Inside.

taps microphone

Hello?

Anyone there?

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I'm trying to imagine an alternate universe right now, one where we decided to have a Spring Break staycation for no particular reason; didn't feel like skiing or camping, just decided to hang out at home and chill all together.  I can't quite make myself imagine it vividly enough to enjoy myself.

Yesterday I made my last trip to a grocery store, not a big one, a small neighborhood natural-foods store, so I could stock up on the last few items for my freezer.  I didn't empty any shelves, but took one thing here and one thing there; the exception was milk, which I'd just that morning remembered you could freeze; that memory was why I decided on the "one last trip."

  I came home and was beset by anxiety for a few hours about having done it.  Even if I don't set foot outside my house for the next fourteen days, I think I'll still have little waves of anxiety about it.

Tomorrow it will be fourteen days since I worked the polls on Super Tuesday.  Thursday it will be fourteen days since the family went to the Children's Theatre.  Saturday it will be fourteen days since I last had breakfast out.  Sunday it will be fourteen days since H and I took four teens to see Twelfth Night at the Guthrie.  Ticking them off one by one.

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Whenever I actually spend time working on something that theoretically will Help Us Get Through This, I feel better while I'm doing it.  Early this morning I did laundry, extra focus on the towels and on the gloves we've worn in public places, and the scarf I used to grab all the door handles.  Later I went downstairs and took inventory of the freezer.  Then I made lunch for us to eat together as a family, Mark coming down the stairs with his coffee cup to sit with us, almost as if it were dinnertime. 

I thought that would be a comfort to me, having us all together; but it seemed only to remind me today how very disturbed we are:  we never sit down together for lunch on a weekday, I don't even sit down with the kids; I don't eat what they eat; the teenagers usually make frozen pizza or quesadillas and I usually eat leftovers or a salad.  And here we were all six of us, Mark and me and the four kids still living at home, eating waffles and sausage and a sort of peach topping I made out of an ancient bag of homemade peach pie filling that I excavated from the freezer.  

FIFO, y'all.

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I hope that after a few days it will start to feel like a new normal, and I'll cease being startled by it.  We'll start doing school again on Monday, a week away, somehow or another; we won't go to H's,  but we'll do something; I'll enlist the teenagers, hers and mine, to work out some kind of remote voice chat thing.  

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I feel kind of lame about my attempt to sit down and write a blog post.  I hoped I would write something different:  either something a little more inspiring, or else something that might actually help someone, information and recommendations; or a meditation on this long unchosen Lent we face, that will stretch on beyond Easter; or, I don't know, almost anything else besides what I'm actually writing about, which looks like a rather dry accounting of being home for one whole day with my family (most of it) but it's really not about that at all; in fact it's about a wrenching sorrow that I'm tamping down and trying to keep below the surface, a sorrow for missed chances, for lost data of all things, for future lives everywhere that spool out like threads, the frayed end tucked under the few turns that are left, not enough length to hold the seam.

Comments

[Melanie B.]

I understand this sorrow.

I think we're all unravelling in different ways. Trying to hold it together in different ways.

For us, so far not much is changed from our daily life. Except for no Mass on Sunday, we're sticking to our usual routine. And yet, somehow, it feels like nothing will ever be the same again. It's 9/11 all over again, except worse. This time I'm a mom. This time I'm more personally worried.

[Amy F]

Oo, Melanie nailed a lot of my feelings. I keep remembering 9/11 too. Then I was newly married, unemployed, and knew eventually I needed to stop staring at the TV, but there didn't seem to be much point.

Now there are loud kids jumping all over each other while I try to listen to the governor's press conference and I don't want to freak them out but I'm also tired of the newly-14 year old make jokes when I tell him not to get too close to the neighbors we haven't already seen this week. Everything feels so fragile and I'm already weary.

[Erin]

It may not have felt like a valuable post, but your honesty is refreshing. For many reasons, I should be grateful to be here with my family (we are literally in the middle of an expat move to France, our life is completely up in the air and my husband and I were supposed to be in Europe right now!)and for quality time together after months of work travel, but it all feels so weird. I'm working EU hours from home, our boys are home from preschool, my husband has been laid off from his part time job. I'm emotionally exhausted at this point and instead of finding peace in being at home with the people who matter most, I just want our normal routine! Ack, one day at a time I guess.

[bearing]

Thanks for the comments. I'm realizing that connecting through blogs and blog posts and comments is giving me a lot of comfort right now.

[mandamum]

It is good to hear you again. I understand your feeling of not having anything "new" to say, but sometimes it helps to hear something in a different voice, or at a different time - I will always read your posts ;)

So far, we still have a breadwinner who goes "away" for work, and comes home, so our only change is that the rest of us are all here all the time. But the unsettled doesn't come from the new schedule, here.

I had to have a serious talk with one child who wasn't taking things seriously, just before everything shut down and the talk was irrelevant. She was annoyed about the precautions she was being asked to take, and we had clearly done too good a job of protecting the children from our worry ;) And now, we're learning about exponential growth, heh. "Let's talk about why having only 1 new case doesn't mean there's nothing to shut down for."

[Jenny]

One thing I’m feeling is immense gratitude that we homeschool, so everyone-home-together-all-day is normal. I’ve been reaching out to friends who are homeschooling for the first time now, and I feel bad for their level of stress/worry about doing “all that” on top of life! I keep telling them not to sweat the academics and to go outside as much as possible (of course, it *is* in the 80’s here in New Orleans...!)