Battles

This week has felt like a string of endless battles - against time, work, house mess, the weather, and my own body.

Last Sunday I came down with a cold.  Craig had been sick for a week and tested for COVID countless times (mostly for work--including one PCR), and the odds of it being anything other than his cold were slim, so I never bothered testing.  It was a pretty standard cold--lots of sinus congestion involving almost constant nose-blowing for the first few days, and just enough of a tickle in my throat to have a dry-cough hacking episode a couple times a day.  I was maybe slightly more tired than usual but not enough that I couldn't function.  I was so busy with work that a sick day wasn't a possibility, especially since I work from home full time right now.  I turned the corner around midweek and now it's just some thick mucus hanging out somewhere between my sinuses and throat.  Sometimes I can get a solid blow gives relief for a few hours, but sometimes I feel like it's choking me a bit and I need to cough to loosen it up.  Not ideal but better than expected a week out, if I'm being honest.  Though maybe my perception is skewed after my two-month sinus infection a couple years ago.  I'll assume zinc, Nyquil-assisted sleep, and Airborne helped things along.

As I said, work has been crazy.  It's always busy, but since we lost a couple team members and my boss and I both got promoted as a result, things have been non-stop ridiculous.  Data, deadlines, endless projects...it's been a lot.  And now that I finally got promoted 6-1/2 years later, I don't want to mess it up.  But it's getting hard to keep up, though at least my boss is in the same boat and knows it's not just me.  I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to take off time when the boys are off in a couple weeks, but working through this week despite illness and the boys being off one day (more on that in a second) will hopefully help.

On top of getting a foot of snow a couple weeks ago, we got hammered again late in the week.  I finally cleared the driveway of every bit of snow from the last round and on Wednesday night it started raining, which turned into snow.  It snowed lightly overnight and continued all day, getting much worse Thursday evening.  By that night we had about six inches, then it snowed all night adding another three.  The boys had a snow day Friday as a result (I think the districts had concerns about everyone getting dug out in time for buses to pass safely), and then it snowed all day Friday but it only added another couple inches.  Still, another foot was about the last thing we needed.  Shoveling was hard, especially with a cold.  I may be able to be convinced to get a snow blower after this, especially if these nor'easters become more regular.  

As if all of that wasn't fun enough, Friday night I was preparing a smoothie in our new Ninja as part of breakfast for dinner, and while messing with a banana in the pitcher, I sliced my left ring finger rather deeply with the blade.  It took a while to stop the bleeding, probably a half hour in between trying to finish making dinner when I couldn't put good pressure on it.  Craig was on his way to Buffalo for a Knighthawks game the next night, and waited around to see if I needed an escort to urgent care for stitches.  Luckily it slowed down and he was able to leave, but I was pretty nervous initially.  Thankfully the blade is super sharp so it was a super clean cut and it seems to be healing well, but it did not help me feel very functional on Saturday when I had planned to clean.  

Turns out a sliced finger is not conducive to cleaning up a messy house that took an extra hit while I was sick all week.  I put off a lot and having kids home for an extra day didn't help matters.  I'm really struggling with housework two years into the pandemic--I feel like the house is just getting beaten up and everywhere I look there's pockets of filth--crumbs in every corner of the kitchen no matter how much I wipe up, dust in every corner of the house no matter how much I vacuum, sludge and debris in every corner of the bathroom that seems to have no clear cause.  I feel like we probably need our vents cleaned or something, but it's so frustrating that it all falls on me and I don't feel like spending all my free time on weekends doing it.  I just can't catch up.  And by the time I do it and then get up the energy to do it again, whatever I cleaned is gross again.  God forbid we ever have to sell this house because I'm going to need some major outside assistance from a professional.  We're hoping to celebrate Carter's birthday in a couple weeks with the grandparents and I have no idea how this house is going to get presentable.

Speaking of Carter's birthday, it's in two weeks and I have one gift bought.  I know some of what he wants but we're back to him not wanting to do much except sit in front of screens so I'm torn about all of it.  Also, he's been sleeping in our room (on a separate mattress) because of the bedwetting alarm, so Craig and I have even less of a chance to talk privately about anything, and suddenly we're running out of time.  As a side note, the bedwetting alarm has been oddly successful, but I think it's more because it's vaguely uncomfortable and combined with sleeping on a different bed, he's been prevented from sleeping deeply enough to have an issue.  It went off the first night and we managed to handle it well, but it hasn't needed to go off since.  So we're sending him back to his room tonight and we'll see how it goes.  

On top of everything else, I'm reaching a new level of frustration with the pandemic.  It's hard to describe but it feels like a losing battle on multiple fronts.  Cases are down considerably so a lot of people are fighting hard to have restrictions discontinued.  It doesn't help that a ton of people have had it courtesy of the omicron variant that caused more cases in three months than we had in something like the first year, so all those people feel invincible even though a new variant could easily infect them down the road.  It could mean the imminent end of masks in public, and possibly in schools.  So many people are fighting the vaccines, fighting masks, and hating the President, and I think we're getting to the point where they may win.  Many people are starting to agree we need to learn to live with this, but I'm not comfortable with that just yet--maybe infection is inevitable, but I still hesitate to risk having complications let alone Long COVID, which they still don't have a treatment for.  I don't need anything like fatigue or brain fog making life our lives any harder.  I don't need my kids, especially Jacob, exposed to heart inflammation.  I still don't think it's living in fear--I believe in taking precautions much like I would have if I knew the flu was heavily circulating, had masks and other protections been normalized prior to this.  The problem with all of this is it still works better when everyone cooperates--mutual masking, distancing, etc.--and most people are just done.  So no matter how much I try to do, it may not be enough when everyone else isn't on board.  It's a helpless position, made odder because my employer is getting even stricter--boosters mandated and cloth masks banned (unless double masked with a surgical mask).  I'm just exhausted by the arguing and the contrasting opinions on precautions. It's hard to watch much of the rest of the country live like things are normal, whether or not they should.  I'm mad at my church because they stopped mandating masks in the church (despite the state mandate still being in place), and it just adds to the disconnect I've been feeling for a while--at least since Christians started defending Trump and insisting their liberties are more important than the greater good--all of which is in direct contrast to literally everything we're taught as Christians.  I'm just so confused how it all happened and how I'm in such a minority.  

