O, the places I'm not going this spring break

I'm engaging in quite a bit of my own CBT this week as I see social media posts from people who are traveling.

On the one hand, even though I'm fully vaccinated, it gives me a severe case of the heebie-jeebies to see people out and about engaging in life. And I have to remind myself that the pictures they post are of their own families together outside. They aren't packed into a subway car mask-less with hundreds of strangers. 

My parents, who are also fully vaccinated, got together for a meal with several other also fully vaccinated couples for dinner (not at a restaurant; in one of their homes). My initial reaction that never got past my lips was, "OMG. Are you crazy?" 

But then I went through the "They are fully vaccinated. The other people are fully vaccinated. They are fine" mantra and was ok. 

I'm doing a lot of the self-talk business lately. 

As mentioned, I do some CBT to manage the anxiety of seeing people out doing stuff.

And then I do some CBT to help me manage my feelings of meh and self-pity at seeing other people doing stuff because we're not doing stuff (even though I don't yet feel comfortable doing stuff especially if it involves being on an airplane).

My brain is putting itself in freaking knots.

So I give my brain this talk:

Me: "Brain, you've gone some really cool places, and you'll go to some really cool places again just not right now."

Brain: "Yeah, ok."

Me: "And you wouldn't enjoy traveling right now because the boys aren't vaccinated so you wouldn't want to fly. And you don't want to stay in a hotel. And you wouldn't feel comfortable going out to eat at restaurants."

Brain: "Yeah. You're right."

Me: "Not to mention that you've been able to save a crazy amount of money this year from not going places which means you may be able to do some stuff to the house that you've been wanting to do."

Brain: 'Yeah. That would be good."

Me: "And finally, Brain, you know as well as anyone that pics on social media are one moment in time. You've posted your own pics that make everything look amazing and wonderful even when five seconds later you felt like murdering your entire family."

Brain: "True, all."

Me: "So quit feeling mopey and boring. Life is 95% mopey and boring, and you know that. Cool it."

I'm finding that navigating all the rules and protocols and reservation systems is overwhelming me and taking all the fun out of doing stuff and that is just attempting to do stuff in my city. (We had a zoo attempt failure a couple weeks ago). 

I can't handle the idea of doing this from several states (or countries) away. YIKES!

This summer we're going two hours away and that will be good enough. 

I am having to remind myself a lot (more CBT) that it took me months to get used to pandemic life and it will take as long if not longer to readjust to whatever is going to look like normal. 

A reason I'm not sending my kid back to IRL school now (that hadn't occurred to me until recently)

Every parent is having to make decisions right now that both they and their kids can live with regarding in-person school. 

I made the decision to not send my kids back to school for the remainder of this school year.

At its most basic, this decision is about the virus.  

But the decision is about a lot more than the virus, and it took me a little while to see this. 

My basic argument in my head was that all this seemed like an awful lot of work and struggle (especially for teachers and staff) for what will ultimately amount to 12 days of in-person school per child (due to the hybrid scheduling). 

In "normal circumstances," the first six weeks of school in August are aimed at establishing routines (that is 30 days of consistent 5-day-a-week school). To me, starting IRL school in mid-April (after Spring Break when everyone is mentally done with school anyway) seemed like an effort in futility. 

But it dawned on me (finally) that my feelings about this futility had a lot to do with what the virus did to all the work G had done pre-pandemic (starting in November 2019) to manage his OCD. 

He had been going to therapy once a week. 

He was dealing with his uniform and his shoes.

He was going to school ok and managing his anxieties.

And then COVID hit. 

No IRL school; no uniforms; no shoes; nothing normal.

No being around unknown people and having to manage his anxiety in the face of them. 

So a lot of those things that set off his OCD haven't been there for a year. 

Which is EXACTLY the wrong thing when you're doing exposure therapy. The goal is to EXPOSE yourself to the things that cause anxiety. COVID made exposure not happen. 

(If I was a better person, I would have forced him to wear his uniform and put on his shoes, but given all the pandemic and all my dad's stuff and all the STUFF, I didn't have the mental energy to fight with my child constantly.)

