I can't do this anymore.

 I'm holding by the very thinnest of threads, trying to scream, my voice silent or it seems to be because no one seems to hear me. Can anyone hear me? I say I'm not doing well. I haven't been able to work for most of this month. I'm lonely, SO damn lonely for human contact, for someone, SOMEONE to give a damn and spend some time with me, actually ask me how I am doing and be there for ME without me having to give SO MUCH in return. I try and I try and I try to give people what they want but I never get back nearly what I give and it hurts, it HURTS. I just want someone to care what actually happens to me. If I were to disappear, would anyone even notice? Would anyone even care? I don't know anymore. I'm tired of fighting. I'm tired of being strong. I'm ALWAYS having to be strong. I'm sick to death of it. I don't want to be strong and have to keep going on in the face of all this shit. Because no one notices when you're strong, no one is there for you when you're strong. They just ignore you. I'm so tired of doing this all alone. It wasn't supposed to be this way. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Have I not gone through enough in my life? Do I not deserve some fucking happiness? I'm just so so damn tired of it all.

Where were you on September 11, 2001?

It's one of those pivotal events in world history. That moment where, again, the world is turned upside down. Assumptions you had of your world are shaken and you don't quite know what to do. That was September 11th for me. And to this day, I still think it had a major effect on my parents and led to the events that occurred less than 2 years later.

I do remember that day though. I was a resident assistant at the time at the local Catholic university. I had been on rounds the night before and the last set of rounds are at midnight so by the time I got to bed it was pretty late. I was running a little late turning in my pager and the on-call binder so I was rushing. I had an appointment later that morning and needed to get ready. I remember hearing the radio when I came in and putting away the pager and binder. I'm just about to leave when the head of residence life stopped me. He asked if I heard that two planes had been hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center. Now, color me a tad clueless because I didn't know exactly what buildings those were but I knew it was a huge deal and the first thought that crossed my head was to call my mom.

I rushed back to my room which was on the fifth floor of the adjoining building. I tried to call my mom (back then, it was still good old landline telephones on the wall with cords) but didn't reach her. I called John, told him to turn on the TV. I called my mom again. This time she answered. I told her what happened and her response was, "What?" in her typical fashion. She did eventually either get the TV on or the radio going and got the news. I still had my appointment so I got ready as did she since she was taking me to my appointment. She picked me up a short time later and we sit in the car and listen to the news on the way to my appointment.

Later, we're back on campus and she's having lunch with me. The large TV in the student union is playing scenes of the towers' collapse over and over. Students are quiet, not boisterously loud as they usually are. It was surreal and I remember sitting with my mom eating lunch and her commenting that it reminded her of when John F. Kennedy was killed. She was a senior in high school at the time.

Another thing I remember that day is how blue and clear the sky was. It was a beautiful September day and any days like that now reminds me of the tragedy. It's hard to believe that it's been 19 years now. My oldest daughter obviously was not yet around, would be another 4 years before she would be born. And they've learned about it, heard about it of course but it's a story to them. In fact, we were watching an episode of Criminal Minds that was on something regarding biological chemical warfare and anthrax was mentioned. I happened to say I remember when all of that went down in 2001. And Natalie looks at me and was just astounded. She thought it was just something made up on a show. No, it was very much real but for these kids, it's just a part of history.

And now, they're living in their own history in the making with Covid-19. All of these stories, all of these things that happen in our lifetimes that become part of the history of the world, but really when it comes down to it, outside of those events, life moves on, people move on, and the world continues.

A World Turned Upside Down

Right now, it's about the best way to describe it. The girls are back in school...virtually. After the um disaster of the last quarter of the 2019-2020 school year, the districts at least prepared for this coming year to be pretty much anything. And right now, that's virtual. Last Tuesday was the "official" first day of school but it was a first day of school like no other. I drove Natalie to her high school to pick up her supplies and her violin for orchestra. You drove into the parking lot at your assigned time, the person noted the name we had on the sheet in the windshield, and called into a walkie talkie to let them know who was there for their supplies. It felt surreal. These last six months have felt surreal and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Isabelle at least was able to go into the building and see her teacher. First, we had to have our masks and we had to fill out a survey saying we did not currently have any symptoms of Covid-19. At the door, they took our temperature and then we were able to go in. Her teacher had on a mask and had went over all the stuff with Isabelle on her iPad so she would be ready for class the following Tuesday since it was going to take awhile for everyone to get their supplies. He helped her collect all of her supplies and that was it, more or less. No putting supplies in their desks or lockers. No hugs. No seeing other classmates. Again, very surreal. So that was the first day of school for both of them.

