Many times during the pandemic, it’s felt like my hold on reality was tenuous. My body has been hurting, and it keeps getting worse. My brain was overloaded with the daily onslaught of requests. It is literally burning right now, right around its outer membrane.
After a particularly hard week, with major parenting struggles in addition to the regular parenting demands, I was teetering on the edge of not being able to cope when I walked into my new rheumatologist’s office.
Is the New Year a new start for you?
It generally hasn’t been for me. I much prefer the new book smell of fall for my fresh starts. New Year’s felt forced. I often worked that night and had to ask my patients the date every hour all night long. It confused all of us and constantly reminded us of the passage of time, blurring the effect of waking up to a fresh beginning in the new year.
This year was a bit different, right? A bit of a dumpster fire, by some estimates. Way out of bounds for what most of us expected.
The end of 2020 felt like the perfect time to embrace all that New Year’s had to offer.
Last night, I got an email from my job. It was addressed to all the per diem workers on my unit, reminding us of our education and scheduling requirements to stay in the hospital’s good graces. There was no due date in the email for the education compliance.
Failure to comply, it concluded, may result in termination.
I set my laptop aside after reading the email and tried to figure out what about the email had bothered me. I remember a similar from one last year. When I read it, I freaked out – Was I behind on my education? Was I working enough weekend hours? (Everything was fine.)
This year, I have been so mentally bogged down by family life, homeschool life, and the pandemic that I actually HAVEN’T done my education, at least not all of it. So maybe the email WAS for me.
I was standing in our dining room with one of my older daughters. We were having a conversation when we heard a loud noise. The door of our china cabinet, inches away from our elbows, flew open. A cascade of china fell to the floor at our feet.
While we were standing very close to it, neither of us had been touching the cabinet. My having seen what happened with my own eyes took away the anxiety I usually experience when I find something broken. I knew no one was at fault, so I was able to skip the Who Is To Blame step of dealing with brokenness.
If I hadn’t been in the room the moment the accident happened, I would have spent serious bandwidth trying to figure out how an accident like that could have happened without human interaction. Yet it clearly had.
Today is a day of mourning for Native Americans. It has been so for fifty years. As our country awakens again to the tragedies that have dogged us at every stage of our history, it’s difficult to find a holiday that can be celebrated without mixed feelings.
Truthfully, what holiday was ever free of baggage? These days were already burdened with the small and large issues we have with them, wrapped up in financial woes, boundaries with family members, or our own dark personal struggles.
If you go back to my very first blog post, I talked about the pressure of trying to make all the holiday magic by myself. In the couple of years since then, I’ve realized that I don’t have to do it alone.
