Day #27: Why Facebook is Horrible AKA I'm Doing the Best I Can.
Things facebook has made me feel guilty about in the past 20 minutes:
*Not doing enough school
*Complaining about being stuck at home with my kids
*Going for a drive
*Eating too much
*Complaining about eating too much
*Complaining about educating my kid at home when I'm not working
*Spending too much time on screens
*Worrying about my kid spending too much time on screens
*Seeing people...at all...ever...even from a safe distance outside
Argh!!! Seriously...I'm so beyond done with all of this. The messages are so confusing. Yes, you should hike! But no, don't hike more than a mile from your house! It's fine to go someplace if you don't get out of your car. But no, you should not do that, what if your car breaks down? You absolutely cannot see relatives if they don't live in your house. But hey, you should check on your dad, he's alone, bring him groceries or something.
Say it with me: I'm doing the best I can. I'm doing the best I can. I'm doing the best I can.
I'm trying to follow the directives of public officials especially public health officials. Which, btw, are a moving target. We are home. We aren't seeing anyone. Josh works from home. We get groceries when we need to. We don't go anywhere else except for the occasional takeout. We wash our hands when we do that. A lot. And after we get home, even if we've just been outside or for a walk. Once a week or so we go for a drive for the change of scenery. Going for a drive is a very old coping mechanism for me. My dad does it and when I was a kid he would take me along. James and I used to do it when he was little. Now he doesn't like it so much, so when I do it I get to put up with him whining. I thanked him a lot today for riding along. I said to him, I know this isn't your favorite thing but Max and I like the drive and we appreciate you riding along.
We didn't stop. There are fewer and fewer places to stop, even to pull your car off the road long enough to watch the ferry go. Tomorrow we'll go back to the forest because it at least is open but as more places close there are more people in the forest and it's harder and harder to do social distance in the forest. Which is HARD. I understand why parks and playgrounds are closed, it is harder to understand why trailheads are. Today it started raining which maybe will keep people inside but I don't know that I'd bet on it.
I need to really stay off social media. I like some things about facebook and now is a tough time to give up connections. I like seeing the memories there. But oh man I am so tired of everyone and their brother posting a new thing about something else you aren't supposed to do. Sitting in a parked car six feet from a friend in their parked car having coffee? Don't do that!! Sew masks! Oh, wait, don't sew masks because the medical staff deserve real masks. Argh. I'm just so over it. I am doing the best I can. I am doing the best I can. I am doing the best I can. I am doing the best I can. As if mom guilt wasn't real enough without the entire Internet deciding they get to be the police officer of how you spend your time. They've had to tell people to stop using 911 to report their neighbors being out and about too much. For real, people. Stop. Just stop. Never in the history of the Internet has yelling at someone ever convinced them of your rightness and their wrongness.
One thing being in the car did is made me turn on the radio and absorb some news, which I hadn't really done in several days. See also guilt about listening to too much news...or not enough news. I know the death and infection tolls have been rising. The numbers are sobering. They could be worse...they will get worse...but this is for real hard. It is also hard to see how fragile our healthcare system really is. We aren't talking about a huge number of hospitalizations as a percentage of population but that level of increase is enough to really strain healthcare systems. You realize how close society always is to a breaking point of some kind and that's not a reassuring thought.
I keep thinking back to some kind of idiot facebook meme I saw months ago about calling the coronavirus the Kung Flu. What struck me at that time wasn't the racism of it, which looking back seems super obvious. What struck me at that time is...if this gets really bad...like if this gets 1918 Spanish flu bad, we will look back and think, man, I can't believe we thought this was a joke.