Natalie had gotten her laptop about two weeks before but I hadn't had a chance to do anything with it and wouldn't you know, when I do, it's the night before she's supposed to log on and I run into technical issues. Go figure. But working 45 hours a week just did not give me much time to get things done. I decided then and there I needed a break. And that's what I have been doing. I have taken some time off of work to get a much needed mental health break and to be avail to deal with all the technical issues that have so far come up with Natalie's schooling. I imagine there will be issues tomorrow as well when both of them go online for classes. Hopefully, by the time I go back on Thursday, these hiccups will be few and far between. I have no idea otherwise how I'm going to make everything work.

It's been exhausting and frankly, I'm kind of tired of feeling like I live in a dystopian novel.

Is it so much to ask to have someone there for me?

 I'm tired of being alone. I'm tired of carrying the load by myself. For close to two years, I have been alone dealing with all the trials and tribulations of being a single mother with two girls. I've dealt with the illnesses, the parent teacher conferences, the various afterschool activities, the show choir competitions, the pains, the sorrows, the frustrations with school work, and now a fucking pandemic that never seems to end.

And I'm just tired of not having someone there for me to help me. I'm tired of not having a moment to myself to just cry and cry hard, cry until I'm empty inside and all the poison inside of me has been washed away. I'm tired of having to smile, to say I'm doing okay, call after call after fucking call. I have to be happy. I can't let anyone know how I really feel. And day in and day out it is like this. There's no time, no break for me. The only way at this point I'm going to get a break is a trip to the hospital.

And I'm screaming out loud and no one hears me. I am screaming in the dark and in the void and I may as well be in space. No one hears me. My pain is becoming all encompassing and I can't get anyone to see who can help. I need help where is everyone? We're in the middle of a pandemic. That's great. That doesn't change the fact that I need someone now. I need someone to take care of me. And there's no one there. I'm alone and I will always be alone.

Pandemic Thoughts Day 3

From April 15, 2020

How will the world change after all of this is over? Will there be more people working from home? Will schools do more online? Will people change their careers and how they view their lives? What will change for me? What would such a world be like?

Let’s say schools do more from home and people are home more. We stay home and we don’t go out as often but I don’t know this doesn’t seem right either. There are a lot of people who have no desire to work from home or remain at home. They want to go out and do things and be productive. The idea of just being idle at home with nothing to do doesn’t appeal to a lot of people but may it’s something that could be more and more necessary? Is this a one time thing? Will this be something that happens again and again? The last major pandemic was the Spanish flu of 1918. There hasn’t been anything this major in over 100 years. So would it be another 100 years before we face this kind of monster again? Or will there be other pandemics that come and threaten our very existence?

Humans do seem to struggle with doing what is right. So many people want to get out and go out and don’t want to remain at home. Some of it is understandably the need to be able to survive and work is the only means to do so. So how would that change? The idea of a universal basic income could come into play. So if people had the ability to get paid no matter if they worked or not, would that help with something like this? As jobs become more scarce due to automation and robotics (and wouldn’t something like this push the need for automation even more?), the need for a universal basic income would increase.

Surrogates hit on the idea of robots replacing humans out in the real world while humans stayed inside and controlled the humans from their safe environment. This was seen recently with a graduation in Japan where robots were used to collect the diploma and the students were present by means of a tablet used as the head of the robot and the student was present on the tablet via a meeting app of some sort. As robotics improves, something like what came about in surrogates could become more of a possibility and what’s not to like about that idea although, when you think about it, there are always those who wish to experience things for real and not virtually.

Going along these lines, the need for virtual stimulation may also increase. Broadway has been cut for the time being and many experiences of late have been done virtually. What better way than to have a virtual reality that would more closely match how it feels to go to those places. And eventually, from there we would get to holodecks. Though I think that the computer processing speed needed for something like that would be astronomical. But it would be a way for things to be experienced when it is not possible to experience those things in person.

So many problems need to be addressed that this pandemic has laid bare. The need for universal healthcare is huge. People are dying because they do not have the ability to get the healthcare they need when they need it. Insurance costs are high, and care is high and not everything is covered. Those who are the most vulnerable are the ones who do not have the insurance they need to get the care they need. And so many countries have found a way around this but the US has not and that needs to change.

