Almost Free

I’ve been having a series of emotional meltdowns recently. I feel like I’ve reached logical end of being overextended for too long. Full-time grad school, part time work, full responsibility for educating my kids, plus parenting overtime has definitely caught up with me. However, unless something awful happens, we’re expecting to be able to start getting our vaccines next month! We’re part of the final cohort because we’re young and healthy, so most other people we know have already been/are currently getting vaccinated. Which means we definitely only need to get through the rest of this school year! We’ll be able to do normal summer stuff this summer! We’ll be able to see family again! Most significantly right now, having light at the end of the tunnel — knowing this isn’t going to last much longer — really makes everything feel possible again. I can muster a second (or tenth or something) wind to sail this ship to the end of the semester.

In light of the fact that I should be able to start getting vaccinated against COVID sometime next month, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on things I miss and things I hope will stay the same. I think we all have to admit there are things we at least saw the value of, if not actively liked, about this year’s weirdness.

Things I miss:

1. Meeting my peers in class – Zoom break-out rooms aren’t the same as casual conversations before class starts. I have been in the same classes with several people for the whole year and still feel like I haven’t met them. I’ve seen their faces, and heard them respond to questions, but I can’t even remember their names. I know they feel the same.
2. Eating anywhere other than home – We went to a restaurant for my birthday last summer. Half of the tables were necessarily empty, and we sat in a booth that was semi-walled-off and facing out a big, open, garage door. There were only digital menus. Everyone wore masks whenever the server was around. I think that was the only time we’ve ventured to a restaurant since last spring break.
3. Traveling – Normally, we’d go out of state at least once in the summer, and for Thanksgiving every year. We haven’t done any of that since last March. I do know people who have traveled, and been safe, but the hassles surrounding safety seem like enough of a deterrent for me.
4. Feeling safe – There was a really big snow storm here recently and my partner went out to help our older, retired, veteran neighbor shovel his driveway. Neither my partner nor the neighbor wore a mask and I quietly panicked. I don’t want to get sick or unknowingly pass it to the neighbor, but it still feels rude to run out and ask them to wear masks. It feels like I’m insinuating that we think our neighbor is a health risk to us or something, when the truth is I’m worried that anyone could be. I don’t want to become part of the problem.
5. Podcasts, gratefuls, and other things I do in the car – At first, I was meeting a couple of times a week with one friend and her kids for our homeschool pod. That lasted until Thanksgiving, when case numbers jumped up and they were meeting with family members. Then there were birthdays and Christmas which meant more family gatherings, so we haven’t gotten together since. I thought I didn’t mind not driving. Recently, I realized that I do a lot of mentally healthy things (like listen to educational podcasts) when I’m driving, especially if I’m driving alone (which is when I used to list things I’m grateful for).

Things I hope stay the same:

1. Not having to drive so much – Yeah, I miss podcasts and gratefuls, but I don’t miss the hour of driving my partner had to do 5 days a week (and I had to do 3 or 4 days). The commute makes it hard to schedule my classes because someone needs to be available to drop off and pick up kids. It cuts into time for all of the other things I need to do as well, like cooking, cleaning, homework, my part-time job, etc. Knowing I could, just sometimes, attend class remotely it would really relieve some stress. This also applies to being able to stay home when sick or injured. Basically, let’s not ditch Zoom entirely… but just do less of it.
2. The kids’ sense of self confidence – This year has been pretty incredible for my kids in some ways. If I look past the unfortunate reality of socially painful quarantining, I see that they have all learned more and grown more in most, if not all, other categories this year than in previous years. They’ve all had access to mental health services we didn’t have time for (or realize we needed in some cases) before. Plus, they’ve been able to learn at their own pace with relative freedom to choose what they want to learn. I’ve watched them become more realized individuals with robust interests. I love that.
3. Actual adult friendships – I didn’t really have these before. I moved away from the closest thing to a “town I grew up in” to another state the day after I graduated high school. Then, I went from being a pretty fresh high school grad to a mom of two when I was 19. That combination didn’t give me much of a chance at having friends. I moved and moved again and married into the military and moved again and again and again. Now, I’ve been in the same place for about a decade, and gone to the same school for 5 years, but it took the pandemic to really inspire me and one of my former college friends to actually hang out. We created our pandemic homeschool pod and I have enjoyed actually having a real friend.
4. Grocery shopping less – We’ve tried shopping only every-other week and we’ve tried having groceries delivered, both things we hadn’t done before we became afraid to confront other people. I love the time freed up by no longer devoting most of one day every weekend to acquiring food for the week. I never want to go back.
5. Political activism – Obviously, there are some activist groups I agree with and some I super don’t. Still, I’m extremely excited to see people getting fired up about stuff they care about. I don’t know if we didn’t do as much of this before because we were too busy and then many of us lost our jobs, or if we were too complacent and now we’re scared, or if having an ill-equipped, celebrity crook for a president was too much to take quietly. I just hope that when all of this is over and unemployment is back down, people aren’t afraid to leave their homes anymore, and the presidency settles back into a game of which-lifelong-politician-sucks-less, we don’t forget to be pissed off and hold everyone accountable for their crap.