Day #365: A Retrospective

Dude, I don't know what to say. A year ago was James's last day of school. He is currently scheduled to start "bridge weeks," where he will go to school one day a week to do some orientation and rules introduction stuff, the week of March 22 and back to school 2 days a week after spring break. That's the current schedule, but I'm not counting on it yet. I've learned enough to know better than to count on things before they happen.

For most of the country, the anniversary of the shutdown is about a week from now but for me and my family it's tomorrow. March 5 was the first day school was closed in our district and also the day we moved my husband out of his office and into his remote work space, while listening on the radio to a press conference happening at a nursing home that had been the site of the nation's first outbreak. The nursing home was down the street from the hospital where we used to volunteer. March 6 was my last day of work.

I don't know how to talk about the year that was, particularly since I'm already having a rough morning. I'm feeling touched out in a big way. I hate days where I feel like this...where my kids just want snuggles and I just want to push them away so I can have a tiny bit of personal space. I think one of the meanest things we tell moms of young kids is to enjoy the cuddles because someday our kids won't want them. We KNOW that. We know that it is a temporary phase, but that doesn't mean we can enjoy every minute of it. That doesn't mean we don't sometimes feel touched out, exhausted, and like we just need a break.

So let's talk about the year that was by starting with the highlights. Because there were highlights.

James learned he loves reading. He's become and independent reader and we will never again take our library for granted. This summer when they started offering curbside pickup we had such celebrations.

Max learned he loves flowers. Not as much anymore but I am excited to see if it comes back as the spring returns.

We've taken some great road trips and day trips. We got to spend a weekend at Fort Wordon and it was so nice. We've found ways to have adventures.

We always loved our used bookstore but we have developed new appreciation for it and for little free libraries.

We've baked a lot. We've tried new recipes, some good, some terrible. We've had a lot of family dinners and we've also perfected the takeout date.

We've had a lot of time together. No question it's been good for Max to have his brother around so much. The two of them have become very close and have done a great job playing together.

We have new appreciation for our neighbors. I always said you should like your neighbors because when the shit goes down that's who you'll be with. I was not wrong. I'm grateful for my dad's neighbors as well.

We've found ways to see and stay connected to grandpa.

We've had holidays and birthdays and Santa came and we've done it all.

We live in a really beautiful place with beaches and forests and mountains and rivers and small towns galore. If we had to be marooned somewhere for a year, this is a pretty good place.

We're here. We are surviving. We are together.

As for the negatives...well, those are easy. The isolation is big. The disconnection from friends and out of area family. The feeling that those people are missing seeing how our kids are growing and spending time with them at this age.

The monotony is REAL. No vacations or outings or parties or events to look forward to is really hard.

Too much takeout. I miss restaurants. I miss date nights.

The loss. We have been so lucky not to lose anyone close to us, so far our family and close circle of friends has been spared this virus and where it has touched it has luckily not been devastating. I do know people for whom this has not been true. But there have been other tough losses. Jobs, opportunities, friends, it's been very tough. There has been a lot of grief.

And all the other things that have been so hard about this year even aside from all of that. The political divisiveness and chaos and toxic rhetoric is so hard to live around. The forest fires. The losses to violence. It has been a lot.

I'm a generally pretty optimistic person. I have a strong faith and while I'm a worrier I generally feel like things are mostly gonna turn out okay. I think for me the hardest part of a lot of this has been that for the first time I feel more pessimistic than optimistic about the world. About the future of the planet my kids are growing up on, about the future of a country that can't seem to deal with its shit. The loss of optimism has been really hard.

But, as they say, the only way around is through, so onward. There are good things happening. Grandpa is fully vaccinated, that is huge. My sister and her husband both have first vaccines and will be fully vaccinated in about a week. My in-laws are on the vaccination list and should get theirs soon. James is excited to go back to school and I think it might happen. And...drumroll please...we got to go to the library.

That is our big news this week. James and I had a library date. Our library is allowing up to 5 people in the building at once, with strict mask protocols and a half an hour time limit. Usually I limit James on books he can check out, but this week I said if you can carry it you can have it. Watching him sit happily on the library floor with a giant stack of books...it did my heart good in a way few things have. I bought him a shamrock shake to celebrate.

If it's all about the little things....and I think it is, I think life is if I'm honest...that was a little thing that wasn't little at all, that was in fact an enormous thing.

Media consumption: I read a dead mom's graphic memoir this week. Honestly, it was fantastic. Dancing at the Pity Party it's called. So relatable. I'm writing a book...or something...I don't know what I'm writing...about a girl with a dead mom so it was good timing. I'm also reading Refugee by Alan Gratz and it's interesting...it's a novelization of 3 refugee stories from 3 time periods, a Jewish boy named Josef leaving Germany in 1933, a Cuban girl named Isabel fleeing to Florida in 1994, and a Syrian boy named Mahmoud trying to get into the EU in 2015. It has some structural issues...it jumps back and forth between time periods in a way I don't love...but it's well written and I can recommend it. I'm also reading Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance by Nikki Grimes and listening to Savvy, which was a book every kid in the school I worked at loved back when I worked there but I haven't read since. (My story of Savvy is that I once came running up to its author, Ingrid Law, during a librarians conference raving about how much I and my students loved her book and while she was happy to hear that I think I was....a surprise and a lot for her. Authors of kids books aren't always used to being treated like celebrities.) March is a big middle grade month in the bookstagram world and I'm all for that.

Today I'm grateful for my dog, my boys, my books, going to bed at a reasonable hour, sunshine, signs or spring, signs of healing, and another year of this crazy life.

P.S. If you've been counting days along with us you'll notice we dropped a couple. I realized this week I somehow in the course of a year lost 2 days...I'm not sure exactly when it happened and I'm not going back to find out. When I started counting, I did not know I'd be counting for a year. I think I'm now officially done counting. I don't think I can stomach writing Day #366 and beyond.