I fear though that much will remain the same. It may take something even more dire to get through to people that the way things are is not the way things need to be. So many are more concerned with themselves, with the fact that THEY are locked up inside, that THEIR rights are being infringed on because they are not allowed to go where they want to go when they want to go. They don’t see that their actions have consequences or really care. I can’t say I really understand that. We are not merely individuals. We are a part of something larger, part of a larger human collective. We should work together to take care of each other and take care of our planet. Thinking only of ourselves is not going to help us in the long run. We are tied together and need to work together for the betterment of all. Sadly though, some people are just too selfish to understand this.

How can we get that to change, to get this idea that we are all part of one world, that we need to work together, how can we get that through to everyone? What does it take to do that? Apparently not a major pandemic because it is all too easy to see that the individual is still more important, that money is the be all and end all of everything. How do we leave such a system, a system where wealth is the ultimate goal for many people? How were they able to get people to no longer need money in Star Trek? That is never really talked about. People worked and still did things but were not paid. Obviously food was available to everyone. How do you even start to go about making that possible? Is it possible?

Can our world change from what we currently have to something that is better for all of us? Religion looks at this as being a form of heaven though for many the idea of heaven is to be ruled by a supreme being and only those willing to follow his every command would be allowed to live. That doesn’t quite strike me as a heaven I would want to be a part of. However, it does seem that people are not going to go into this willingly, there has to be some sort of government that leads us in that direction. But that is problematic as well. How then can we make our world better than it is?

Pandemic Thoughts Day 2

From April 14th...

So, today is day two, the challenge is to write something that is deliberately bad. Not sure what that means exactly. Are we writing a grammatically bad sentence? Are we to write something that just makes one cringe like the examples I saw today of writing men have done describing women that are not even remotely realistic? There’s a joke I’ve seen regarding how the year 2020 is a short story that’s been written by a fourth grader. My fourth grader took massive offense to that. But when you look at it, it does seem like this year has been more of a disaster movie than anything else. My sister keeps saying the world is going to end because we now have the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I don’t know about that but this has not been a good start to what was supposed to be a shiny brand new decade. I wonder if that’s what people in the 1930’s thought too.

Going back to bad writing. My ex-husband lives in South Korea and occasionally shares some of the cringeworthy bits of writing he’s seen on labels where they try to use English. On one hand, I feel I’m being mean to even make mention of it because I know that English is a difficult language. On the other hand, if you want to find bad writing, translations are definitely the place to find them. So, he bought a thing of grapes. The package is labeled “fresh raisins”. Uh...okay. Below that is the following: eating right through the full and healthy life for born in an attempt to protect the brand. Uh...say WHAT?! I don’t even know how to figure out what that is supposed to say. And that’s not the first time I’ve seen writing like that but it was definitely the most recent. I have no doubt that it has to do with the way Korean is written vs the way English is written as far as sentence structure and whatnot but still, I can’t even begin to make sense of that sentence. And this is a label on an item that you would buy in the store.

So, realizing now that we’ve all been schooling/working from home for four weeks now. It has definitely been a challenge and my youngest Isabelle seems to be feeling it the most. She doesn’t really have anyone to talk to or play online with when her sister is busy and I’m working so she’s having to spend a lot of time alone. Her dad being 6000 miles away doesn’t help. And with it looking more and more like school won’t resume this year, she got a little emotional. I can’t blame her. I would be too. Something like this is hard on a kid her age. They should be out and about, meeting up with their friends and playing outside at recess and they can’t. The weather is very slowly (I live in Wisconsin afterall), getting warmer and nicer and yet they can’t get out and really do anything. Parks are closed. They can’t meet with their friends. It’s looking more and more like this will continue on through the summer months. At the very least, you can’t plan anything because there’s no end date. Yes, the current stay at home mandate is set to expire next Friday but slowly, articles are coming out saying that this will likely not be the case so it’s just a matter of time before it gets extended.

Eventually though, this will all end at some point. It has to. Obviously, we can’t spend the rest of our lives in this limbo so there has to be an end to this. We just don’t know when that will be and we don’t know exactly how it will come about. I don’t think anyone really knows. The president sure doesn’t. He keeps saying we’ll be back in business by such a date and everyone then has to tell him that that is not likely. But what is needed to get us all back to normal is not a sure thing either. There are some ideas out there such as being able to test more people and having more supplies. The goal is to flatten the curve and keep hospitals from being overwhelmed but how can that be kept up for the long term? The virus has not gone away and is not likely to go away anytime in the near future. People will continue to be susceptible to getting this because no one has natural immunity to yet. And people who have gotten it even are not necessarily immune from getting it again. Letting everyone get it at once though is not an option either. Too many people will die if that happens.

