By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (52)

May 31, 2021

Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 2, Day 71: I overheard kindergarten students talking about their experiences at Disneyland and other amusement parks with frequent flier style attitudes. They might have been exaggerating but if not, and this is the Bay Area so it’s totally plausible, the idea that young kids might have gone to Disney multiple times already was jarring. I grew up a mere hour away from there and we went to Disneyland once only because my school arranged a field trip when we were older. We couldn’t afford to go to Disneyland for fun. And it’s so much more expensive now than it was back in the 80s. Heck, with the money we have now, it still seems prohibitively expensive.

We go to Comic Con every year but we stay with family, we economize on food expenses, and kids attend free. Even with travel, we make it an affordable trip in a way I can’t imagine making Disney because just getting into the door is exorbitant.

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Civilizing small humans while still giving them the tools to thrive is hard work.

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We’re on Day 3 of terrible second and third naps for Smol. They were doing so WELL for a few days last week; they’d get two really solid naps. In this series, we are getting one semi-decent morning nap and then we’re lucky to get 40 minutes at a time after that.

Sigh.

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I missed this Ask the Grumpies when it first came around: How are you dealing with returning to post-vaccination life? I’m not anywhere near returning to post-vaccination life myself. I’m not yet fully vaccinated so it’s not a relevant question yet. Even when I am, the kids still aren’t close to vaccines yet. We still assume that we won’t be traveling this year for a lot of reasons. So their question of what do we want to keep from pandemic life is more relevant to me. A lot more stuff became accessible for me this year with the shift to remote only and curbside services. Though we never used grocery delivery, curbside pickups for retail and restaurants was so so so helpful in preserving my limited energy.

Year 2, Day 72: Here’s a sad discovery. Those little packs of powdered donuts that were such a treat when I was growing up? They taste terrible (now)! Of course JB still likes them. I too enjoyed terrible tasting desserts as a kid. And a teen. And in my 20s.

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I’ve had The Blacklist on in the background to cover kid noise while I try to work and I gotta say, without actually paying real attention, Liz is coming across as a terrible profiler. If she was a good profiler, she wouldn’t do half the things she did, would she? Shouldn’t she understand how her actions would influence a criminal? She consistently acts against her own self interests as far as I can tell. Or is it that she can’t act in her own best interests on a personal level using her professional skills? I don’t know. Then again, I can only predict a percentage of what Reddington is going to do, and sometimes I think he’s less thorough than I expected.

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I find myself very frustrated with JB’s learning right now. They don’t seem to be remembering most anything from their Spanish classes. The most simple seeming concepts that they’ve been covering for days, they don’t remember. I even wrote one of the verbs and their conjugations up on a poster sized sheet on the wall and they doesn’t even remember that ONE. Is this normal for this age? It’s driving me up the wall!

Year 2, Day 73: Last night was classic pre-sleep training bad. Smol woke us up crying four or five times in the night. Not only were they up constantly and unable to settle themselves back down, we’d let JB bunk with us as a special treat. Big mistake. They were tossing and turning at me all night so every time I tried to settle back in I’d be fighting back a flurry of outflung arms and legs. Sigh. I caught two hours of sleep before 9 am but that was hardly sufficient.

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It’s my week for being frustrated with JB’s education. We’ve been trying to teach them how to do money math and it’s like the concepts are bouncing off them like Teflon. ARGH.

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This is also my week for grief brain fog. We’re losing a dear friend to cancer and it’s terrible. We’re grieving his loss of function and loss of quality of life now, the loss of our quality time together because of COVID, and loss of future holidays together. We don’t know how much time he has left and we don’t know that we’ll have a chance to safely see him before the end. If we actually were able to travel, I worry about bringing germs that will tax his already fragile system. I worry too about bringing germs home to Smol Acrobat. That’s all assuming I was physically able to travel which is definitely not a given.

Year 2, Day 74: This morning started off with a terrible nightmare that my mom was still alive but utterly out of touch with reality and had deleted my phone number from her phone and wasn’t taking my calls. I’m not sure what dredged up that lovely bit of subconscious drubbing but it was very unpleasant.

My work day was then derailed by a series of tasks that needed doing but ate up more than my whole morning. Playing catch up the rest of the day was a bit demoralizing. I finally decided to give up mid afternoon and give myself a nice long reset.

JB had a light schedule today and filled many hours with drawing and coloring and more drawing. I’m going to need to pick up a few more composition books when back to school sales start, they’re a hit for kid art streaks.

We’re offering Smol some solids and they enjoy the tasting but aren’t actually interested in eating for the sake of eating. Chewing on the spoon, though, that’s a pasttime worth keeping up!

Year 2, Day 75: I’m having nightmares about my Mom being alive again and having lots of conflict with her. I wonder if this is being stirred up because of all the losses this year or if this is because I still carry a load of unresolved guilt for expecting myself to do the impossible in her last years. Or both. Maybe the situation with our friend losing their battle to cancer reminds me of her long slow decline, and the painful slide to the end.

I had a long talk with my therapist about it. It’s only about the 1574th time that it’s been said my guilt over my inability to be there for her emotionally while I was also tied up working 80-100 hours a week to pay the rent (and all the other bills and pay off their debt) for them and to pay my tuition and keeping my grades up and then findjng a new job to continue to pay for everything is unreasonable because there was literally not enough hours in the day to add emotional support to my barely survivable schedule. My answer to that has always been: yeah but it feels like I should have figured it out.

I’m just starting to see that maybe there wasn’t a way to just figure that out short of a lightning strike type windfall. I did the best I could and it was never going to be enough because I was only one person in my 20s working my ass off, fighting the tide of two family members dragging us down, and there was no way in hell for me to do as much as it’d take to provide a safe home for her AND be there for her emotionally. And maybe I have to be able to forgive myself for not being superhuman enough for her last years to be better quality. That maybe it’s not my fault that she had such a hard time in her last years. That it just generally really really sucks that all played out that way too early, when I didn’t have the financial resources to both pay for her needs and not work so I could be with her. That maybe providing for caretaking for a sick parent from the time I was 18 until she died ten years later was doing the best I possibly could. And if that was the best I had to offer then it’s not fair to keep beating myself up for not being better and not doing more.

I dunno.

Maybe.

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