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.

First Day of School

 My son's first day of secondary school was on Friday. (I got a big spot on my nose in what I assume was maternal sympathy.) The big milestone for us is that he's now responsible for getting himself to and from school. No school run for me!

He was adamant that he didn't want me accompanying him to the bus-stop, but they were starting late that first day, so I over-ruled him. He wouldn't be taking the usual bus, and I was afraid his bus pass wouldn't be accepted. As it was only year 7s and 12s going in, I was fairly confident that there wouldn't be any other pupils at the bus stop to see his maternal shame.

Just as well I went, as the usual bus was late. Eventually a completely different local bus turned up, one that doesn't normally come through our village. I talked to the driver who agreed to stop at the school and accept the bus pass. We waved my son off, and I proceeded to be wildly anxious. 

I sent a hasty email to the school explaining that he might show up late, and he sent us a gloomy text from the bus but didn't respond to my later texts. I took this to mean he had made it into school (where phones must be switched off) and fought against the urge to helicopter-parent the hell out of the school phoneline. Thankfully, in due course, somebody replied to my email saying he'd arrived and was with the rest of his form.

As per his wishes, we didn't meet him at the bus stop at the end of the day. Instead, he called us on his walk home so that I could put the kettle on. And then again, to let us know that he was having to wait for cattle being herded in the road. At that point, my daughter charged out both to meet him and to see the herding. They came home, as complacent and satisfied with themselves as you'd expect from pre-adolescents, and we all had a cup of tea.

Tomorrow my daughter starts back as well. My son will walk down to the bus stop bright and early, and she and I will do the shorter walk to the village school by ourselves, which will be odd. Even odder when I collect her in the afternoon, and we have to wait almost an hour for him to get home. Another new routine for me to devise and the kids to groan about!

Along with back to school stress, we've managed to get a last gasp of summer holiday this week. I gave the kids their first experience of rowing on Tuesday, and then my boyfriend took us to an indoor rock-climbing gym on Wednesday. Today, we took Granny (and Grandad and the dog) out for a coastal lunch for her birthday.

Life has felt pretty good this week... At some point soon, I'm going to go back to student-hood, as well as the kids, but I'm determined to keep up the adventure side of things.

Must be harvest-time

So after a chaotic few weeks of slogging through administrative treacle, things are suddenly coming together.


1. Driving Test Booked

Firstly, I finally got granted an emergency driving test... for the end of September. Having to wait another month is crushing—not least because jobs have been popping up that I can't apply for—but at least I know instead of vainly hoping. Now I'm just dealing with the stress what-ifs of failure or a return to lockdown.

It's still embarrassing having to explain to various people that I can't drive at the moment. Everybody is too polite to ask, but I know the obvious assumption is that I have had my licence revoked. It was amusing when it was just my neighbours seeing the L plates, but when I'm talking to somebody in a more professional capacity, I don't want them assuming I'm a reckless driver! It's very awkward explaining the US licence though, since that requires further backstory. I'm still working on a nice pithy wording for that.

2. Back on the drugs

After a last minute hiccup of losing my prescription, the pharmacy managed to produce some ADD medication for me this week. A few days in, and I've got killer insomnia while my productivity's through the roof. I expect this initial dramatic effect to wear off, but it's pretty weird right now. Instead of being drowsy and having to push myself through the to-do list, I'm restless and keep finding more stuff to do. 

It's not a magic bullet, so I still can't multi-task, and I keep forbidding the children from talking to me while I'm on task, but I can stay on task without my brain fogging over after half an hour. Meanwhile, I'm averaging about four hours of sleep a night and my eyes are burning holes in my head, but I'm not yawning and nodding off throughout the day. Nights are hit and miss: I'm only sleeping a few hours at a time and then struggling to get back to sleep, so I'm firmly routining my body clock and hoping that will settle. I've got a follow up call from my doctor in two weeks to decide how it's going.

3. Return of the Course

Out of the blue, on Friday, I had a phone call from the early years training course I'd applied to, chasing up some outstanding documentation. The following day, they offered me a place for September conditional on the receipt of my last reference. As I had given up hope of that, this is incredible news. I'm a little concerned about how it will go due to the last-minute-ness of it all, but in these pandemic-times, that's going to be a recurring theme. It's a full-time (funded) course though, so I won't be working much if at all this year. As it turns out, it's probably just as well I couldn't apply for any jobs.

Despite the vagueness, I'm really, really happy about this. I'd been feeling very down about my complete failure to progress with the career stuff, but this is a definite progression. Not only do I get a vital qualification, but I'll be placed with different schools throughout the course, which will give me the local contacts I've been missing and, with any luck, might lead to a job offer for 2021. When I moved to the UK, I had a five year goal of achieving a steady job at a particular salary level. I feel like I'm on track for that now.

4. Et Cetera

Meanwhile, all the other variations on life are ticking over... like back to school stuff, particularly my son's switch to secondary school, for which the guidance keeps changing. But we've got a full set of school uniform now, he's got a bus pass and the information for the bus service laid on for this stage of lockdown, and since the government's last minute switch on facemask advice, I've got ten extra washable facemasks thanks to Amazon Prime. (He's required to have one for the bus and one for school every day.)

The house is pootling along at a quieter pace. I've had all the information on it to read through—including a wonderfully old-fashioned document from 1949, when it was converted from one detached property to two semi-detached. I'm told all the agreements in that document still apply, so I'm making careful note of my right to install a pipe in my neighbour's well (so long as it is not lower than his pipe).

The main issue with the house is that the surveyors are all over-booked. I had one surveyor cancel on me this week "due to unforeseen circumstances" which is useful cover for all eventualities from "somebody died" to "we made a mistake we don't want to admit to." Luckily, I was able to get another one, but as they won't be able to survey the house before October, I really hope they don't find anything.

The sellers still haven't found a house, and as they'll have the same issue with surveyors as I've had, I now think it's unlikely we'll move before Christmas.

And I haven't even mentioned dentist appointments, a car insurance issue (that turned out to be a glitch on their end)... Thank goodness for the bank holiday weekend! Despite the sunshine, we haven't really done anything with it, and I've spent a lot of time on the laptop. But it meant a three day break from phone calls and emails. 

 I think I'm caught up again.... We'll see what happens on Tuesday.