I am at the point where I’m rather bored. I’ve spent the last few days drowning in social media and binge watching Hot in Cleveland, for lack of anything else to do. I’m getting tired of it.
I’ve posted a reel each day, updating my “followers” (of which there are about 3 actual followers) on how I’m doing. Today I got a rude comment telling me that covid is just a cold and I should get on with my life. I guess I should have just deleted the comment and moved on, but instead I informed the commenter that they were welcome to live their life and they should stay out of mine. They were more than welcome to keep on scrolling. What I wanted to say is that they were exactly the reason this virus is never going away. I understand that many people have only mild cold like symptoms. And luckily, I was one of those people. However, that isn’t the case with every person that gets it and I’ll be damned if I’d ever be okay with being the person that spread it to someone that got seriously sick. If it means I’m stuck in my room for 10 days or wearing a mask when I leave it, so be it. It’s a very minor inconvenience in the long run.
I am looking forward to being able to get out of the house. And I plan to do just that on Thursday when I have a follow up from wrist surgery. I’ll be wearing my mask, so I decided not to cancel that one (the CDC says I am at the point where I can leave the house with a mask on starting today), but I did cancel my therapy appointment again for this week. I frequently cry in those sessions and don’t want to deal with a soggy mask or not being able to wipe my nose. I could do a virtual visit, but that means hiding in my closet and I’d rather not do that.
Saturday is the day I can leave my room without a mask. And at that point there are only 4 days left before my kids go back to school. It’s hitting me hard that my kids are heading to middle school. The frustrating thing is, their school is under construction this year, so they won’t even get their schedules or see the inside of the school until the night before school starts. They are concerned about finding their way in a brand new school as well as changing classes 7 times in a day. It’s leaving them quite anxious. I’m trying to be reassuring, but I am anxious in many ways myself.
I contacted the school’s librarian (I know her from when I was a librarian in the district) and offered myself as a parent volunteer. I hope I’ll get to be more involved in their middle school years than I was able to be last year (the librarian didn’t want me to volunteer because I had been the librarian before her). I received an email last week expressing interest, but nothing definite has been lined up. I’m hoping I can make it a regular part of my week.
I’m also feeling guilty that we didn’t have the summer I’d like to have had. We went didn’t take a family vacation at all. My surgery ate up an unexpected chunk of the summer, and Covid has taken over the last two weeks. I’m hoping to make up for it a little by taking the kids to see their cousins in October when they have a Fall Break. They don’t know about it yet, just in case it falls through for some reason.
I think having all of this alone time has been both good and bad. On the one hand, I’ve had a chance to recharge after the stress of being gone instead of jumping right into busy chauffeur mom mode. On the other hand, it’s given me way too much time to think about all the ways I’ve failed them this summer. Which I know is not the way I should look at things. I even said something to my son about not giving them the summer they deserve and he said something along the lines of “That’s silly. What do you mean the summer we deserve?”
My family never went on vacations together. We went to visit my grandparents at Christmas and sometimes in the summer, but nowhere else. My dad would take my brother and I camping, but my sister and mom never came. We may have gone to San Antonio, but I don’t really remember. I guess I have always imagined that families that got along went places together. I know that most of our not traveling is because of my mom’s anxiety and I certainly don’t want that to end up being me. I want my kids to experience the family vacations I always wanted to take. When I was a teen, my dad and I would go to the library and plan out these great trips we’d take together. Only we never went. We’ve managed to go somewhere new almost every summer since the kids started school (and a few places before that). This is really the first summer we haven’t, including 2020. Granted, we didn’t go where we’d planned to go, but we did get an Air BnB in our college town an hour away and spend a few days exploring the campus. Hopefully we can restart the tradition with next summer. I want the kids to start getting a say in where we go, maybe even take turns planning it. I want summers to be looked back upon with fondness because we spent them together.
Wow. That post took a turn I didn’t expect… Guess I can count this one as therapy too! LOL
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