And part of the therapy is the consistent practice of managing your anxiety in the face of exposure. Consistent being the operative word. 

To send G back to school now for two days a week in a hybrid schedule means to force him to deal with all of his OCD issues for six weeks inconsistently and then have a huge summer break (again, no consistent practice). 

It means to send him back to deal with all his old OCD issues and all the new anxiety issues from the virus. 

Prior to COVID, G would experience anxiety seeing his classmates and peers act out in school and not do what they were asked to do by teachers. How will he handle seeing this happen with mask-wearing or social distancing? 

Last year, he rode the bus home. How will he handle that, being in obviously close quarters with other kids who may remove their masks and hide behind the seat? 

G could barely manage the uncomfortable feeling of his uniform so I'm not sure he could manage 7+ hours of mask-wearing.

I know there are lots of kids who need to go back and have some semblance of whatever they describe as normal. But there are, I suspect, an awful lot of kids for whom going to school before COVID was an emotional labor that they maybe aren't super keen to return to especially because all the COVID protocols will heighten their anxiety even more. 

My kid is one of those. 

OCD itself is tantamount to rolling a stone up the hill to only have it roll back over and over and over again. It is a labor at all times, and I really do not have the desire to intentionally make ourselves Sisyphean in April of the nearly over school year. 

Sad to see the pandemic go

Let me qualify that title a bit.

I don't think COVID is done with us even though people are continuing to get vaccinated. I would not be a bit surprised to see rates climb again after March and April spring breaks. 

I've read too many dystopian apocalyptic books to think things are just going to go totally swell (cause 526,000 deaths is not swell). And I've read enough Buddhism books to know it is all hopeless/emptiness, and I can't control it anyway. 

But I am sensing an "end-to-this" feel, and it makes me a little sad. 

Maybe it is just the spring weather?

I won't be sad to see sickness and dying go away.

But it saddens me to think that everyone is going to pick right back up exactly where they left off a year ago, perhaps none the wiser, perhaps having learned nothing or thought nothing about what was better about life in the pandemic.

As the months wore on, I heard people lament their kids being home, things not being normal, and I wanted to shake them and say:

In one year (or 10 years) you are going to be wailing about how your "baby" is going away to college. You have been given the gift of time seeing your child in ways you never would have had if the pandemic hadn't happened. You got a bonus. 

Our family has long been on the slow boat. That is always how D has rolled, and I have gotten more comfortable on the ride over the years. Our kids generally like being home and not doing much. Our lives in many ways didn't change much due to quarantines and the pandemic, but it changed enough that it was a gift. 

We took hikes last spring before N got a job. 

We always ate most dinners together, but now we were eating all meals like we would if we were on a vacation. 

D and I take walks together every single day, and sometimes twice a day. 

It wasn't all bad. 

And so now to think about going back to "normal" makes me cringe because...

I didn't miss the early mornings and the travel time.

I didn't miss the hours away from home and the homework when the kids got home.

I didn't miss being in my car and driving so much. 

I didn't miss the school functions and the paperwork that came home. 

I didn't miss the guilt that sometimes came with not attending school functions. 

I didn't miss the uniforms and the lunches.

I didn't miss the meetings.

I didn't miss the go, and the go, and the go. 

I didn't miss the small talk with people I barely know.

I didn't miss the being friendly when I didn't feel like being friendly. 

Once you become used to more stillness, the idea of returning to the buzz of sound and motion just feels like too much. 

Jack Handey doesn't know what to do with these thoughts

If life expectancy is 77.8 years, I am nearly 10 years past. 

Were I born some 300-400 years ago and managed to survive childhood, I'd be close to dead right now. 

Oh, and also managed to survive childbirth three times. 

That is a lot of maybes. 

Of course, I suspect life's lessons were learned much faster back then for all sorts of different reasons. 

I guess when you butt everything, every possible concern up next to death, all those other concerns become a lot less critical. 

Sometimes when I'm in an SBDM meeting (or any meeting) and I feel myself getting worked up about something, I have a moment of butting the issue up next to death which tends to make me step back just a smidge.

