By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (98)

April 18, 2022

Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 3, Day 24: Well hello Monday. Starting at midnight with the utterly brutal pain that made it hard to breathe, and then moving right along to the four am wakeup with Smol who somehow managed to drape a blanket completely over themselves like a tiny distressed ghostie and cried for rescue. After a few rounds of patting and signing, they settled back down for a couple more hours. We got our real morning started around 630, that superb night under my belt, with a downpour that didn’t bode well for JB’s playground ambitions.

No wonder I’m tired before I start work. No wonder it felt like two days compressed into one.

*****

Work felt exponentially more repellent than it should (than usual?). Nothing was actually wrong aside from a couple annoying policy problems I have to deal with. It’s probably that I’m just worn to a thread already and now my brain must somehow turn on and do stuff. Yes of course why not.

*****

PiC’s work informed him that he’d had a close contact exposure to COVID at work last week and JB’s school informed us that they had a close contact exposure today. This does nothing good for my frustrations with how much we’ve endured and how stupid policies are right now. (Why did it take his work a WEEK to inform him??)

Year 3, Day 25: Two huge reliefs. My pain was a bit less than yesterday’s so I got to sleep and Smol slept right through to 7 am so I got almost 6 unbroken hours! Huge. Not restorative but at least it’s not taking two steps backwards like most nights.

*****

PiC had a gangbuster day of meetings, 5?, which meant I was main parent on deck much of the day. I did manage to whip through a lot of my workload earlier in the day because I’m super efficient at my job and Yesterday Me did Today Me a real solid getting through the weekend backlog. So, despite an important but also major detour into placing orders for our Lakota families, the later part of the afternoon was mildly less stressful than usual and I was able to stop working at 530.

I’m still deeply winded, and sad that I can’t even get through the most sedentary of days without being physically wiped out halfway though. After packing and taping up a 13 lb box of baby clothes for our Lakota family after the kids were in bed, the next step was to go schedule the pickup but my body just couldn’t get up off the ground. The temptation to drag a blanket off the bed nearby and just nest in place was overwhelming. Eventually PiC passed by and saw me and my buddy, the box, and carried the box out for me which created a little mental tailwind that I rode to get that package pick up scheduled and my bum into bed.

This was after a day when we’d had dinner delivered and just had to be reheated while Smol happily (or unhappily) screeched. It doesn’t bear thinking on how much worse it’d be if standing and cooking for 30-40 minutes had been necessary.

Year 3, Day 26: Pure speculation: in my attempt to get Smol to drink more any water, I offered them very minimal to no milk for a few days. I caught myself and reversed course to add back milk this week and they’ve gotten two full nights of sleep yesterday and today. Coincidence or no? Actually, probably coincidence since they also popped out two more teeth in the past three weeks.

Whatever the reason, I’m grateful for whatever good sleep any of us get. It’s just impulse to try and figure out the reason so we can get MORE.

*****

Day three of this work week and, to only my own surprise, I’m still unenthused about work. I keep expecting this malaise to just pass overnight and to feel enthusiastic or invested in my work the way I used to. But in the spirit of trying something new, I’m not trying to force myself to pretend to be upbeat about it or to find a “bright side” like how much I like getting a paycheck when we’re not independently wealthy. We do like our paychecks, FTR. Just being honest about my meh attitude privately (here or with select friends) helps the feeling move through, rather than pooling and festering. Not that I’m opposed to waking up to be independently wealthy and no longer in need of W2 work one morning but let’s not count on it.

The funny thing is that my work does matter, and the job that I do matters. I’m also doing a lot of positive building right now, we’re not just fruitlessly plugging holes in the dam trying to stem the flow of bad things. We have weathered two really hard years and are coming out this year with positive changes for my team and myself for the longer term. But the minutiae of getting there under the shittiest of (pain and pandemic and pregnancy and newborn now toddler) circumstances has been grinding me down. I can’t erase that damage with a positive outlook on good outcomes. I don’t prioritize the good outcomes at work over my personal life anymore which means that days and weeks like this are going to be somewhat inevitable while I figure out a better long term balance.

*****

On a personal note, I’m feeling like a terrible parent again so that’s great. I took a break from work to take the kids on what was meant to be a fun walk. Instead, while I was trying to talk to JB, they kept barreling ahead several feet even though I was in the middle of talking. After the third or fourth time, I lost my temper and scolded them for being rude and trotting off when I was mid-sentence. They claimed they were waiting for me to speak? What the heck is that?? Where is your common sense? If you genuinely were waiting for me to speak, how does it help to be standing so far away I have to shout?? Argh!!

So that blew what was supposed to be a nice one hour break from work and I went back to my desk exhausted from a long walk and not at all reinvigorated. I feel like we’re already dealing with teenagery nonsense and I don’t know how I’m going to survive them.

Then Smol really put the capper on with their exhaustion and refusal to nap. A potent combination. By 9 pm, I made myself walk away from the office because there’s always one more thing to do. I’d already paid the CPA and finalized the last of the 17 forms for summer camp. Sending the payment and other paperwork can wait until next week, I’m still three weeks ahead of schedule. I used to think that pacing myself was sprinting at the beginning instead of the end, creating plenty of time to rest between the completion and the deadline. Now I’m making myself work on big projects in significant chunks spaced by days, not minutes and hours.

