By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (67)

September 13, 2021

Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 2, Day 176: I’m feeling so conflicted. Day to day, I feel like we have more than enough to share more generously with people who need a helping hand. Everyone else’s struggles remind me frequently how fortunate we are. But I worked my tail off to get here specifically because I am concerned about the murky future and my ability to work. It’s very important to give but I’m also responsible for keeping our own parachutes in good repair. Even with whatever work I do to improve my health, which I can only do now because I’ve been so aggressive with saving that we can afford some of that crucial healthcare, my baseline immune system is unreliable. I need to be able to step away from work earlier than later. Mortality aside, I don’t have good years in the tank. At best, they’re slightly less crappy than before years. They’re dominated by pain, fatigue, and limited range of motion. I want to have more freedom to use my precious energy only / mostly on what’s actually important to me and my family, which doesn’t include working a job. I feel selfish about taking care of myself financially. I shouldn’t. But I do.

In writing this, I just realized what it is. I feel selfish for taking care of myself first. If you told me that I had to look out for JB’s health future because they had chronic health issues, I would take on the world to make sure it was as secure as possible. If it was Smol or PiC on the line? Same thing. But because it’s me who is the “weak link”, well, I’m reverting to form and saying that I’m not good enough to be a priority.

Look at that, spotting an unhealthy pattern happening right there.

It’s wild that it’s hard for me to say: It’s ok to take care of myself. It’s ok to secure my future. It’s ok to make sure that I have choices even if I wasn’t thinking about making sure I wasn’t a burden on my kids in the future.

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We’re so grateful for the holiday weekend. I still had work to do but the reprieve was so much needed. We spent the whole weekend at home doing all the needed chores and trying to rest and reset.

Year 2, Day 177: Related to yesterday’s thoughts: My job isn’t actually a bad one, especially when I remember to put reasonable limits on the madness during times of extra stress, but I am definitely still reacting very negatively to the most minor provocations that at best deserve an eyeroll. I’m so tired of work. I’m also just so tired. This tiredness frequently puts me in the negative spiral mood: thinking that I wish we were further along in our FI journey so I could exercise the choice to not work for a long period of time. Getting mad thinking about all the money I wasted taking care of a lying, selfish grifter father because that much money invested back then would have made SUCH a massive difference in our choices today. I can’t even let myself run those numbers because to have the confirmation in numbers that it would have made it possible for us to have better choices during this terrible time makes me mad enough to spit.

Sadly, I can’t take a leave of absence and come back to this job. The team is too small to do without me and keep my job for me. I’m also very much not interested in any of the compromises I’d have to make for every other job out there, I’ve looked, so keeping this job is the least worst of all the available options that I am aware of. Sigh. Anyway, getting that off my chest periodically helps release that pressure and stop the If Only spiral by reminding myself I did the best I could with the knowledge I had at the time and now I’m doing the best I can too.

Part of me grumbles that I did a piss poor job back then so why should I take comfort now with the knowledge that maybe I don’t have all the relevant information and maybe I’m just in a perpetual cycle of screwing up but I suspect that’s a new bad spiral.

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JB and I had it out over their homework today. I told them to correct a few items and, true to current form, they talked back about every single thing. I lost my temper and yelled and they got snippy back and things were not good for a while.

I gathered myself after washing some dishes and decided to make the most of a bad attitude about homework. We agree that homework is the enemy and that we would work together to defeat it. But teams don’t work well if you don’t listen to your helpers when they’re trying to share areas of improvement and correct mistakes. They warmed to the idea and got over their snitfit.

Year 2, Day 178: Babies are torture. Cute and fun and also torture. Smol woke up at 330 babbling up a storm and also angry. Settled back down and then was at it again at 620. We were not ready for all that. Plus I had worked extra late the night before so at best I’d gotten to sleep close to 1 am.

All in all, it made for a zombiefied type day. I was cranky and dragging. By the hour before dinner, I was like Tik Tok from Oz running down the last twist of the key. I rather recklessly expended the last of my energy writing a letter and then collapsed on the couch to be useless for five minutes. I had to wrangle the kids after that so PiC could make dinner, or at least the squirrely one who kept trying to make a beeline for the magic bag of markers that JB was flaunting. It was touch and go but I made it to dinner where I finally realized that I’ve been calorie deficient and sleep deprived almost all week. No wonder nothing works right. I’m trying to make my brain function full bore dealing with all kinds of work, plus manage the kids. Meanwhile, stress has wrecked my appetite so I’ve not had a full meal in days and I just didn’t notice because I don’t ever really feel full anyway.

Then I wonder why I can’t drag myself out of the abyss, and don’t want to do so much as stretch. Stretching is easy! Or it should be.

