Me

I admit it. There was a point at the beginning of the shutdown order in March where I was hopeful that the slow down would bring some peace. Some calm. I crave calm. I seek easy.

It’s not happening.

At the same time I feel like I am coming out of that grey. The Governor announced school guidance. Bloomington schools remain thoughtful and transparent and with every communication they are filling my bucket with the data I have desperately sought. I will do anything they say. I am not interested in critiquing or wishing it was different or figuring out how to choose the days she goes. I have no emotion at all about fall sports other than to be grateful that the priority remains slowing the spread of the virus. Never having been a speculator, I will now speculate on one thing… T’s GT class because with enrollment down across the district her class also has to be down. Does this mean she will have a much smaller class size this school year? But I am not asking the GT department or polling people on Facebook. I will do anything they say. I am grateful for a decision to be made for me. Masks, easy. Two days? Gladly. What else can I give you?

I have prepped T for hybrid. She is fine with that as long as she gets to go back into the school and smell pencils. She has started planning where she will do her work while at home. She has requested we go shopping for her first day of school outfit. She has started diagnostics on IXL. She has a note for her bus driver written and in her backpack. She is ready. She is also poking holes in the transportation policy for distancing because of the rules for Kinders. And she has questions about air ventilation and how recess will work. She has my brain in her head. It’s both entertaining and exhausting to keep up with.

Business is up. Way up. Our gross sales numbers are incredible. Customer needs are amplified and customer behavior seems to be more serious. So S is working ridiculously long days trying to get it all done. I have been solo parenting for as long as I can remember. S actually looked at me with huge eyes one night when he described a fight he had with T. I should have felt badly but I only felt joy. “Meet T”, I said. It didn’t end there because T was beside herself because “I never fight with Dad only you” and how lovely that my tiny little self aware child can articulate the normalcy of battling with me all day every day but be devastated to have one battle with her Dad.

Add to that one home improvement show promoter rescheduled home shows so he has one more Saturday to suffer through. Last weekend I told him I would find somewhere to stash T and I would go work the show. Instead, I got a migraine and spent the day in bed. Our new hire starts in 2 weeks. I will find a way to reduce his on-boarding down in such a significant way that he can be out selling in one week. But I will need to find the time to do that. I feel like having another salesperson will not only take the pressure off of S, but will remove the pressure of “what will happen when one of us gets COVID and you have to stay out of homes for 2 weeks?” We had a COVID exposure scare earlier this month and I had to get on the phone and cancel appointments until he could get tested, and get a result. We paid for the 24 hour result - but we paid way more in lost business. That is our fear with every interaction, right? He gets COVID and the business closes. I had visions this summer of a dramatic 20/20 expose called “The play date that cost our business hundreds of thousands of dollars”.

I am still part time. Last spring I completely changed my job so I can complete the bare minimum of work in 2-3 hours a day and then one full day in the office. Until my babysitter had a COVID scare and we isolated from her - so my full day was gone. None of my work is customer facing now so the transition worked, my focus is on earning new business through digital marketing so I can slowly replace the business earned through home shows. Slowly, it is working. Because I can actually find a solution to anything.

Except my home office. This makeshift office in my kitchen is horrible because it is in the center of all household activity and I can hear the ever present drone of the TV from the basement and that sound is starting to be nails on a chalkboard for me. I bought a cheap little laptop so I could work in other rooms or on the deck but it isn’t perfect either. I can only actually focus on tasks or complete thought work without interruption before T wakes up in the morning. With T and I only one thing can be true. Either I am thinking OR she is talking. My brain shuts off when her mouth opens. And I don’t want to leave her alone so I can go to the office for a few hours every day. I know she isn’t alone, she can hang with our roommate. Except our roommate still does not turn off NCIS, CSI, etc when T is down there and I don’t need her witnessing that violence. And our new roommate isn’t a caregiver, so lunch isn’t offered but pudding and candy bars are. I get home and T isn’t hungry because she is full of sweets. Then I battle horrible nutrition and sugar crashes the rest of the day and that isn’t better than my desire to get my work done.

All of this is separate from our new roommate. It is in addition to the stress she brings into our life. The initial scope of insurance arrived late last week. Its 50 pages and $250K. Going over it is a tangled web as I discover inconsistencies in coverage (why the interior doors and not the kitchen cabinets?) Oh. Because normally she would have a homeowners policy and they would cover that. Got it. S and I are playing the role of not just our new roommate as the homeowner but also the invisible homeowner’s policy. It gets mixed up all the time in our heads. (“That should be covered”. “Right. Her policy would have covered that if she had one.” “Right.") Not made less confusing by the fact that our new roommate isn’t even listed as an insured on the policy because her town home association is the policy holder. So at some point after we get a final scope back it will need to be turned over to the association. And we know they will start over and question everything because they already have. We have estimated such a significant amount of money out of pocket to get the place restored that we don’t believe moving back is her right move - not financially, not physically, not for safety or for aging in place. We even looked at a few places last week behind her back to visually evaluate spaces. S started the conversation with our new roommate last night. He got a hard “F No” as well as a list of upgrades she wants and pictures she has ripped out of the newspaper on the remodel. She didn’t bat an eye when he told her that she would need to spend half of her life savings to move back there. She who lives on a couch in my basement and washes her dishes in my paint stained basement utility sink insists on 3000 square feet and a designer kitchen. Do you feel like you were just punched in the stomach? Me too. It’s like Trump insisting the virus is under control.

I am tempted to give her the final scope from insurance when we get it and tell her she can do it all herself or give it to me to do. But in both scenarios, I will not be opening my checkbook to bail her out of any more poor decisions. When she is hurt again and cannot live in her home I will immediately begin the process to move her into a safer place and it will be one that I choose and if she complains I will not visit her. But she is my husband’s mother and I will never really do that.

Hmmpf.