Like A Half-Birthday But Less Festive; Twenty-Six Weeks In

So, for those of you who are counting, 26 weeks is exactly half a year. Six months of this pandemic! Back in March, six months felt like The Worst Possible Scenario. Now it is Just Life and I don’t think at all at how long this will go on; no one knows and speculating isn’t helpful.

This is where having a blog pays off; I look back and see the evolution. I think we have all gone through the five stages of grief, on a number of different levels, and I am now firmly in the Acceptance Stage. Happy Half-Birthday to the pandemic, I guess. Over the last six months I’ve gone from drinking a lot of wine and eating mini-eggs to frantically cleaning and reorganizing my laundry area and every other part of the house to learning how to teach yoga online to colouring my own hair and giving myself a bikini wax (WE’RE GOING TO NEED MORE WAX).

When the pandemic first started, only the most paranoid of us were wearing masks; that quickly changed and now I am leaning hard into Mask Fashion, coordinating my masks with my outfits.

Back in March and April, grocery shopping was the most harrowing, depressing, and soul-sucking activity; I remember feeling absolutely drained after a Superstore trip, and scheduling a whole day so that I could wait outside, in the cold, to get into Costco, and then feeling so disheartened that I would have to repeat the whole thing over and over again. Now, grocery shopping is just grocery shopping, still some things missing on the shelves but nothing really to write home about, unlike in the earlier months when we were all panicked about toilet paper, flour, yeast, and – for a few strange weeks at our house – baking powder and sauerkraut.

Speaking of which, I have discovered a huge downside to the boys being back at school and that is I have to bring the groceries into the house all by myself. What is this bullshit. For six months I have strolled into the house holding only a jug of milk or the bag with the bread and eggs, and commanded everyone to bring in the heavy bins, and now I, I am the one bringing in those heavy bins, this is an outrage. Groceries aside, I have barely lifted anything for six months, including but not limited to the laundry basket, outdoor chairs, and clothing donation bags. If the school shut-down lasted longer, it’s likely all my upper body muscles would atrophy completely.

The boys just finished their first week of classes; I am thinking week by week and one day at a time when it comes to school. They all wear masks – they are mandatory everywhere here – and although my older son tells me that “social distancing doesn’t exist,” well, we are doing the best we can. I mean, there is only so much physical space in a building, and there are 2300 kids, so take a deep breath, mask up, and wash hands.

It’s my thought that the kids are way better than adults in adjusting to a different world. It is my younger son’s fifteenth birthday tomorrow and on Friday afternoon he celebrated with friends, his usual “hangout” group. They had massive amounts of food in our back yard, always keeping distanced from each other, and when they weren’t they put on masks, even though they were outside the whole time.

The boys finish school at 1:00 on Fridays, and so the party started at that time and went until 6:30 pm, not before five large pizzas were consumed in addition to all the baked goods. Strangely enough, my son had an online math test to do on Friday “any time between 1:00 and 11:00 pm” and so he settled into his test after his friends left. Does that seem strange to anyone else? Well, I’m not criticizing. Finally, finally, FINALLY after years and years of filling out forms until my hand seized up, the school has taken to online forms. I guess they don’t want germy plague-ridden papers coming into the office, and although I don’t really think anyone’s catching The Covid from paper, I am not questioning anything. How many reams of paper have I gone through in my life, filling out the exact same thing over and over? How many Septembers have I spent rubbing my ink-stained hands as I fill out my phone number over and over, signing my name until it doesn’t look like my signature anymore? The biggest bonus is my sons are filling them out themselves, although I was a little taken aback that my younger son put in my husband as “Parent One.” I am usually Parent One! I’m the main contact! When I said this to him, he said “Oh, I thought it went by age.” Well.

This week I have gone back to teaching in-person classes at the community centre; I am now teaching two online classes and two in-person classes per week. It feels a bit strange after a six-month hiatus to see people again, but I will say this: if I contract Covid, it won’t be from that. The community centre is very strict: hand sanitizer before entering, one (masked) person at a time allowed in the lobby where we take off our shoes, there are x’s on the floor to mark where mats can go, and the x’s are three metres apart, and we leave via the emergency exit door so as to not run into anyone coming into the centre. My students don’t wear masks when actually practicing yoga, but I wear one to teach, and it isn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

Six months seems long, but it’s really a just a blip. I’m trying not to think ahead to the next six months and the long winter on the horizon, instead buying more warm clothes and taking things a day at a time. At least the masks will keep our faces warm.

Pandemic Reading

This book was, frankly, bizarre. I thought it sounded like a funny concept: man has an affair, so his wife decides she is going to have her own affair to get even, and is thrown into the new world of dating. But…the underlying theme of the book was stay married no matter what because divorce is awful and hey, we all make mistakes. I thought of googling the author to see if she is a fundamentalist Christian, but I guess I don’t care enough about it.

I have NO idea why I put this on hold at the library. Did someone recommend it to me? Was I drinking and library app-ing? Who knows. This was fine, not enjoyable but not terrible. It was very repetitive and gave advice like instead of flipping out when someone doesn’t change the toilet paper, just discuss your needs instead. I mean, that’s probably sound advice but I didn’t really need a whole book about it.

Six months, you guys. We can do this. xo