Pandemic

Last month, my plan was that this month, one of the girls, or both, would write about their school camp as Lara did last year. Instead, here we are.

Maybe in retrospect Australia should have quarantined everyone entering the country, including flight crew, at the point at which travel was restricted in by people from South Korea and Iran as well as China, but not from anywhere else. Hindsight is a useful thing. And we learn from our mistakes; there’s no doubt we’ll be better prepared and take it more seriously next time, as they did in Taiwan after SARS in 2003. But so far, so good. Or not diabolical yet here, at least.

At our little microcosmic level, Steve is working from home fulltime and I’ve started working from home one day a week, and also looking after the girls on my day off. Rhea and Lara are home with us for at least a month, including two weeks of school holidays, and their teachers have at the end of this first week posted their schoolwork so that we don’t have to keep stringing together a timetable ourselves. I’ve found it hard – not so much the fact that we can’t go out to restaurants, movies, or art galleries anymore, but the stressors of life lived on top of one another. It has made me so crabby that I’ve totally lost it with one or both of the girls on several occasions, and my jaw is sore, possible from clenching it during the day as well as when I sleep. My shoulders are tense. And I’m grumpy all the time.

I put that all away, and have a break from it, going in to work three days a week, where we have transitioned to holding all our meetings via teleconference and/or Microsoft Teams. My one-on-one meetings have started to be held with a walk outside; others are doing the same. I’m calm and positive around my team and am reminded of a book and audiobook I consumed recently in which women talk frankly about their lives, many reflecting on what an enormous strain it is working and bringing up children, and wondering how it had gotten to be so hard. One of the writers described how she was perceived at work as being calm, reasonable and unflappable while at home she was a shrill screaming wreck. That’s just how things have been increasingly getting with me too, both pre the pandemic and since.

Tips are being shared about how to manage. They include finding quiet times and spaces, exercising, thinking positively, contributing. I’m trying to do those things, I’m also keeping up my piano playing three times a week, and trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to distract myself from the rage the simmers up when I’m at home over little things like the girls playing computer games on my laptop without permission, or generally not doing what they’re told. I had a bath last night, steaming hot.

I’ve got lots of good books to read and can keep them as long as I need to now that the libraries are shut. They include thirty-three essays called A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 reasons why we can’t stop reading Jane Austen. I could make many reflections on her books and life, but one that’s relevant is that her life was very geographically contained as ours is becoming: she and her contemporaries didn’t go to restaurants, movies, or art galleries either, nor did they fly elsewhere on their holidays. But they lived with nature, interacted socially in their communities, and enjoyed simple things like meals and books. We’ve got that as well as podcasts, and phones, and Facetime, and the bush, and parks, and bike rides, and most of all, the prospect that for the lucky ones like us, things may go back to something like the way they were, maybe in six months, maybe twelve. We moved the girls intp a separate room each over the weekend, so they have their own space now and more of it, and an exciting adjustment to that.

Meanwhile, like everyone else I’m adjusting to this new reality, trying to make it bring out the best in me and value what I have. That is certainly a work in progress.