I awoke to snow on the ground.
What day is it? What season? In a moment where the passage of time feels slippery and elusive, ephemeral days blur: A moment negotiating with a toddler feel like hours, but suddenly it dinner time and I sigh with exhaustion at the thought of feeding 5 people again. Again. Didn't we just eat?
I get two pages into reading before I am interrupted and need to put it away. I get two thoughts into writing, when the urgency of sharing a toy forces a pause. Life feels chopped into little moments, a stream of consciousness from which I am always sidetracked, constantly distracted. I sit down to work, and at the moment when I feel some sense of focus, the office door opens, and someone needs something: a question, a snack, an ant that needs to be killed. Something that pulls me out of organizing the next 3 weeks of exam prep for AP French and into the immediacy of a scary bug, on the wall, right now.
Even E cries at the end of the day, stunned that it is bedtime: "Today was too short for me!" The passage of time is elusive for her too, the strange new routines disorienting her internal clock.
And the exhaustion of the pneumonia adds a lacquered layer of fog over the everyday, simply going through the motions has me back in bed by lunch time.
And in bed I lay, determined to rest, trying to nap, but I can barely hear over the clattering of thoughts inside my head. Banging around like pots and pans: fear and anxieties, to-do lists, emails that need to be sent, grocery lists and household chores that remain undone, (wait, sorry, I'm being interrupted because something-very-important), thoughts of the world and pandemics and the health care system and money and parents and school and kids and well, we probably all have the same lists going. I'm not sure when I showered last, and pondering this makes me feel afloat in a blur of hazy memories that seem hard to separate, and hard to stitch together at the same time.
Exhaustion, anxiety, illness, the need to rest coupled with the need to do, the new strangeness of they daylight moving through the house, familiar and novel at the same time.
But then, something pulls me back up. My husband sees me on the verge of tears and takes the kids for a walk so I can have a moment of quiet. My neighbor sends me a over a spa kit with some fancy creams and a face mask (no, that kind of face mask, like for a facial!). My mother in law drops off, unannounced, 2 large pizzas and a few boxes of doughnuts.
And as by body beats back this virus, as I am changed because of it, I have to put faith in the idea that this transformation will make us stronger. This shit show, this suffering, so many deaths...can there be something we collectively gain, after we lose so much?
What day is it? What season? In a moment where the passage of time feels slippery and elusive, ephemeral days blur: A moment negotiating with a toddler feel like hours, but suddenly it dinner time and I sigh with exhaustion at the thought of feeding 5 people again. Again. Didn't we just eat?
I get two pages into reading before I am interrupted and need to put it away. I get two thoughts into writing, when the urgency of sharing a toy forces a pause. Life feels chopped into little moments, a stream of consciousness from which I am always sidetracked, constantly distracted. I sit down to work, and at the moment when I feel some sense of focus, the office door opens, and someone needs something: a question, a snack, an ant that needs to be killed. Something that pulls me out of organizing the next 3 weeks of exam prep for AP French and into the immediacy of a scary bug, on the wall, right now.
Even E cries at the end of the day, stunned that it is bedtime: "Today was too short for me!" The passage of time is elusive for her too, the strange new routines disorienting her internal clock.
And the exhaustion of the pneumonia adds a lacquered layer of fog over the everyday, simply going through the motions has me back in bed by lunch time.
And in bed I lay, determined to rest, trying to nap, but I can barely hear over the clattering of thoughts inside my head. Banging around like pots and pans: fear and anxieties, to-do lists, emails that need to be sent, grocery lists and household chores that remain undone, (wait, sorry, I'm being interrupted because something-very-important), thoughts of the world and pandemics and the health care system and money and parents and school and kids and well, we probably all have the same lists going. I'm not sure when I showered last, and pondering this makes me feel afloat in a blur of hazy memories that seem hard to separate, and hard to stitch together at the same time.
Exhaustion, anxiety, illness, the need to rest coupled with the need to do, the new strangeness of they daylight moving through the house, familiar and novel at the same time.
But then, something pulls me back up. My husband sees me on the verge of tears and takes the kids for a walk so I can have a moment of quiet. My neighbor sends me a over a spa kit with some fancy creams and a face mask (no, that kind of face mask, like for a facial!). My mother in law drops off, unannounced, 2 large pizzas and a few boxes of doughnuts.
And as by body beats back this virus, as I am changed because of it, I have to put faith in the idea that this transformation will make us stronger. This shit show, this suffering, so many deaths...can there be something we collectively gain, after we lose so much?
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