The Life of Bon: January 2021

Thursday, January 07, 2021

2020

 I came here to write.  My brain asking me to settle some thoughts.  Then I got sucked in.  Sucked in to this blog.  What it is, what it once was, the pain suffering sorrow joy gratitude it contains.  Some posts make me cringe.  A la 2012.  That was a weird time.  Forgive me for what I wrote.  I was still learning and growing.  I am still learning and growing.

Somehow I landed on Hugh's birth story.  He turns four in a few weeks.  Where did his babyhood go?  My baby who I never planned on, who formed and arrived in spite of strict instructions from his parents NOT to form and arrive- my passion, my fire, my Chef Hugh, my choo choo king.

I digress.  I came here to write, not to reminisce.

To tell you that I made it through 2020.  

Isn't that something?

WE made it through 2020.

The world.  We survived what has collectively been the hardest year that we have lived through.  Congratulations, world!

I was so scared when the world shut down in March.  Suddenly my children couldn't go to school, I was left to my own lonely devices to figure out how to teach them.  I was still trying to run a jewelry business.  Working while teaching June her letters.  Needing to hire on help, but not knowing how to, especially now, in a pandemic, how could I even interview anyone for a job?

I was afraid to see my own mom.  She was coming up every Wednesday to help me with menial household chores that I couldn't keep on top of by myself.  Suddenly this felt like a crime.  Everyone else gets to quarantine with someone,  but I had to quarantine by myself.  My friends who had been my life support the last two years, suddenly taking cover in their homes, their safe spots, with their people people.  Oh, I realized.  I am your people but I am not your people people.  At the end of the day all my people have other people but I have only two little people.

I remember my best friend agreeing to go on a walk with me.  Don't tell anyone we agreed.  We were criminals.  Breaking invisible pandemic laws that had emerged in minutes.  I remember feeling so grateful and so scared.  So grateful for a friend who would walk and talk with me, so scared the gestapo would see this single mom, desperate for companionship, on a walk with a friend.

And then there was the day I broke down in the Walmart parking lot.  It was mid April.  I had gone three straight weeks on my own with the kids.  Running a business, homeschooling kids, no break, no social outlet, no way to just go to a damn store and try on a pair of jeans.  We ate Taco Bell in the backseat of the car, and I sobbed.  Is being single and caring for kids during a pandemic the thing that will kill me?

On Easter Sunday I locked myself in my bathroom.  I was trying to make a ham and twice baked potatoes.  It was too much.  My kids needed me and I needed help.  I turned on the tv and ran away to a hot bath and sobbed into My Antonia.  Later we went in secret to my brother's house.  My two brothers and their two wives and their collective four children.  Tried to celebrate a somewhat normal Easter together, instead we ate in paranoia, half convinced we would all now kill each other for eating Easter dinner together.

And somehow.

Here we are.

2021.  Facemasks in hand, social distancing signs at every turn, positive covid tests par for the course.  

Surviving the pandemic.