Tomorrow I get to figure out how to handle the stupid extra fees tacked on when I tried to roll over PiC’s Roth IRA.

Year 3, Day 27: Drat. Somehow I’d forgotten today was both an early start with an extra early morning call AND PiC at the work office day. Usually I do some things to ease the day a bit so it doesn’t feel like a slow grinding crawl. Alas, I did not.

After my three hour stint with Smol, feeding, cleaning up, playing, reading, laundry, feeding, cleaning up, my body wanted to just power down for several hours. Alas, again, rest was not yet in the cards. I had too much work to do. The good news was after being confined to my chair for three solid hours because I couldn’t move anymore, the critical work was done by 530 and we were able to have an early dinner. Smol was, as usual, kind of a putz about eating a balanced meal but they did enjoy learning to dip their own pita in hummus.

Smol and I then had a slow chase game going round and round in big laps around the kitchen, Smol cackling for all they were worth, as JB enjoyed dessert.

Then we discovered how many pieces a chip-resistant Corelle plate can shatter into when JB dropped it on the floor. My approximate count of large and microscopic pieces is in the thousands. That wasn’t the best use of the last of my energy but at least our floor doesn’t have a speck left on it. Until tomorrow when the crumbs will begin anew. The exercise also reminded me how much I’d really like properly clean floors. The tile needs a really good scrub but the act of vacuuming it alone tells me exactly why I won’t be able to make that happen. The hired cleaning folks do no more than a cursory mopping of the floor, even after we specifically asked for a deep clean of the floor, or I’d gladly pay someone to make this happen.

PiC’s already in charge of scrubbing the sinks and toilets and taking out the garbage and compost on a regular schedule, among other cooking and cleaning so it’s not a failure to pony up equal effort on his part. If anything it’s mine because my fatigue and pain mean I’m not contributing in so many ways. I do everything I can of course, it’s just my “can” is so much more limited than anyone else.

*****

Tomorrow’s an even earlier morning meeting day hooray 👀

Oh but we got into the Earthquake Brace and Bolt program again this year, you might remember we had to give up our funding a couple years back because their timelines were too tight and we were juggling too many big projects. Not that we’re just at our leisure now, I’m not sure if we should give up our spot again and reapply later but PiC and I need to discuss.

Year 3, Day 28: 3 hours of sleep is not enough.

*****

We’d ordered Lebanese from the city for delivery and I’d assumed it would be as tasty or better than our local spot just because it was from the city. Boy was I wrong. The serving sizes were generous, that I can’t quibble with: huge kefka kebab. Heaping piles of hummus. More hummus than we can eat in a week. Mountains of rice. But it was all rather bland. The garlic sauce I so eagerly anticipated was a mayo with a sticky mouth feel instead of fresh smooth yogurty garlic. The cucumber tomato salad was dressed liberally with a pesto-like sauce that tasted like nothing at all. I’m not sure how they managed that. There was distinct green in there, lots of it. Surely the green had some kind of taste originally? Whatever happened to it, it arrived here as purely decorative.

*****

I’ve been thinking about perspective a lot lately. I’ve been mostly subconsciously, sometimes consciously, waiting for the other shoe to drop with my estranged bio family while doing my best to set up my chosen family for stability.

Scalzi’s A Self-Made Man Looks At How He Made It from 2012 was a great read on its own, seeing all the major connections in his life that led to his present day success and comfort. This post from 2008, Ten Years Ago Today, looking back at a pivotal moment in his life made me think of how much where and when you’re standing changes your perspective on events in your own life.

Putting myself in his shoes, I couldn’t have predicted what they decided to do or why. I couldn’t have predicted whether it was worth the risk. It could have gone either way.

I know what I would have chosen. Time and again in my life, it was me taking responsibility for everyone else’s lives, I chose the grey apartment. It was the safe path and I could be miserable for the sake of others. Very occasionally I didn’t and it probably isn’t a coincidence that those times were when I was with PiC. Not just because he was the one person for whom I had to take no responsibility, and in fact we shared responsibility, but also because he absolutely insisted that I was worth it. Worth something. I still don’t accept that internally but it had an effect all the same.

There’s a lesson there, one that’s still being learned. When presented with the choice to suffer for someone else’s benefit, I generally jump on the grenade and that’s not a coping mechanism that’s served me for quite a while. It’s just going to take time to build new habits and thought patterns.

*****

I should never choose cherry flavored anything. We tried Waterloo brand pineapple sparkling water and I was impressed at how tasty it was so we bought some black cherry and cherry limeade sparkling waters.

Disgusting!

It tasted like Robitussin which I never drink that stuff without complaining so this was a particularly terrible experiment. Luckily JB likes almost everything so these two cases are now for them. Yck yck yck.

And because maybe I never really learn my lesson, I’m trying their watermelon flavor next week. Cross your fingers for me.

*Now that it’s too late I’m remembering that I should have had PiC pick up the Soleil brand berry flavored sparkling water at the grocery store. We liked that one.

I’m trying to avoid anything that uses sugar substitutes, my body has decided they are terrible now, so Ice is out. I have not been a huge fan of Le Croix or Buble. I wish I liked tea or coffee.

:: Do you have a favored non-sugar substitute flavored water?

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