At the time, and this is like late January, that was a dark thought and I tried to keep it out of my head, but I remembered a joke I heard Woodrow Wilson had made in the spring of 1918 about having a bird named Enza, leaving a window open and In Flew Enza. His reaction at the beginning of the outbreak was to make a joke because the word was funny. So I looked at that joke about the Kung flu and I swear to you, my stomach clenched a little. I remember saying to myself, you're being really dark. There have been epidemics before and they haven't made it here. It's sad, what is happening in China, but it's not going to be like that. You had the swine flu back in '09, remember? You were really sick for a couple of days, then got over it and who ever talks about the swine flu anymore? Well, here we are. Welcome to the really dark. And we aren't out of it yet. We haven't peaked yet, they tell us (and I believe them,) so we aren't even at the darkest yet.
I don't know why this post is coming out all dark tonight. I even said, and this is something moms should know better than to say out loud, that in a lot of ways this is getting easier. Part of it is because I got out of the house and went for a drive today...so there you go, I don't know if I've proven my own point or not, but that's just my truth. Today I got out of my house and went for a drive....and did not break down sobbing at 2 p.m. It's not super easy to explain the nuance of that to facebook.
James, meanwhile, had a lengthy conversation with the barista at drive through coffee and begged our neighbor to come back with her dog and more bubbles after we met her bubbles (and baby) loving dog...through the fence, of course, from a social distance away. God bless my little extrovert, he's been coping with this so well but in moments like that you see how hard the isolation is on him...harder, I think, than even he realizes 99% of the time. My neighbor, who recently moved into the neighborhood and who I met for the first time today and didn't even get her name, has been working from home for 45 days. This is day 27 for us. We had a bit of a laugh about people who are on their high horses after having done this a week and a half. It was nice to laugh with someone new. From a safe distance.
Tomorrow James has school and I so have not looked at the schedule or the instructions or what he's supposed to be doing. There's probably another Zoom meeting. Today I asked him what he wanted to do for his learning and he said cut and paste things. So we made a checkerboard. That was math. We did counting and measuring and dividing and he had fun. I say this every day, but I'm so close to just chucking school and doing projects. Oh, well. One day at a time. And now I take a break from writing this to go cuddle Max.
Tonight I'm grateful for back roads by winding rivers, coffee, math, baths, books, dinner with my family, health, love, light, bubbles, neighbors, and writing.
*Not doing enough school
*Complaining about being stuck at home with my kids
*Going for a drive
*Eating too much
*Complaining about eating too much
*Complaining about educating my kid at home when I'm not working
*Spending too much time on screens
*Worrying about my kid spending too much time on screens
*Seeing people...at all...ever...even from a safe distance outside
Argh!!! Seriously...I'm so beyond done with all of this. The messages are so confusing. Yes, you should hike! But no, don't hike more than a mile from your house! It's fine to go someplace if you don't get out of your car. But no, you should not do that, what if your car breaks down? You absolutely cannot see relatives if they don't live in your house. But hey, you should check on your dad, he's alone, bring him groceries or something.
Say it with me: I'm doing the best I can. I'm doing the best I can. I'm doing the best I can.
I'm trying to follow the directives of public officials especially public health officials. Which, btw, are a moving target. We are home. We aren't seeing anyone. Josh works from home. We get groceries when we need to. We don't go anywhere else except for the occasional takeout. We wash our hands when we do that. A lot. And after we get home, even if we've just been outside or for a walk. Once a week or so we go for a drive for the change of scenery. Going for a drive is a very old coping mechanism for me. My dad does it and when I was a kid he would take me along. James and I used to do it when he was little. Now he doesn't like it so much, so when I do it I get to put up with him whining. I thanked him a lot today for riding along. I said to him, I know this isn't your favorite thing but Max and I like the drive and we appreciate you riding along.
We didn't stop. There are fewer and fewer places to stop, even to pull your car off the road long enough to watch the ferry go. Tomorrow we'll go back to the forest because it at least is open but as more places close there are more people in the forest and it's harder and harder to do social distance in the forest. Which is HARD. I understand why parks and playgrounds are closed, it is harder to understand why trailheads are. Today it started raining which maybe will keep people inside but I don't know that I'd bet on it.
