Lockdown Fatigue

The first lockdown was a break, bringing the onslaught of Life to a temporary standstill just as we hit the first gloriously warm spell of the year. The children were in the same class at school and did most of their homeschooling together. The rest of the day was ours to spend as we wanted.

The second lockdown almost seemed to pass us by. The schools (and many other businesses) stayed open and I had just started my placement for my postgrad. All three of us left the house every day, interacted with other people and learned new things--save for the two week blip when my son had to self-isolate, but we managed to adapt.

This third lockdown has been harder.

The children are at two different schools with very different homeschooling systems. My son has to log into the relevant classroom for every period, while my daughter requires a fair amount of attention if she's to do her work properly. While the schools are more prepared for homeschooling now, teachers are still struggling to teach via a medium they've not been trained for and one that renders almost all their training invalid. They can't engage their students with hands on activities or group projects. School is, inevitably, boring.

The weather's terrible too and with the government finally getting firmer about travel restrictions, we're reluctant to venture too far afield. But it's hard to muster interest for the umpteenth visit to the beach in the wind and rain, or for a walk through rain and mud. Even when I dredge up the motivation to drag the kids out, at least one of them will be groaning the whole time, and then I start snapping. Fresh air and exercise are no relief.

It's taken a toll on our mental health. At first, I assumed I was doing all right, because I was staying productive with house stuff—until I noticed I was losing weight. I'd all but given up on self-care. House-productivity was just escapism—a constructive form of escapism, doing stuff that needed to be done anyway, but it was a way of procrastinating on everything else because I didn't want to face up to it.

The mental health issues are even worse for the kids. They've had a rough go of it the last few years: Dad left, Mum was an emotionally volatile mess for two years straight, and they got uprooted from everything they knew and plopped down in a new country to start over. Now, just when things are supposed to be getting better, we have this interminable pandemic.

Supporting them is what's taking its toll on me. Sometimes it's fine, because I can see the breakdowns coming and I can head it off. Sometimes, I don't see them coming, and I realise too late that I picked the wrong time to get insistent about doing a chore. Then all my plans are wiped out for a few hours as I try to defuse everything. Usually badly, as my brain isn't good at switching tracks from whatever project I was on to focus on human interaction.

A few weeks back, I posted to Facebook about how I wanted to be something other than Mum for a little while. Some friends offered to video chat with the kids so I could have a break, but that wasn't what I meant. It's not difficult to get time away from the kids; what I miss is being Sarah. 

Our family doesn't have our support bubble this time around, and we sorely miss that... I miss being a girlfriend as well as a Mum, I miss having somebody who wants to go out for a walk, we all miss having a fresh face to talk to and a different meal to eat. Something that isn't the same as every other day!

Socialising in general is something we're badly in need of. They chat with their Dad most days, but that's not getting them out of the parent-child dynamic. My daughter's got a few online friends on various games (she's allowed to be on game-chats on the understanding that I may glance at her screen at any time to check everything's OK), but my son isn't into net-chat, and I'm not active in any online community lately... probably the first time in my adult life that that's been the case. We don't do many video calls either. 

We should do. There's no excuse. I have family and friends who'd be willing, and there's no end of virtual events to try, if we want something other than a basic chat. It would do all of us the world of good to talk regularly to other people. But it only happens every now and then, even with me thinking about how good it would be for us.

(One friend, a mother herself, understood my afore-mentioned Facebook post exactly, and the two of us have occasional video-chats, mostly framed around watching an episode or two of Bridgerton and then discussing it, letting me live another side of myself for a while. But, because we're both parents and Life is a Thing, these happen infrequently and often get postponed. They don't benefit the children either.)

My vague theory is that as the lone adult of the household, I get tired of being the one to set everything up, to always be the one encouraging others to participate in my choice of activity—often with very poor returns of enthusiasm.

At any rate, I'm doing a bad job of keeping up my end of the social network, and the whole household is suffering as a result.

As gloomy as this is, our life-rollercoaster isn't a white knuckle ride. We're not getting the high highs, but nor are the lows too low. Thankfully, this is just a part of our lives it will pass. In another few weeks, the kids at least will be back in school (I haven't figured out yet whether it makes the most sense to return to my course before or after Easter). The weather will have improved. We can meet up with my parents again. By the end of the year, we should be able to hug, to travel, to make more friends...

Of course, it's easy for me, with 43 years of living through difficult periods, to have confidence in this being temporary. It's less easy for children, and in the case of my two, I've been saying: "We've just got to get through this difficult bit and then things will get better!" since we came to England in summer 2019.

Small wonder they're getting a bit suspicious of the whole Hope concept. All I can do is keep trying to find the patience for all three of us.

My house

Making this house ours has been a leisurely process so far as we find ourselves more focused on schoolwork, but it's already our home. As with all new homes, we're discovering an escalating list of problems now we've moved in, but I'm still so thrilled we found this place. It's perfect for us.

