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  2. bethh says:

    I’m interested in your mullings re parenting and how it’s been so good for your life. I didn’t have kids (that ship has DEFINITELY sailed) and I think sometimes about what I am missing out on – a lot of aggravation and stress, of course, but also a lovely richness, I think. At least that’s how I imagine it! I’m pretty satisfied with my path, fortunately.

    Sometimes I think my library hold queue is a product of my acquisitive itch – I certainly can’t begin to read everything I get, but it’s nice to HAVE it (and then be able to get rid of it).

    • Revanche says:

      I wouldn’t ever say that anyone is missing out for not parenting no matter the reason, no matter how much I think MY kids might add to my life, because I don’t think it’s true.

      My kids are really entertaining but they are also a complete package of complexity and frustrations and worries. If I had to get that entertainment secondhand without kids, it would also be without all the hard stuff so IMO you can come out even either way. It just depends on your luck and circumstances.

      In my case, I think it’s been better because of my circumstances. We very consciously wanted to do better, I knew I was flawed, and I knew there was a lot I didn’t know yet and I sought help.

      That plus my brain therapy means that I am a more whole person because of the work that I’ve done. I probably would not have done that work without the impetus of not wanting to screw up my kids the way I was screwed up. I can’t do better as a parent without learning to be better and kinder to myself. Maybe I would have come to this eventually, but I rather doubt it, I wouldn’t have considered myself important enough or worthy of such help.

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