I need to really stay off social media. I like some things about facebook and now is a tough time to give up connections. I like seeing the memories there. But oh man I am so tired of everyone and their brother posting a new thing about something else you aren't supposed to do. Sitting in a parked car six feet from a friend in their parked car having coffee? Don't do that!! Sew masks! Oh, wait, don't sew masks because the medical staff deserve real masks. Argh. I'm just so over it. I am doing the best I can. I am doing the best I can. I am doing the best I can. I am doing the best I can. As if mom guilt wasn't real enough without the entire Internet deciding they get to be the police officer of how you spend your time. They've had to tell people to stop using 911 to report their neighbors being out and about too much. For real, people. Stop. Just stop. Never in the history of the Internet has yelling at someone ever convinced them of your rightness and their wrongness.
One thing being in the car did is made me turn on the radio and absorb some news, which I hadn't really done in several days. See also guilt about listening to too much news...or not enough news. I know the death and infection tolls have been rising. The numbers are sobering. They could be worse...they will get worse...but this is for real hard. It is also hard to see how fragile our healthcare system really is. We aren't talking about a huge number of hospitalizations as a percentage of population but that level of increase is enough to really strain healthcare systems. You realize how close society always is to a breaking point of some kind and that's not a reassuring thought.
I keep thinking back to some kind of idiot facebook meme I saw months ago about calling the coronavirus the Kung Flu. What struck me at that time wasn't the racism of it, which looking back seems super obvious. What struck me at that time is...if this gets really bad...like if this gets 1918 Spanish flu bad, we will look back and think, man, I can't believe we thought this was a joke.
At the time, and this is like late January, that was a dark thought and I tried to keep it out of my head, but I remembered a joke I heard Woodrow Wilson had made in the spring of 1918 about having a bird named Enza, leaving a window open and In Flew Enza. His reaction at the beginning of the outbreak was to make a joke because the word was funny. So I looked at that joke about the Kung flu and I swear to you, my stomach clenched a little. I remember saying to myself, you're being really dark. There have been epidemics before and they haven't made it here. It's sad, what is happening in China, but it's not going to be like that. You had the swine flu back in '09, remember? You were really sick for a couple of days, then got over it and who ever talks about the swine flu anymore? Well, here we are. Welcome to the really dark. And we aren't out of it yet. We haven't peaked yet, they tell us (and I believe them,) so we aren't even at the darkest yet.
I don't know why this post is coming out all dark tonight. I even said, and this is something moms should know better than to say out loud, that in a lot of ways this is getting easier. Part of it is because I got out of the house and went for a drive today...so there you go, I don't know if I've proven my own point or not, but that's just my truth. Today I got out of my house and went for a drive....and did not break down sobbing at 2 p.m. It's not super easy to explain the nuance of that to facebook.
James, meanwhile, had a lengthy conversation with the barista at drive through coffee and begged our neighbor to come back with her dog and more bubbles after we met her bubbles (and baby) loving dog...through the fence, of course, from a social distance away. God bless my little extrovert, he's been coping with this so well but in moments like that you see how hard the isolation is on him...harder, I think, than even he realizes 99% of the time. My neighbor, who recently moved into the neighborhood and who I met for the first time today and didn't even get her name, has been working from home for 45 days. This is day 27 for us. We had a bit of a laugh about people who are on their high horses after having done this a week and a half. It was nice to laugh with someone new. From a safe distance.
Tomorrow James has school and I so have not looked at the schedule or the instructions or what he's supposed to be doing. There's probably another Zoom meeting. Today I asked him what he wanted to do for his learning and he said cut and paste things. So we made a checkerboard. That was math. We did counting and measuring and dividing and he had fun. I say this every day, but I'm so close to just chucking school and doing projects. Oh, well. One day at a time. And now I take a break from writing this to go cuddle Max.
Tonight I'm grateful for back roads by winding rivers, coffee, math, baths, books, dinner with my family, health, love, light, bubbles, neighbors, and writing.
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