So we wait and survive each and every day. I’m very thankful I’m still working and I have a job and money coming in. Not everyone is fortunate and I’m also very thankful that my job is not one where I”m having to interact with people in person. This virus cannot be transferred over the phone so I’m safe at home so long as I stay at home. That’s not always easy because there’s food that needs to be bought and I do have necessary appointments I need to keep but for the most part, I’m extremely fortunate in my situation. Not everyone is and those challenges are real. This is a very difficult time for a lot of people and not knowing when it is going to end doesn’t make that any easier.

Once all of this is over, I do wonder if we will all go back to the way things were or if things will be different and if so, will those differences be better or worse? The Black Death, if I recall, brought in the renaissance and ended the dark ages. So, what changes, if any, will we see once this is all over and done with? Perhaps that’s something to be explored... 

Pandemic Thoughts from April

Finally getting around to posting these? Anyway, this was actually written back in April when I was trying to do more writing. Four months later isn't too bad...

It’s been awhile since I’ve really done any writing. I always seem to have ideas swirling around in my head but getting it from there to the paper is not so easy. It is far too easy for me to decide to do something else and these days, it’s even easier. It’s hard to do much of anything when you are more or less confined to your house and all future plans are on hold if not canceled. It all just kind of hangs in the air, and you’re waiting because that’s all you can do is wait for life to return to normal again or at least some semblance of normal because really, after something like this, can the world ever really get back to normal?

You see all of these disaster movies where the world is affected by some big disaster or another. Maybe it’s a meteor. Maybe it’s a catastrophic global storm. Or maybe the world for some reason or another comes just to the brink of total annihilation. The end of the movie always ends with things having stopped and the pieces needing to be put back together but you don’t see how that happens. You suppose that it WILL happen because somehow it HAS to but you don’t see how that will be. You don’t see how people will pick up the pieces of their lives again and go back to living. 

We obsess over the disaster, the drama of the disaster itself. We like to watch things be destroyed or fall apart. We want to root for the characters who make it against all odds. But in reality, when it’s all over and done with, we don’t really want to watch how people will pick up the pieces of their lives and put them back together. We don’t want to see that because that’s not as much fun. It’s not easy, it doesn’t have a neat little ending. Picking up the pieces is messy and drawn out and complicated. People don’t like that as much. People want their happy endings and will get that even if it means that the happen ending doesn’t really show what happens AFTER. And the AFTER part is important too. But we never get to see that.

Independence Day actually showed a little bit of this but it sort of glossed over a lot of it too. You see Bill Pullman’s character still suffering from flashbacks and having some sort of physical issue and maybe mental issues as well but it’s not really explained what happened. Other characters have issues as well but you don’t see the process from the event to the now as to how they got there. You’re just briefly introduced and the story goes on.

Then you have dystopian movies/novels. Those are even more interesting in that they are the result of a disaster and it creates this world that is totally foreign to our own but you’re not shown how it gets there, it is just suddenly there. Sometimes, you may get a brief glimpse, usually in a voice over or news report type things that goes into a little bit of how something came to be but again, not enough to really give you an idea.

I was thinking of the movie Surrogates the other day. And I realize that with the pandemic we are currently experiencing that something like that can easily come as a result of that. I mean, in Japan, you have a graduation where robots are used in the place of students and the “heads” of the robots are tablets with the students coming in from Zoom or something like that. So you have these robot bodies that can accept their diploma and everything and then the students themselves are present through remote video conferencing. So, this is in a sense a very basic form of what surrogates ultimately becomes. In the movie, you have these robot people controlled by a person at home, a person who never leaves their house except in this robotic body. Right now, being out in person is not safe. You can become ill, very ill and even die from this virus that has no vaccine and no cure. So, the idea of a surrogate going out for you, working for you, shopping for you, etc, and if everyone had one then you wouldn’t need to worry about people going out, everyone would be in their homes, safe. Seems crazy in theory but if the right people put it into play, not so farfetched of an idea when you think about it. It’s whether people could handle being inside all day operating a robot of themselves. I think some can but others might have a harder time with that.

