Pretty much everyone I talked to this week agreed, This week was terrible.
And it wasn’t terrible in any of the worst possible ways. I’m aware and grateful for that. It was just one of those weeks where my work hours were super long, and my kids were very understanding about how long my hours were, which made me feel guilty for my awful work/life balance. We all stood around for 45 minutes past when I was supposed to take them to their father’s and their grandmother because I was just waiting, waiting, waiting for replies to half a dozen emails and messages.
And there were the extra stresses of the school district changing from 100% in person to a hybrid 2-day a week option, and all the questions that I didn’t have answers for. And knowing that when school let out in May, we all hoped, were fairly confident, that by the fall, things would be back to normal. Instead, I’m excited but trepidatious for those two days a week. My children have questions I can’t answer, because there are no answers. What happens if… or if… and I don’t know. I hate not knowing for them, and I hate not knowing for me. The endless uncertainty. But I also can’t wait to ask, How was your day?, and truly not know until that moment.
All of this is to say, it’s Friday night. We made it. And while I told my boss, who was very nicely and genuinely concerned about my week as well, even though hers was also equally dismal, that I would take a long walk and unwind, instead I poured a glass of wine and made dinner, and now I’m not out taking advantage of the cooling evening air, but instead I turned on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives while somehow my body, which has been mostly in front of a computer all week, aches in ways that would imply I’ve taken up marathon training. The marathon, I guess, is just life.
We’re all just so tired. Tired of not knowing. The uncertainty of when we’ll make plans again and feel even a small degree of confidence about them. Will we ever not purchase traveler’s insurance again? I literally never have. But now… it seems crazy not to.
We’re tired of being in the same walls with the same people, even though the walls are our homes and the people are our favorite people. We want to miss our children and our partners. We want to see the people we do miss.
And through it all, through this longest of terribly long weeks, my people were my people. My best friends were a text away. We are intimately connected to what we’re each doing, even though it’s been months since we’ve seen each other. We are full of plans, even though plans are so tenuous in the present. We are taking a girls vacation. I am hugging my parents. I am having a night out at my favorite places, and last call will again be later than I can stay awake and I’m taking a Lyft home and I’m posting photos of me next to complete strangers whose health history I neither know nor worry about.
Tomorrow morning, I am sleeping as late as possible. I am having a video call with my soul sisters, and I am going to the mountains where last call is basically as soon as the sun goes down and the day’s fresh air is as good as an Ambien and we just stumble to bed as Vintage SNL barely makes it through 2012’s Weekend Update.
I am so truly bone tired in this moment. This week was a marathon in all the ways that boring, every day, routine pandemic life can be overly exhausting, when work-home balance is laughable, because there are no boundaries to either. Just a little farther, I tell myself. Just a little farther. It’s like the end of a grueling workout. Just 10 more minutes. That’s just 5 minutes twice. That’s just counting to 100 three times. This is nothing. This is fine.
Just a little farther, and even in the Upside Down, tomorrow is the weekend.