I'm reading Untamed by Glennon Doyle right now.  I've heard it was a great book, though it made me nervous to read a book by a former Christian writer who is now married to a woman (granted, that woman is Rochester hometown hero Abby Wambach) and whose faith clearly had to morph a bit to make that acceptable.  There's definitely some funky theology in there--things about God being a woman and listening to your inner self to the exclusion of God's word.  I personally would rather assume that God's word is pretty solid--we have to base our faith on something--though maybe some of the Bible builders were flawed humans (yes, scripture is inspired by God but there have been plenty of good humans inspired by God who screwed up) and that would explain some of the contradictions, and maybe some other stuff we're just interpreting too simply.  Regardless, I try to set aside what I can't explain, chalk it up to faith, and err on the side of loving people first.  That may be in contradiction to what a lot of churches teach (i.e., abortion and gayness being foundational sins more horrible than all others) and the book gets into why that's an issue, but I feel like my theology is somewhere in the middle.  Even still, it makes some good points about trying to live your best life, which I want to take to heart, but it probably hasn't helped my disconnect because it digs into a lot of the reasons I feel like it's extra hard being a Christian right now and I don't know how to fix it.  It's not so much my faith as much as my practice, but it's hard to have one in tip-top shape without the other.

It all just sort of culminated today in a lack of motivation and general exhaustion.  Tiredness from working through a cold all week, exhaustion from the screen time battle with Carter, frustration with the cleaning battle, annoyance that my workout momentum has been interrupted, and many other things--it all swamped me today and all I could muster was Valentine's decorating and spot cleaning.  I did have one bright spot of the weekend that I'll share in the next post, but otherwise it's been a struggle.  It probably doesn't help that my parents have been on a cruise all week and enough other vacationers or southern dwellers in my social media are living life in spring mode (and generally unmasked to boot), while I feel literally snowbound and like I'm the only one left who cares about keeping my family safe.  On top of not having a real vacation in many years at this point (not sure the Jersey Shore really counts due to all the drama we had), it's getting harder to not feel like I'm missing out on living my life to the fullest.  The "same old, same old" has been more monotonous over the past two years than it ever was before (and it felt like it enough then), and I think not only do I need a complete change of scenery for a while, but I'd also like a little undistracted time alone with my husband, which has been in extra short supply over these two years as well.  I have a feeling that getting into the pre-pandemic "last" memories again over these next six weeks will only deepen the longing for normal life.  If you could guarantee we could get COVID and get through it with no lasting effects, sure--it might be worth it to get back to a less fearful life.  But there are no guarantees with COVID.  It is, by nature, oddly unpredictable.  

So here we sit in this weird limbo, caught between a natural instinct to protect ourselves and our family and a world that's increasingly over it.  I don't know what our breaking point is--or maybe it'll be a plain old turning point--but either way it feels strangely imminent.  Maybe that's just an instinct that we can't go on like this much longer, one way or another, but I hope we figure out some relief before it gets to that point.  We're okay--we're so much better than we have been in many respects and are so blessed in so many ways.  But this is still hard.  I'm not good at decisions on a normal day, and so much about pandemic life feels like life-or-death (or at least, loss of quality of life) decisions, not just on a daily basis, but often multiple times a day.  That's not how I'm built and these two years have challenged every bit of that.  I'm tired.  Lots of people are tired.  We can barely put on our own oxygen mask or help others with theirs, let alone fly the plane.  Basic functionality can be hard enough, and attending to other life stuff only happens when that need for control I posted about a couple weeks ago overtakes the exhaustion.  And even then, there's a reason my kitchen is still not remodeled and I don't know why our water pipes thump when the toilet flushes.  But some windows are on their way to getting redone, but probably only because the cracked one made that the "squeaky wheel".  One day, one thing at a time.

I never really thought about how there's a fine line between monotony and consistency.  They both indicate a sort of ever-presence, but while consistency's presence is reassuring, monotony's is annoying to the point of torture.  The unique brand of stress that the last two years has created is a monotonous hell most of the time.  But I've consistently said "one day at a time" because it's all we can do to get through this.  As the Bible says, "Each day has enough trouble of its own."  Most of us wouldn't have survived mentally had we known from the get-go that we'd still be living like this two years later.  But we've slowly adjusted because we built up our defenses one day at a time.  Only now I'm not sure how we will break down that wall once this is finally over.  It took years to build, so it might take years to dismantle.  All of this is such a process, and years from now we'll marvel at it, assuming the PTSD lets us think about it at all.  

Today wasn't great.  But hopefully tomorrow is a better day.  All we can do is hope.