Day Who Effing Knows

This is a rant. This is lots of rants, actually. There are some ranty tangents. I just need to write these out, I need to know someone is reading them and feels me, but if you aren’t in a mental space for bitching right now, save this one for later, mmkay? **I just edited it to add another rant I had forgotten about. It’s very important that I SAVE all of these complaints in written form so I can let them go in emotional form.

The last day or two, the bloom has fallen off the rose. I’m just annoyed all the time. Annoyed that my cute, darling, sweet six year old won’t ever, EVER leave me alone. I take a bath? He comes in and poops on the toilet while chatting with me. I sit down to meditate? He comes to lie at my feet and ask me how many fortnite v-bucks he can buy with his allowance. I set up my computer to work, and the Prof shuts the door and occupies him with something else? As soon as the Prof’s attention is distracted, Craig wanders down the hall like a moth to a flame and suddenly he’s there, talking my ear off, just chatty chatty CHATTY FOREVER IT NEVER STOPS. He comes in our room at 6:30 or 7 am and crawls up to perch on me and chat, and often he sneaks out of his room at 9 or 10 pm to come ask me for a back scratch. He is forever LAYING on me, poking my soft bits with his elbows and knees, and I fully realize he needs his Mother and this is a time of great upheaval and I am a source of reassurance but DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN YOU MUST NEITHER TOUCH OR TALK TO ME FOR AT LEAST ONE STRAIGHT HOUR PER DAY, OR I WILL BREAK. One day I’ll miss this, yadda yadda, it’s just hard to be constantly covered by Child right now when I’m supposed to be working full time and I, too, am anxious and stressed. Another friend recently said “I’m tired of being the one everyone looks to in this house to see how they should be feeling.”

And the dog. This goddam dog. He follows me everywhere I go, a low rumbly growl in his throat, ready to bark the second I speak a word. I issue a lot of orders around here (go get your pjs on and then come down for milk! Please get dressed! Start a load of laundry please!) and Virgil is at the ready, prepared to bark as soon as I utter a syllable so his piercing woofs drown out my every word. “I can’t hear you mom! The dog’s too loud!” He’s trying to help me boss the kids around but really just making me abso-fucking-lutely insane. He’s also quite old – nearly 13 – and has started peeing just sort of anywhere. He’s definitely losing it, and taking me with him.

Jack. I love him so much. He’s a dream, a darling, so helpful with Craig. But he has a learning disability and dragging his voluminous daily distance learning assignments out of him inch by inch is slowly making me lose my ever-loving mind. Actual footage of me trying to pull his work out of him:

I’m not going to complain at all about Liam, because he’s been an absolute superstar. It’s his time to shine here. He’s a little slap-dash with his distance-learning assignments but easily re-focused, and otherwise he’s chipper, entertains and feeds himself, does his chores, and participates in “family fun” with glee. He’s definitely our favorite kid right now.

As for the Prof, none of my complaints are fair or reflect poorly on him at all, they just show what going-on-four weeks of being in each others’ face all day and night without ceasing can do to you. For example, he says the “th” in asthma. “People with ass-th-muh are more likely to suffer complications, so we’ll be ok.” “AZZ-MUH. SAY AZZ-MUH. SAY IT RIGHT. YOU SAY IT RIGHT RIGHT NOW.” He also leaves me for many hours on Tuesday and Thursday to go teach his class (nobody attends, but they have a room set up with cameras and such so the professors can Zoom their lectures). Tuesdays and Thursdays I start my workday at 3pm, after he gets home and we get the kids settled. It is not his fault but it is TERRIBLE.

I actually would not be minding this homeboundedness too much – it’s a nice contrast to my former constant work travel. It’s just obviously the homeschooling and virtual working on top that makes it hard. (Side rant: PEOPLE NEED TO STOP LECTURING ME ABOUT CALLING IT HOMESCHOOLING, I AM FULLY AWARE IT’S NOT ACTUAL HOMESCHOOLING SINCE SOMEONE ELSE MAKES THE CURRICULUM, THANK YOU FOR YOUR JUDGEY OUTBURST, IT’S JUST WHAT I NEEDED RIGHT NOW) (yes, if you don’t have as many Tiresome Liberal Friends as I do perhaps you have not seen this judgey trend to finger wag at parents who call distance-learning “homeschooling,” but it ranks right up there in annoyance with all the “While You Enjoy Memorial Day Barbecues, Soldiers DIE FOR YOUR FREEDOM” judgey posts we get every May. Word choice is important, yes, but I have wearied of this liberal trend of making word choice The Most Important, and they are just wearing people out with all this multi-exclamation-point rage about vocabulary.)

