Insanity Week

 I need to stop referring to what I'm doing, in-self deprecatory fashion, as a "training course." It's a postgraduate degree, and it's a lot of hard work that is not made one jot easier by pandemic limitations.

The pandemic meant I was late starting my first placement in a nursery, so that the first week ended up being the same week our first written assignment was due. Said written assignment is supposed to be reflecting on how I've implemented what I've learned so far in my work with children. It's not meant to be done after just a few days of working.

So I knew I was in for a tough week... and then at lunchtime on Monday, I got a call to go and pick up my son as somebody in his school bus bubble had tested positive for Covid. He had to self-isolate for two weeks.

That was how the school told me. My son got the news when a teacher entered his computer class and told him to gather all his things and leave immediately. "No time to explain." I suppose her thought was not to mention Covid in front of the whole class. My son's thought was that I had died or something similarly cataclysmic.

Anyway, according to current British rules, the rest of the household did not have to self-isolate unless my son developed symptoms, so I was faced with the dilemma of whether to leave him home alone for eight hours a day or to delay my placement for another two weeks—not impossible, but it would make it harder for me to complete the course.

Then on Tuesday, there was a positive test at my placement and the majority of children and staff had to self-isolate.

When the dust settled, I'd had discussions with all parties and arranged that I would stagger my day against my daughter's school day. From Wednesday: 

• I walked my daughter to school in the morning, then I spent a couple of hours at home—in theory, keeping my son company, but in practice hogging the laptop as I worked furiously on my assignment. 
• Mid-morning, I'd get my son to help me prepare dinner partway and instruct him on how to cook it, before leaving for work. Ostensibly, he could now use the laptop for his school work; actually, I'm pretty sure it was more like 15 minutes checking in on school stuff and then five hours of terrible video games.
• I'd spend my work day with three other staff and a handful of children, constantly looking for ways anything I did might be relevant for my assignment.
  
• My daughter would get picked up from school by her friend's dad who would drop her off at home. Both kids then got to enjoy quality sibling time / unfettered screen-time until I got home.
  
• It was only Thursday that I had to call ahead and tell them to get dinner on, in the end. Wednesday and Friday I made dinner, but that was the only nod to domestic duties before I went back to writing.
  

Nothing else got done. I spoke to nobody. I didn't do housework. My brain was completely taken up with coursework, insomnia kicked in... but we had a couple of wins: 

1. I got my assignment submitted whole hours before the deadline of midnight on Friday. I'm highly dubious as to whether it'll pass muster, but the people marking it know my situation, so I'm not going to get kicked off the course either.
2. I got home Thursday evening to find dinner (fajitas) on the table. The chicken was cooked perfectly, the tortilla wraps were warm, and everything was dished up waiting for me. The kids got bonus pocket money this week for that.

Anyway, I spent most of Saturday in a daze... I snapped out of it briefly at 2pm and did some laundry, and then sank back on the sofa again. Slept like a log last night, so today, I met up with the boyfriend for a quick walk, despite the wind and the rain. The kids were allowed a duvet day.

This is, I hope, as hard as it's going to get. I've got a long way to go on the course, but from this point on, I'll have more direct experience to draw on. Not to mention, the kids and I have figured out some of the balancing act between my work needs and their school needs, which will make life easier going forward. 

My son hasn't displayed any symptoms, so we're optimistic that he hasn't been infected—as of Friday, his entire year bubble has to self-isolate now, which extends his home-learning by a day. The first wave didn't really take hold in the south-west, but this second wave is hitting us harder. I still hope this week was the hardest we'll have, but it won't be the last time we have to improvise.

Passing The Test

Haven't posted mostly because I've been snowed under with coursework, and any time leftover was focused on the kids and their schools. Now, England is about to go into another lockdown... but that's not what prompted this post. No, this post is about how I passed my driving test on Friday.

Too Late for a Spoiler Alert, Huh?

It was third time lucky... I failed one at the end of September and another in the middle of October.  The first time wasn't too bad. I actually drove perfectly competently for 40 minutes, and then right at the end I was asked to reverse park at the test centre, I let myself get flustered and forgot to check my mirrors before starting backwards.

That was a classic mistake of mine, so while I was annoyed at myself, I was actually heartened that I had kept calm and relaxed for the bulk of the test. I just had to watch it when I did get nervous, remember to take a moment and bring it back. I could do this. 

Then I took the second test, and five minutes into it, I approached a roundabout in the left lane when I was turning right. That's a major fault, automatic fail, and we went straight back to the test centre... but the worst thing was I didn't even notice I'd done it. It took me awhile to realise we were going back to the test centre, and I knew I must have failed then, but I couldn't figure out what I'd done.

That took a severe hit on my nerves. If I could make a mistake that I never normally made and have no idea, how would I ever pass this?

Fortunately, everything held together the third time. It was raining and traffic was heavier than usual, as everybody drove back north from their half-term holiday, but I held my nerve. For the most part, the traffic worked in my favour, as I had to keep stopping and waiting for people.

