Lockdown Hiatus

 First lockdown of the year! It's somewhere between lockdown one and two. Unlike lockdown two, the schools are closed. Unlike lockdown one, the nurseries are open. Which meant I was supposed to go to school while the children stayed home.

Actually, I'm classed as a key worker, even if I'm only a student teacher, so I could have got provision for the children, but as they've been getting some stress issues lately, I opted to defer my course for six weeks so that I could stay home with them (and catch up a bit on research, etc.) 

And unpack! We've settled pretty comfortably into the new house, but we've got a lot of boxes of the archive-or-delete variety as well as a steadily increasing to-do list. We also had our first houseguest, as the kids' Dad came over to spend new year with them. Because of pandemic rules, this meant he spent five days self-isolating with us, before taking a mail-order test... except the test didn't arrive until the sixth day because the center would neither post them in advance nor over the new year, and then he had to wait until the seventh day for a result.

But it meant he got to spend time with the kids for the first time in almost six months. It also marked a huge breakthrough for the two of us, just to co-exist. Granted, we didn't talk about anything too heavy, and we avoided physical contact for almost his entire stay (we did hug goodbye at the end) but we were able to have a conversation, make eye contact and accept help from each other, which is more than we've been able to do for the past couple of years.

I think having the house helped me a lot with that. I kept joking over Christmas that it was the "First of fifty!" It's plausible that I'll live another fifty years and that I could live in this house for the rest of my life. I don't have to, but I could. All my life, I've lived with the expectation that I'd be moving in another few years. There's something very intoxicating about digging in.

This gives me a vision of my life beyond the kids again. I used to think that when they left home, I'd still have my husband, but when he left me, I struggled to picture my life without the children. Now I can see myself growing old in this house. I don't quite understand why, but that's comforting. I feel more secure with that vision.

At any rate, it's let me face him again, and in this pandemic world we live in, it was really useful to actually have another pair of hands around. It would have been a lot harder to clear everything out of the flat without him, and he got our wifi set up so we can do Zoom etc in just about every room now. Definitely handy while we're all locked down!

He went back at the beginning of this week, so it's just us and the cats now. Home.

Goodbye to a Year

2020 has ended. A year that's been weird and hard for the entire globe. A year in which I've been very very happy. A year in which my life aligned with a man's and we grew closer than we ever intended. But now it's 2021 and on Sunday, he moves to Leeds and I stay here.

It's the end of our relationship, if not so much a break up as the point where our lives diverge. We knew from the start it wouldn't make sense for us to do a long distance relationship. It's not as if he will be back in a year or I will follow him later... I am taking root and he is taking wing. 

Yet for 2020 our lives ran in parallel.

Love in the Time of Corona

The pandemic is a terrible thing, but all bad things work out well for somebody, and that's how it panned out for us. Yes, it was a pain at times (particularly with the whole driving fiasco), but really, I only moan about Covid-19 restrictions because that's the socially acceptable thing to do. They haven't stopped my life from flourishing. Had my dream been to run a pub in Sheffield, that would have been a different matter. But my dream was to work with pre-schoolers in Cornwall. My life has progressed in a year when so many had to put theirs on hold—or saw them shattered completely. I'm grateful for that and humbled by it.

It also meant my boyfriend stayed down south almost a year longer than intended. It was supposed to be a fairly casual relationship, where we would go out on a ramble somewhere every one to two weeks. Instead, we bubbled up and he became his own part of our family for the past six months. He met my parents, I met his Mum, he was there for me during the driving issues and for the move. We've had long conversations about difficult parts of our lives, supporting each other emotionally as well as practically. 

He's also cooked dozens of meals. As the person who has been responsible for dinner for the past 20 years, I cannot begin to tell you how exciting it is to watch somebody cook for me.

For New Year's, we arranged to have one day of 2021 together. It was freezing up on Dartmoor, but we layered up to explore the geography around Haytor. Ice caused us to fall on our backsides several times, and mist kept blowing in and out, but we climbed rocks and scrambled down crevices without breaking our necks. It was perfect. A very 'us' sort of day and adventure. A day to carry with us as we face a busy year. 

At the end of our walk, I drove him back to our starting point. I took the bag I had left in his car, we hugged and kissed in the dusk, then I got back into my car and drove away across the moor and home to my family.

I may miss him terribly, yet I am where I belong.

Our lives will cross again in the future. His parents live down here and he loves the countryside here—we've agreed that if nothing else, we'll meet up for more moor and coastal adventures. However, there's no point in waiting for each other. 2021 will bring its own adventures to each of us. I can wait to hear his, but I won't to live mine.