It has been quite a while since my last post. The world sure looks different from where I am sitting now, surrounded in a Corona haze. In January of this year, my oldest daughter, Brianna, was in Santiago, Chile, to work on her MBA project. She was only there a few days when riots and civil chaos broke out, and she found herself amid tear gas in the streets. She was able to hunker down in her hotel room for two days and find a flight home before they shut down the airport.
In February, we took a Mother, Daughter, and Grandmother trip to The Golden Nugget in Louisiana. We had just started to hear about the Novel Coronavirus. Brianna received a text message alert while we were on our weekend escape that the first cases were reported on campus at Rice University, and the virus was in Houston. I called Robert and asked him to please go to the store and do a “hurricane” stock-up to prepare for a pandemic. He thought I was silly, but he indulged my anxiety. That was on February 29, 2020.
The COVID-19 Pandemic has changed our world, and it continues to shape our lives in new ways daily. It doesn’t feel entirely alien to me to respond to this invisible creature. It feels a lot like parenting my son with Autism and daughter with IDD. We just added taking physical temperatures and charting symptoms to shaping behaviors and doing our darndest to keep the world from falling off its axis.
It is, however, much lonelier and so isolating. I miss being in the same room with my mom-squad telling stories we’ve heard a hundred times and the latest updates with our families. This week I also had to make a difficult choice and leave a job that I loved. The “Rona,” as my daughter calls it, has caused so much disruption that we need to find a new level of balance to support each other at home.
I plan on returningto blogging as a therapy tool over the next few weeks. There have been some exciting, fun things that have happened over these last few months too. We have Corgi #2, Mick Fly-Away With Me, to go with our Mighty Zeus. And after dreaming of a little trailer of my own for years, Mrs. Which Way has arrived.
