Day 197
2020 September 30
Wednesday
8:12 pm:
It’s time for a catch-up. It’s been a long time since my last one and I feel bad about that, but I’ve been exhausted — completely mentally and emotionally drained, nothing left to give. Trying to keep this all afloat, making sure we had a solid plan for the kids for school, that we were not relaxing our safety measures and putting ourselves at risk, working in our garden and processing our harvest, the regular day-to-day effort involved in keeping the household running, working every weekend..
It’s been a lot.
It’s been 6 months.
And I’m absolutely burnt out.
There are posts I have wanted to write during the past couple months. I half-composed many in my head on my drives to and from Ottawa — I should look into a dictation app, I guess — but by the time I was back home, my mind was scattered and the fractured ideas and half-thoughts were too hard to pull together. I am finding it incredibly hard to get so very little quiet/alone time in my house.
That might be the singularly most draining aspect of the last 6 months, if I am honest.
I need quiet to recharge.
That is a precious commodity in a house with 7 other people.
There are many things I would like to say — could say — about how our province and our school board have handled the whole “back to school” thing, but I won’t.
Suffice to say, as usual, our teachers are left in a situation where they’re expected to do far too much with far too little, and without the support they deserve from our government. I have serious concerns about what this means for kids in the classrooms, for kids at home, and for the educators responsible for keeping everyone safe and on track. I am not happy with how much lobbying and time parents have had to expend on getting the government and school boards to even attempt to do the right thing. Given the way things have gone in our school board, it feels like a massively wasted effort.
With the “Dark Months” approaching and the second wave hitting now, our family is hunkering down again and will return to the level of activity we had in the Spring. We’re aiming to go grocery shopping once a month, limit our errands to single days as much as possible, and be cautious about our interactions with people outside of our nuclear family. Two of the kids are doing non-digital remote learning, one is doing synchronous, and the other is doing asynchronous, so we don’t have to worry about school “exploding our bubble”.
That is reassuring to me, as I watch the case count start to rise again in our rural area.
Last year at Thanksgiving, my parents traveled from Nova Scotia to stay with us for the celebration. We’ve never had a home big enough to host them before, and we were all hoping this would be the beginning of a wonderful annual tradition. Given they’d have to travel through Quebec to get here and that our proximity to Ottawa (a hot zone) means there’s a greater chance of it circulating in our community, we decided it was best for them to skip this year.
I have 6 kids — we’ll still have a big, boisterous Thanksgiving, but it won’t be the one we had in mind.
It’s been a year since I’ve seen my parents.
It looks like I will have to wait even longer.
I won’t lie. Skipping a year is triggering my anxiety.
The last time I skipped a year, it was the summer before my brother died. When he died, I hadn’t seen him in 2 years — that was one of the hardest things for me to forgive myself for when I was deep in my grief. That knowledge sits like a tiny sharp stone in the back of my head, always reminding me that any of us can just stop at any moment.
Putting off seeing someone, no matter how good the reason, might mean you never see them again. I know everything will be fine, and maybe they can visit at Easter, but the unrelenting throb of low-level panic is very real to me right now. I think much of it is misplaced worry — not seeing my Folks is something concrete my brain can focus on and fret about. It is a worry that has a shape and a history, and easier to identify than all of the unknowns spreading out in front of me in the year ahead.
As such, I’m giving myself leeway. I’m allowing myself the freedom to be sad when I need to be sad, to be active and proactive and an advocate when action is what my mental health requires, to blast music if that is what my heart needs. The only things that I can’t give myself but require desperately are sleep, quiet, and space to think.
This Covid situation has my sleep completely messed up. My brain has figured out that the house is only quiet in the middle of the night, and therefore wants me awake for hours at a time when everyone else is sound asleep.
It has established my daily routine.
Mornings are filled with helping the kids with school and ensuring the youngest two don’t feel left out. There’s generally some bread making happening in the background, and many cups of tea or coffee. Then it is lunchtime. Then the usual daily chores — lately this has also involved prepping pickles, jams, and tomato sauce for canning. Then supper. Then bedtime. Then..
Wide awake for 3 hrs.
The 6 month mark in any endeavor is hard — whether it’s a project, pregnancy, or pandemic. It’s the “I don’t want to do this anymore” point. We don’t have a choice, though. We have to do this. We have to keep doing this. We don’t even know when (if?) we get to stop doing this.
That’s a lot to deal with.
So, to conclude, I apologize for the downer catch-up, but please use it as evidence that you are not alone in however you are struggling with all of this. We’re all in this together, so we need to be good citizens and wear our masks, wash our hands, limit our contact with strangers, and sit tight and hope we all ride this out as well as possible.