This is going to be the longest 10 days of my life. Well, maybe not of my life, but definitely ranks up there.
I found out yesterday afternoon that despite the CDC recommendation of isolating for 5 days and wearing a mask the following 5 days, our school district requires students to stay home for the full 10 days after symptom onset. Which means my son will be home until April 21. Which happens to also be the day of his band concert. So even though he will get to attend, he will have missed two weeks of lessons leading up to it.
It’s become extremely clear that it was infinitely easier to keep just about anyone else isolated in this house than it is to keep my son isolated. How do you keep an extrovert whos love language is touch away from everyone for 10 days? Is it even possible?
This morning he called out from his bedroom that he’d lost his mask somewhere in his room and could I bring him a new one so he could come out. I dug through his backpack for the pack of 10 KN95s I’d just given him, but couldn’t find it. I did find an old wadded up mask at the bottom of his backpack, so I hung that on his door and told him he would have to come out and look. They were in the car. And once he’d found them he followed me into my room, which I’ve been trying to keep a “clean” space for the last two weeks. When I asked him not to come in he fell to pieces crying “I’m sorry! I forgot!” I don’t like making him feel unloved, but I don’t know how to keep him from sharing his germs with me. Thankfully his sister has been at school or in her room the majority of the time, but I don’t know how to protect me and show him love at the same time. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears.
The infuriating thing is, my husband seems so unphased by any of this. Even posting on Social Media that he “knew the risks” of going to this conference and felt they were worth it. But it feels like the only risk he took into account was his own and not the rest of us. He didn’t consider that it would completely turn our lives upside down and not just his. He didn’t take into consideration that his actions could impact all of our lives. And while he did sleep and eat in a different room and wear a mask (when he remembered) outside of that room, it did not interrupt his life in any significant way.
But it IS interrupting the rest of our lives. My son is missing testing at school. He’s unable to attend his tuba lessons or prepare for the mandatory concert that is coming up. He won’t be able to attend the Holy Week events at church and Easter dinner will have to be socially distanced.
At this point, if my daughter gets it she will miss a choir performance. If this drags out even longer, she could miss her choir festival and field trip or even Confirmation. If I get it, not only will we have to worry about how it will effect my heart, but I will have to miss my son’s band concert, my daughter’s choir performance, and who knows what else. It makes me angry that my husband is not bothered by any of this. My kids suffered enough last year, missing everything they should have experienced as 5th graders. I can’t stand that they are suffering because he deemed the risk “worth it.” What if we don’t think it’s worth it? We didn’t get a vote.
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