In with the good, out with the bad
As tends to happen with blog posts these days, I started this one last week, before the terrifying events of last Wednesday unfolded in our nation's Capitol building. Of course there's a whole new set of thoughts in my head now, not to mention added anxiety, but today I'll stick with finishing out the ideas of this post first, and if I have time maybe I'll process all my new thoughts later. 45 minutes a week is not a lot of time for sifting through the thoughts and emotions of 2020/21!
Back to the original post...
Happy New Year, dear readers.
I have a contemplative post coming your way today, and I’m assuming that if you’re here in the first place you don’t mind reading my thoughts and musings, but this will definitely be a process-by-blogging day for me, so you'll want to have a seat and pour yourself some coffee. It might be a while.
(As usual I’ll intersperse a few pictures to help lighten the mood a little)
I think there aren’t many of us that are feeling sad to say goodbye to 2020 right now. I have been trying, since the world shut down last March, to remind myself daily of my many, many blessings. Neither M nor myself found ourselves unemployed this last year, despite such troubling economic times. We are all healthy. Circumstances aligned so that I could work from home and homeschool the girls, keeping our health risks to a minimum. All of our extended family remain untouched by the virus thus far, and despite some loneliness not being able to see one another in person, we are all well-versed in the Zoom call now and able to stay connected.
P.S. I did not know what Zoom was before 2020. True story. I had done Skype, FaceTime, and old school Google Hangouts, but Zoom was new. How much our world has changed that it is now an integral part of daily life.
I read an NPR article a couple of weeks ago (of course I can't find the link now) that talked about the psychological impacts of the pandemic, and how the average American is experiencing a lot of psychosomatic symptoms of stress and anxiety, and this happens even for folks who haven't experienced the worst-case-scenario... like me. Again, I haven't lost a job, we're doing okay financially, nobody has gotten sick, and I feel like my kiddos are reasonably safe in our choice of schooling this year. But the article mentioned that recognizing the things you have lost, even if that may feel ungrateful or silly when others have lost so much more, is important. It also mentioned that feeling simultaneous gratitude and grief over loss is also okay.
I guess that's where I am at right now. Simultaneous gratitude and grief. And it's getting wearying, after nearly a year of those feelings. Top that with anxiety over the chaos that's going on in our government right now, and it's just hard to make it through the day sometimes, right? Lowering my expectations has been key this year, and I really don't think that will be going away anytime soon. Even after things are "back to normal" (if they will ever really be that way again?) it will take some time, I think, for everyone to recover from the trauma of it all.
For the sake of processing, I'm going to recognize some of the things I have lost-- and again, these are not earth shattering things, but they are losses. And they're not really anything different from what most Moms and/or teachers are feeling right now, but I guess I kinda have to write them all down. Here goes.
I have lost the ability to leave home for work. This is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that I'm not exposed in person to more virus vectors than I have to be, and it gives me the freedom to be in charge of the girls' school at home. As an introvert, it feels like a bit of a blessing not to have to see so many people during the day. But as much as my introverted self would not admit to this, I need people (outside of my own family). Not only am I very much missing my teaching colleagues, but I'm also missing my singing colleagues. The ways in which we can stay in touch right now are poor substitutes.
{making videos for a virtual violin/viola recital with my gals!}
The other curse of teaching from home is that I am also trying to homeschool-- so every day I experience the age-old Mom conundrum of not doing either job very well. My teaching is suffering because I'm also trying to homeschool, and vice versa. It's rough to feel like you're crazily, frantically busy, and putting forth your best effort all day long every single day, but all the results to show for it are poor. It's a familiar feeling from the old days of homeschool, and it's one of the reasons we decided to put the girls back in school. All the spinning plates can't stay spinning all the time and there's simply nothing I can do to make it better. I do feel as if I have learned to beat myself up about it a little less, so there's that. Every day I sit down in the morning and make my list of what I can accomplish that day before my teaching schedule starts in the afternoon (and I've gotten better about being really realistic with those to-do lists). I do what I can, and then I start teaching, and there are plenty of school things for my girls that I don't get to every day, but I have learned not to sweat about it and just add them to the list for the next day, rinsing and repeating and accomplishing what we can. I have a feeling that it's the same way for their peers in school this year, with all the school schedules being so disrupted due to COVID restrictions, so I'm trying not to worry too much about it.
The other big thing that has been tough this year is M's stress level. Talk about psychosomatic symptoms; he has had them all. In addition to the migraines I already mentioned, he had to take an entire week off from work just after Thanksgiving due to stress-related illness (not COVID). The non-stop pace of work for him this year has taken its toll. It has been very worrying for me to watch him go through this. Not only that, but my helper being at less than full power when the above mentioned stresses are simultaneously bearing down on me has been doubly hard. I can't really fault him for coming home from work and falling asleep at 6:30 PM, which happened more times than I can count this fall, but when that happens after a crazy or stressful day for me, my knee jerk reaction was to feel angry. And alone. And a crazy mixed-up cocktail of emotions like worry for him mixed with frustration and impatience with the girls mixed with overwhelm of all the tasks mixed with isolation from most other adults I know. So..... not good. We have talked a lot, and as with any trying season in a marriage, we are wading through it, airing our frustrations in our own imperfect ways, working towards solutions. We always end up okay and my head-over-heels love for him has never allowed me to hold a grudge for more than a day or two. There are mostly good times, but our share of struggles too.
So....... that pretty much sums up my losses for 2020. Not insignificant. But it could be a lot worse.
In the midst of the strange mixture of emotion brought on by the pandemic, I feel like I have had a very keen eye lately for the rapid ways in which my girls are becoming grown up. Not even two years ago we moved into our new house with little children-- 5th grade and younger. Very suddenly, with our oldest now in 7th grade, their needs are worlds away from where they were that summer. We have rapidly outgrown what was already a tiny house for us, with pre-teens that need their space and emotions running a little bit higher, which is age-appropriate but also pandemic-appropriate. We have our youngest in the prime of her playing phase of life, with the need to be accepted by the bigger kids but also to spread out and make her own friends, which she hasn't really been able to do. And C somewhere in the middle of all that. And we have all just seen a LOT of each other this year. We do love to be together but... well, let's just say our opportunities for practicing our social-emotional learning and expressing ourselves are plentiful.
I think I have to be honest and say that I'm feeling a bit of loss and grief over the girls not being little anymore. I know this will only get more intense in the next few years. One night I had a dream that I think perfectly captured my subconscious feelings. In this dream, baby N came to visit me-- I can think of no other way to describe it-- in the most vivid and visceral dream I've had in a long time. It was so very real-- I was holding her in my arms and hearing her little voice just as it used to be 10-11 years ago, feeling the softness of her baby curls on my face, feeling the lightness of her bird-boned little body, smelling her baby smell. I was playing with her and talking to her and she was as close to being actually with me as she could be. And then I was in that place between dream and waking-- where you're realizing it's a dream and aware that you're about to wake up. And I was overcome with a terrible, terrible sadness at the thought of leaving her, even though her 12-year-old self was right there in the next room. The sadness became more and more intense as I slipped out of the dream into waking, and I actually laid there in my bed for a full two minutes or so after waking feeling that I might die from the grief-- it was like a huge weight crushing my chest and I was finding it difficult to breathe.
Wow, right???
My very next thought was that I know people that have actually lost someone, and what agony that must be, and how I don't think I could survive it. I felt extreme sadness for them, and all the other Moms and Dads I know in later phases of life that have watched their children grow. I know there are good parts to having grown children, but, well... that moment just took my breath away and I understood it all in a new way.
Comments
Post a Comment