A Hard Thing and a Happy Thing
Today I’m tired. Not sleepy, though I have been short on sleep due to anxiety, my heart is tired. My brain is tired. I have this creeping desire to abandon all these new habits because they are hard and retreat back into old familiar habits. I can’t of course. The world around me has shifted in ways that no longer allow my familiar habits. I have to deal with the tired until the new ways of being become my new set of familiar habits.
Yesterday was the official beginning of distance learning for my one kid who is still in high school. It didn’t go well. Rather it didn’t go at all because the kid looked at all the emails and had an overwhelming feeling of “there is no point to all of this.” Then he closed the emails and did none of the work. Him not doing assignment work is par for the course, it is what we’ve been struggling with for years. When he was in the classroom, he absorbed learning just by being there even though he was failing the classes by not doing the homework. Now it is all homework all the time. I’ve no idea how to teach a 17 year old to care about homework. Prior to this month he could have dropped out and gotten a job, but now we’re quarantined and all the jobs he was qualified for (fast food) have been canceled. So that is my hard thing for today. I’ve no idea how to map a road to self-sufficient adulthood for my young adult children. All the old maps are canceled.
My happy thing for today is food. I’m really liking the ways that Howard and I are banding together to manage our food resources so that I only go to a grocery store once per week. We’re paying attention to what we have in the fridge. We’re cooking from scratch. We’re eating left overs before they go bad. Howard has performed several instances of kitchen hedge wizardry where he grabs left overs and random ingredients and then through alchemical magic created the best foods ever. We had amazing pulled pork enchiladas last night and amazing beef stew on Sunday. This food management and cooking piece is lovely and I want to keep it even if other things go back to “normal.”