The manoeuvre is always the danger zone for me, the point when I'm going to get stressed and forget my mirrors as I did on the first test. This time, I was asked to do the easiest one, pulling over on the right and reversing two car-lengths. When I finished that and we carried on with the independent drive, I knew that the most likely outcome was now a pass.... I just had to finish without that roundabout moment. 

It wasn't a roundabout that nearly did me in; it was my mask. 

A Pandemic driving test involves wearing a mask and driving with the windows open, even on as wet a day as this was. (And that's after the examiner hands you a wipe to disinfect the steering wheel, gear-stick and handbrake.) As we headed towards the A30, I felt a tickle in my throat which I now have to assume must have been a fibre from my mask. The first couple of coughs were an embarrassment, and I nervously assured the examiner (who never commented) that it was just something in my throat rather than a sign of illness.

For most of Devon and Cornwall, the A30 functions like a motorway: there's no stopping, and you merge onto it from a sliproad at 70mph. As I entered the sliproad, I realised the cough was persisting and this was about to be a really bad idea. I merged into the traffic, while the cough grew steadily more violent and tears started streaming from my eyes.

Knowing we wouldn't be on the A30 for more than a minute or two before exiting again, I tried to ask the examiner if I could pull over and take a drink after we came off. He couldn't understand me through the coughing and thought I was asking to pull over now. I managed to get across my actual intent, but I was seriously worried that I wouldn't be able to see in a few more seconds, at which point I would have no choice but to put my hazard lights on and stop on the hard shoulder.

Thankfully, I did not get to find out whether or not this would have failed me. I made it to the exit ramp and whatever was in my throat cleared as I went down it. The examiner checked if we needed to make a detour so I could stop, but I told him it was fine and we continued back to the test centre. I half-expected him to leap out of the car and away from my symptomatic self as soon as we stopped, but he calmly stayed seated. The minute between the test ending and "I'm pleased to tell you you have passed," was possibly the longest minute of my life.

 A Weight Lifted

 It's hard to explain the impact of that moment when I passed. In many ways, this test has been twenty years in the making, since I started lessons in 2000. The driving test was always the part of moving back to the UK I was most scared of... I've dreaded it for years, finding it hard to believe that I was actually capable of it, even after a decade of driving experience in the US.

Successfully driving over here, before my US licence expired, gave me a confidence for it which evaporated almost completely after the second time I failed. I began to wonder if I had been reckless in bringing the family to Cornwall instead of somewhere where reliance on public transport would have been a more viable option.

• Not being able to drive was impairing the kids' lives, preventing us from doing so much. We relied on my boyfriend aka our support bubble for proper outings or we'd have to squeeze into the back of my parents' car with our masks on. I always dreaded a situation where my son would need to come home from school early, because I wouldn't be able to pick him up.
  
• After my second failure, I had to turn down a school that was willing to take me on placement as a trainee because I couldn't get to them by bus.
• We're still waiting for a date on the house, but we couldn't have moved, because I wouldn't have been able to get my daughter to school. I was bracing for a situation where we carried on renting while our house stood empty.
  
• In order for me to practice driving, my parents had to drive half an hour to my place, mask up to sit in the car with me as I drove around for an hour plus and then drive half an hour back to their home.
• Errands either had to wait for a day when my boyfriend / support bubble was visiting, or I'd have to haul my parents out again. Some things just got put off indefinitely in hope of passing my test.
• I was never certain of when I could retake a test... Both times I failed, I had to rebook for months down the line and then check the website every couple of days for any earlier slots to come up while dreading the possibility of everything being closed again (or one of us coming down with Covid symptoms within two weeks of a test.) Luckily, my local centre has been assiduous in opening up new slots whenever they could—probably fearing another backlog in lockdown.
  

I felt I was letting everybody down, I felt trapped into this dependency on others instead of being able to forge my own life. I was terrified of another lockdown coming, removing the possibility of even taking the test and limiting further the help available to me.

I owe a lot to the tireless support of my boyfriend through this time. Instead of meeting me halfway for a just-the-two-of-us exploration of some wild spot in Dartmoor, he was driving all the way here to take the whole family out. He was the one who took me to all of my tests. He gamely sit outside the test centre in his waterproofs while I drove, then afterwards, we'd go to Tesco and buy their largest Toblerone. (It was never Driving Test Day but always Toblerone Day.) This week, he got roped into a two-day family road trip during a severe storm just so that I could give the kids something resembling a holiday.

 

Yes, everything was closed, but we were going to enjoy the beauty of the far south, dammit.

My boyfriend is doing an online course of his own and will be moving North for the practical element of that in the new year. I had started to get genuinely scared of how I was going to manage without him... The past few months would have been survivable without him, but they'd have taken a significant toll to our mental health. Now, thankfully, I don't need him, and I can let him go to the rest of his life without a qualm. I'll miss him a great deal, of course, and I'll always be grateful for what he did for us this year.

Still, here and now, my little family is going into lockdown with a new sense of freedom. I can drive again, and that means we can move, I can progress my career... everything we really need is open to us. As uncertain as the future is, this whole Life Reboot thing is working out.