I’ve got to do better about both sleep and eating. I’m not working late tonight. I’m putting myself to bed before 9.

Thank goodness that, despite all the other sleep hiccups, Smol has generally been able to fall asleep easily at bedtimes now. That’s one load off.

Year 2, Day 179: What do you call it when the baby wakes up at 430 but your partner is only finishing work at that time and crashes half an hour later?

Not what I signed up for!

There’s something about having dramatically low expectations for a day though. I was exhausted. He was exhausted. Smol was full of beans. The timing was awful too. If I put them down for a nap in under two hours then we’d be up a creek. They’d wake up smack dab in the middle of PiC’s morning meeting, and me taking JB to school. I did my best to keep them up and we almost made it to two hours. For better or for worse, they had a power nap that was only 45 minutes so in the end they were awake for the school dropoff. But PiC also didn’t want to leave me juggling both kids and the dog so he didn’t go to his meeting after all and did school dropoff while I took care of Sera’s morning needs.

We agreed to be as energy saving as possible today and mostly we did a decent job of it. We both got a good solid chunk of work time and agreed on takeout for dinner. Too bad takeout fried chicken is so salty though. I couldn’t handle as much of it as I had expected to eat. My tongue still feels funny.

*****

Speaking of low expectations. My birthday is coming up and I need to dramatically lower my emotional expectations. I generally don’t want or expect any gifts, but I do want the day to go smoothly and the more I want that, the less likely it has been to happen. Especially with kids.

Used to be, I’d cook a special meal and have an old school friend come over to share with us. Cooking got downgraded to eating out. Now … I’d like to just not be grouchy all day.

PiC always goes out of his way to make special days special but even he can’t prevent the trainwreck of our children crashing sleep and being grouchy and snippy and all that. So I’m resolving to do my best to look for just a small spot of peacefulness. Something manageable. Something spanning about ten minutes. Anything more than that is a bonus.

What did you do, or what are you planning, for your birthday this year? I need some very low key ideas to borrow!

*****

Speaking of bonuses, not the money kind, I was thinking throughout the day of little things I’m grateful for. Clean running water. My robot vacuum. The compost bin. Cool stamps. Really adorable stationery.

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That also got me thinking about why I don’t think of the house as a real estate asset. It’s a place to live and if we were definitely planning to move in the next 30 years, perhaps I wouldn’t be so pessimistic. But as it stands, we bought this place with an eye to age in place here. We’re under no illusions as to the safety of the place though. Even before factoring in climate change, and I don’t think my brain could handle adding that variable now, we are subject to the Big One hitting at any time in the next 50 years and most of our city is in a liquefaction zone. Aside from that, there are a number of studies predicting that the whole Peninsula from San Francisco on down for quite a ways will be witness water rising, erosion, and flooding. And if we’re not flooded out, California is in perpetual drought to the point where I’m seeing suggestions that we’re perhaps more rightly headed to aridification. Quite enough to be going on with PLUS CLIMATE CHANGE.

It’s very hard for me to believe that there will be much value to be had from selling this place when it’s time for us to sell. I sure hope that it’ll hold its value enough for our needs but I’m not holding my breath. I won’t go so far as to say it’s not an asset like our cars, which don’t show up on my net worth calculations at all because they only have practical value but so little monetary value. For normal people, it makes sense to count the house. For us, I’m too convinced that one or more natural disasters will sap most of the value of the place.

I do still count the house our balance sheets as an asset as we pay down the mortgage but I won’t ever be comfortable looking at it as an appreciating investment.

Year 2, Day 180: A thunderstorm rolled through here, lightning strikes lighting up our bedroom at 4 am accompanied by marrow jangling thunder. Everyone else slept through it but Sera and I, she came running for the safety corner and tucked herself in post-haste.

It was unsettling but I also wanted to watch the light show since I was awake. I decided not to, sitting up would just make it that much harder to get back to sleep again.

*****

Smol’s had a week of foreshortened night sleep, waking anywhere from 3-5 am, and it’s slowly sapping our will to exist. It’s also throwing off the daytime schedule. I know they’re having a brain development spurt, we can see it happening. We got into the habit of feeding them and putting them back down, initially thinking the wake ups were hunger, but that’s got to stop now. Painfully.

*****

I had a rough therapy session today but I suppose I was due for a painful cleansing session after a few that were more about my parenting than anything deeply painful.

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In the middle of that, JB was suddenly sent home from school because of some infrastructure issue they didn’t bother to inform us of earlier in the day. They gave us hardly any notice at all, and didn’t say what arrangements would be made for the kids whose parents couldn’t drop everything to get them on less than an hour’s notice. So frustrating.

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