Oh man it is fun to get all these All Caps Rants out right now, I am full of them. Everything is making me mad. I am at the end of my rope. I have been walking 3-4 miles per day to get an hour break from the fam, and have not been able to do it for the last three days. Clearly this must be a priority today. I need my outside exercise. (Another sidenote – I’ve actually lost ten pounds over the last 6 weeks or so. There are many reasons for this, but chief among them are that I found an endocrinologist who listened to me when I said I work out all the time and cannot lose weight, and she tried a tweak in meds. She reduced my basic thyroid hormone a bit, but now gives me pure T-3 as well. Instead of shrieking “THESE AREN’T DIET PILLS” which is what my last doc did, she listened to me and said “let’s try this!” And now I’m losing 1 lb a week – because I walk/jog 15-20 miles a week, used to do weightlifting but now that the gym’s closed do Pilates/Yoga/Zoom cardio classes for an hour every day, and gave up alcohol for now.)

Underlying my irritability is anxiety of course, of course. I just took a dramatic 30% pay-cut to switch firms and now all the law firms are cutting their lawyers’ pay by about 25%. My new firm has not mentioned this possibility, and it might not hit us because we are employment-only and employers definitely have a TON of legal questions right now so we are buried in work. But eventually companies are going to start shutting down and/or slow paying their legal bills, so it may hit us too. To take a cut of that magnitude on top of the cut I just took would be . . . not good. I’m so tired of belt-tightening and trying to navigate a career through constant dramatic recessions. This is our third since graduating college, and salaries have never recovered after each one.

Edited to add: I’m also a little grieving-ish. Our losses could be worse, but darn it they’re losses. First, I switched jobs and took the paycut so that my work would be less stressful, I would have more time for myself and my family, and I would have a chance to recover after years in brutal, cruel, abusive Big Law. I got no chance to recover, none at all, before catapulting in this different-but-also-stressful situation, and I feel less capacity for this than I otherwise would have. And I’m grieving my one chance for an actual break, between jobs, where I wasn’t supposed to have to check email or plan or work or do anything but binge Netflix and relax. I also had planned to enter a writing competition this year. I had it on the calendar and everything. And I have an amazing idea, a couple of them, and had started sketching some thoughts out on paper. Now, I have no time or bandwidth to write a competition-level piece. I feel like I did the hard thing and took the financial hit to have the life I wanted, and I still don’t get to do that life. And I may have to take a second job as a Lyft driver if I take another pay cut. That life, those dreams just retreat even farther in the distance, and I am getting OLD for continued delays here. I also had worked my physical fitness up to a pretty impressive level, but now I have no access to free weights. So my squats and deadlift capacity are going to shrink again, and I’ll have to start all over. Pilates and yoga are HARD, guys, and I’m still working out daily and getting stronger, but it’s a different type of muscle movement and I’m just gonna lose my progress on the other type and there’s nothing I can do about it. And we were supposed to go to Disney World in June, and my sister was gonna come, and now I’m pretty sure we’re not doing that. And our July visits to family are at risk also. And Jack’s baseball season – poof, gone. Craig’s chance to perform in his first piano competition – poof, gone. And I want to go to baseball games, and have our church Easter egg hunt on Palm Sunday and our big concert (cancelled long ago), and our Holy Week services which I always love to go to since they’re mostly empty and very ritualistic and that’s my jam. Jack’s and Liam’s birthdays will be here, solo – I’m trying to arrange a “parade” for Jack’s (i.e. friends drive by in their cars), and maybe somewhere sells helium balloons even though they’re not essential. I’ll be creative and figure it out but I’m TIRED OF BEING CREATIVE AND FIGURING IT OUT.

Phew, I think I’m out. Purged of my irritation, at least for now. It is 11:30 on Saturday, and so far today I have done all the dishes, done a load of laundry, made and consumed some migas, and written this blog post while simultaneously listening to my six year old natter on and on about video games. Now I’m going to make a plan for the rest of the day, which must involve: (1) a one hour walk; (2) 4 hours of billing time to catch up; (3) making some recipe with the cauliflower, butternut squash, and asparagus I have in the fridge; (4) collecting my share of the groceries from my friend’s recent shop and paying her for them; (5) going to the pet store to buy our lizard more meal worms cuz he’s out; (6) making a grocery list so we can go get whatever’s left that we need at 6 am tomorrow as soon as the store opens; and (7) at least one hour of reading and/or cross stitch and/or rest; (8) the boys doing a facetime date with my brother and with their cousins. I’ll be ok. We are all fine. This too shall pass. One day, perhaps in thirty years or so, I shall be retired and I can cross stitch and explore recipes and spoil my grandchildren*, and I will regale them with stories about how their daddy was such a loving mama’s boy when he was a six year old, he couldn’t get enough of me even when we spent all day together in the same house.

*Jack is doing really well being responsible for his bearded dragon – he feeds him every day without prompting and also cleans out the poop. However, whenever he gets Rex out and brings him over to me to say hi, he says “Say hello to Grandma, Rexy!” and it always startles me. I guess I’m already sort of a Grandma, then!