Because I'm a naturally reflective person, I've considered things from lots of angles before I actually verbalize whatever it is I actually think. I've read or done research or considered before I open my mouth. Heck, some of what I think lands on this blog which helps me sort through things and add to my thinking. 

If I could be paid for my thinking, I would be so fucking rich. 

And about some things I do tend to have strong opinions. 

Because I assert those opinions or questions or concerns, I wonder if people think me asserting those things means I think I'm right. 

I used to be that way. I used to give my opinion and think my opinion was correct.

But now I mostly don't know. 

I still assert a viewpoint or opinion because I think I sometimes have some smart thoughts, and if nothing else, they might help distill a situation or help someone check me and my viewpoint. 

Sometimes I like to mull over topics over which I used to feel very strongly in one particular way and now do not. 

I used to believe that breastfeeding was the absolute best way to feed one's baby and one should do it for a very long time, and while I believed that for me, it took awhile to get that what is right for ME is not right for everyone. 

I used to believe some of my neighbors were semi-normal people, and after 2016 and the ensuing years, I realized they appear to have some glaring problems with black people that I never noticed before and maybe aren't the sort of people I actually want to be neighbors with. 

I used to believe that Catholic education was the absolute best, and then I believed that public school education was the best, and now I believe that no education system has all the answers and do whatever is best for your kid. 

I used to think that Tom Cruise was the world's worst actor and now I think...ok, I still think this. 

I feel like the older I get, the more loosey-goosey I get. 

What do I believe? Do I have any rails on which the track of my life runs beyond just like a basic Golden Rule situation?

Sometimes I even ask myself, "Am I moral person?" because I'm like "Are drugs wrong? What drugs are wrong if they are wrong? Are some drugs more wrong than others? Is this even a moral question at all? Do drugs have anything at all to do with morality? Is doing drugs harming only you or is there a chain reaction of harm that may not harm you but harms people on the production chain of getting the drugs to you?" 

Remember when I said I could make millions if I got paid for my thoughts. This is why. 

Why we didn't do a class ring for our kid

I have a class ring from when I graduated high school. 

I wore it for one year and then promptly stuck it in a jewelry box when I entered college; once I entered college, I didn't want to be seen as a "high schooler" anymore.  

It has been sitting in that box for 30 years. 

It sits alongside my mother's high school class ring, which has been sitting in a drawer for 60 years. 

I looked up class rings for my daughter's high school just now, and they range in price from $419 to over $1,000, and either of those amounts seems like a lot of money for something that will be worn for a year and then stuck in a draw for the rest of time. 

In college, when there was a some promotion or information given about college class rings, I promptly tossed them. I knew my high school ring was in a drawer; I suspected my college ring would do the same. 

When the idea of rings came up with N, I explained to her my thoughts on rings. We opted to go on a school-related trip with her Spanish teacher in 2022. 

Admittedly, this trip costs considerably more than either $419 or $1,000, but that experience is something she will carry with her for the rest of her life. She will gain a much greater perspective on herself and what the world is and does. 

Of course, part of this decision was easy because there will be no junior ring ceremony due to the pandemic. N isn't in school every day listening to her peers discuss junior rings ad nauseam. 

But it makes me wonder, as I like to do, who decided that junior rings are a thing? And that junior ring ceremonies are a thing? 

I remember virtually nothing of my ring ceremony from high school. I can say with fairly good certainty that it made zero impact on my life. 

[And my senior prom? What I remember is that the entire time I wished that I hadn't brought my long-time boyfriend because I was well on my way to dumping him. I would have had much more fun had I gone stag and just yucked it up with my girlfriends.] 

I can't help but wonder if junior ring stuff isn't all a marketing ploy that the masses have fallen into because people love an excuse to spend money and don't want to be "that" parent (which I totally don't mind being) and they want to make their own children experience everything they did (a bit of reliving their own lives through their children)?

Of course, I'm not a huge traditions person, mostly because I know that traditions change, whether we want them to or not. And forcing a tradition when it is long past its life, is painful and embarrassing and unpleasant.