I knew we needed a guestroom, even if it was a dining room that we used as a guestroom. I like having people to stay. I'm an introvert, but I enjoy being around other people, and as a single mother, I really appreciate having adult company in the house. 

The house has an extra room downstairs that the sellers were using as a study. I decided I wanted a library more than a study, so I flogged my desk on Facebook Marketplace and put the bookshelves up instead. It's going to require some creative organisation to make it a comfortable bedroom as well, but a sofa bed is on its way. I've always wanted a library and if the idea of bedding down in a roomful of books doesn't appeal to you, you are no friend of mine.

The other thing we needed was room for our sofa. Our sectional is a good size by American standards, and bloody massive by British ones. Our mover was dumbfounded. I knew from the room measurements there was the physical space for it, but I wasn't sure how it would fit around the door, radiator, kitchen...

Thankfully, it looks like it was made for this room, dividing the space beautifully, though I may want to replace the round kitchen table with a rectangular one in due course. I credit the sofa for the cats settling in so quickly. The fact that this was their third move in eighteen months almost certainly helped, but the sofa means home in a way nothing else does, and the cats were purring and confident as soon as they found it.

For the first time, the children have a home with a fireplace! Two in fact, since the one in my bedroom has been left in place, although it's purely ornamental now. The massive fireplace downstairs has been redone and fitted with a woodburning stove, which we're all getting the hang of using. In this grey, mizzly weather and the repetitive grind of lockdown, it's very nice to curl up on the sofa (cats included) for cosy evenings in front of the fire.

Upstairs, I have a couple of candles in my grate, and my grandmother's silver pheasants on the 'hearth'. When I was a little girl, those pheasants were permanently falling over on her hearth, and now they can fall over on mine. 

I have her old secretary next to it as well. As I said, I didn't want a study. Nan's old-fashioned little fold-out desk is fine for paperwork. I should perhaps buy a new filing cabinet, but for now, I've put everything into a concertina folder. In this era of 'going paperless', we have fewer documents to store after all.
 

My daughter wanted a conservatory. Luckily for her, the owners of twenty years ago followed the home-improvement fad of adding one. However, they were more ambitious than most homeowners who squeezed in a small glassy nook along the patio. The conservatory matches the length of the kitchen and living room, with a deep bay area and two different exits to the outside.

I have plans for this to be the 'teenage hangout room' when the kids brings friends over in the future, possibly doubling up as extra sleeping space in the summer months. Ideally, I'd like to put a proper roof on it to make it more usable in cold or hot weather, but owing to its size, I'm not sure I can afford that.

For now, the conservatory is acting as a box room, stacked up with the things that we haven't figured out what to do with yet. However, I've kept enough space clear for a sort of nest with the old papasan chair and two recently-gifted giant beanbags. When the sun comes out, it warms up quickly into a luxurious respite for us: cuddling down into the beanbags even as we bask in vitamin D and listen to birds sing...  The cats are loving it.

The cats are also loving the garden. The flat had a rectangle of grass with no undergrowth for them. Here, we have shrubs galore. Two owners back was a lady who was passionate about exotic gardens, and her legacy is a small fortune in landscaping and lots of different plants.

As far as the mogs are concerned, they like eating the ornamental grasses (and then being sick), and the retaining wall that runs up the side of the garden makes a perfect secret tunnel for them behind the plants.

I like that they can't get out. Cars don't have to slow down for our hamlet, and they whizz by at 60mph. In our cats' younger days, we could never have lived here. Now that they're old and arthritic, they've no interest in trying to climb the fencing. Though Trog does keep eyeing up the pergola....

There's a child's swing on the pergola, which I wasn't expecting the previous owners to leave. My two love it, even if it's a lot tamer than the swing we had in the States. We still have that swing, but there's nothing in the garden with the proper height for it. That's one wish we didn't get, but we're more than willing to make this concession. 

If I were a fictional character, seeking refuge in Cornwall after a heartbreak, there would be a country lane running from our house to the sea. In reality, nothing that close to the coastline is in our budget, but we're only a few miles from the coast, tucked away from the worst of the summer traffic. Our house is semi-detached rather than a self-contained cottage, but the building is a century old—thankfully much modernised in the last four years—and when we moved in we found a box-file containing the information on all the previous owners.

For most of my house's existence, it's been owned by women: a widow and a spinster who held it for almost fifty years until both had died; another who retired here at the beginning of the century and only sold the house when she had to move into a care home. I like knowing that. Knowing that it's been a home to women, to older women who've loved and lost. Their feet wore the grooves in the hallway's stone steps, and now mine will deepen them.

 

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.

A Promise

 When my marriage ended,
Legal professionals took thirteen years,
Of memories, love and hopes,
And they turned it into a figure,
In pounds sterling.

So I took that money,
And I bought a house.
Now I will fill that house,
With memories, love and hopes.

 

 

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.