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.