Here we are a year later in the Pandemic of 2020 and I’m feeling disappointed in myself. I should have done so much more with this time. Why didn’t I finally write that whole book or work out consistently to get in better shape?
I should have actually learned how to cook better. My kids’ baby books should be updated by now; my house should be immaculate if I’m here all day every day, right?
I did none of those things.
My house is a disaster of epic proportions.
I’ve put on so much weight. I think I fell even more behind on baby books. I still only know how to cook the same three dishes.
It wasn’t because I didn’t have time because I just had a year of more time than I’ve ever had in my adult life. Yet as soon as I was done working for the day in the same space I eat and sleep and everything else, I spent it napping and binging Netflix.
The mess that mounted up from the kids while I was trying to work just consumed me. I drown in the monotony of the days. I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety before but this is just a different level of feeling low.
All I felt like doing was escaping.
I just wanted to escape the ridiculous pile of dishes that accumulated every day, escape the loudness of three children running around our tiny house, escape the endless messes that needed cleaning up.
I wanted to escape this damn pandemic that took away interacting with people at school and work, took away all the outside of the house things we enjoyed as a family, took away our sports the kids loved and we loved to watch them play.
As each season passed into the next, the pandemic took away something new and the bitterness and resentment just built inside me to the point it was a raging fire of anger that if let out could have melted off the snow of winter that also just buried me more in my pandemic fog of feeling motivated to do nothing.
I was so tired of doing nothing, but yet had no motivation to do anything.
At one point my excitement of the day was looking forward to going to the gynecologist just so I could get out of the house alone. The local dunkin donuts rememorized my coffee order because running through the drive thru was about the only part of my old life I held on to.
Everything changed over the past year. It should have been a great year for me to change too, yet I’ve just been surviving.
I keep telling myself that is enough and it is. We all as mothers, wives, employers did the best we could this past year.
Maybe we feel like we didn’t succeed in this Covid world but I don’t necessarily think we failed either.
This past year has been a weird time of existence. Now here we are in this eleventh hour of this pandemic and I keep thinking even as something new gets cancelled or taken away that I can hold on a little longer.
The end is in sight now, right? We just need to hold on a little longer and we’ll be to the other side of this, right?
If we can just hold on a little longer, things will open and resume and return to normal, but I’m slipping in this final hour.
My grip on hope and positivity is slipping through my fingers.
But I tighten my grip and hold on cause that’s what we do as mothers. Even when the boat is so rocked and the water close to going over our heads we hang on. We keep everyone afloat because pandemic or not it’s what we do as mothers.