Until something like that comes to fruition or a vaccine comes out or we all just get totally sick to death of staying inside that we no longer care if we get it or not, we’re kind of stuck. And that has been a challenge. Even trying to stay home for two weeks to limit the amount of time I’m going out is hard but I know I have enough food here at home and I know that at the moment I don’t need to go out before next Wednesday. It’s hard though, day in and day out not having anywhere to go or really anything to do. It really does show that there is something to day to day living just having something to look forward to each day. When you can’t really plan ahead, it just makes life that much more challenging to get through. You really do have to take it day by day or you just go insane.

So yeah, that’s where we are all at right now, this 13th day of April in the year 2020. I turn 40 in just under 26 weeks and I really did not remotely anticipate my 40th year of life going like this. This is something we are most definitely not going to forget anytime soon, something that will be remembered and told by my children to their grandchildren and their great grandchildren. We just have to survive this whole thing first.

There are days it is really hard to do this all alone.

 John's contract was supposed to end August 20th. Shortly after that, he was supposed to be coming home. He extended his contract another six months. It's just until the director finds a replacement, he tells me. He's having a harder time right now due to the pandemic. And while I don't doubt that in the least, I also know that the director is not going to be motivated to find someone any sooner than he has to. Why when he has someone locked down already for six months?

John signed the first contract literally either the day of or the day after he was served divorce papers for the second time. So when we sat down with Isabelle to tell her, he gave her a double whammy. Daddy was going to Korea and also was no longer going to be married to Mommy. He left for Chicago in a rental on August 27, 2018 and has not been back since. The plan was that the girls spend some time over in Korea with him. But he was going to have to foot the expenses for everything. Somehow the girls were going to have to get over there as neither of them were over 18. It never happened. Finances and me not being able to take the time off needed to do it got in the way last summer and this year, it's been COVID-19. So for close to two years now I have been a single parent, parenting these two girls with no help because their dad is more than 6000 miles away.

Don't get me wrong, my girls are both troopers and have helped out a lot in the past two years and both have really taken on responsibilities and I can't complain too much on that end. But when one of them is still in elementary school, still prone to catching those illnesses, one thing that happens is that she gets sick and I have to stay home from work. There's no one to help with that, no one to shoulder that responsibility. There are times the emotions get over-powering as they tend to do in pre-teen and teenage girls. And that too has been mine to deal with alone. There's no one else to take on some of that for me. So there have been times when the responsibilities get a little overwhelming, when the day to day gets to be a little too much and there's no one else there to take any of that on. Because 6000 miles is pretty damn far away.

I was diagnosed with diabetes back in February. There's a family history of it so the doctors have been watching me for over 20 years, since my older brother was diagnosed at 25 (he gets it from both his parents while I just get it from our mom). I was 9 when my mother was diagnosed. Ten months after her diagnosis, she was hospitalized for the first time with pancreatitis. That worried me because who will take the girls if I get sick? And then COVID-19 hit the US and everything shut down and we all stayed home, away from everyone and it all got so much harder.

June is hard enough for me and this year was no exception. So I was vulnerable and needing a distraction and that distraction came in the most unexpected way. I wasn't looking for a relationship, was not even pursuing one because I felt I wasn't ready. Still so much I needed to figure out. And while I was lonely, I had my freedom. And having been in a relationship for almost my entire adult life at this point, and having fought so hard and paid so much for that freedom, I wasn't looking to give that up so quickly.

But I had forgotten how good it felt to be wanted, to be desired, to be touched by as simple a touch as a hand on my leg and I got swept up in that. And it was a distraction from the usual pain the end of June brings.

I knew it wasn't love, wasn't even a relationship, was very careful to keep that in my mind, very careful in how and who I told about it. Because at any moment it could pop like a bubble. And it did. And all it really did was leave me feeling empty and even more alone... 

With school starting up again in the middle of a pandemic, there was so much to consider, so much to figure out, so much to decide and again, I was alone in dealing with all of it. I had to make that decision alone. I had to decide what to do knowing that there were problems and risks with either option because while there was a third option, currently working 45 hours a week was not going to allow homeschooling to be much of an option not when school was starting soon. But that was what John was pushing. That was what he wanted me to do because public schools teach kids things they shouldn't be learning, they are making this whole pandemic thing political and not allowing things to be normal like they were in 2019 and as long as things were not normal, they shouldn't be in school. And again because he doesn't seem to get it: I HAVE TO MAKE THIS CHOICE KNOWING I AM THE ONLY ONE HERE RIGHT NOW TO DO THIS! And this doesn't seem to sink in with him.

And so I have done what has become necessary to do because one, he is not here and two he has no intention of coming back before March and I have made this entirely too easy for him to do this because I have not kept him from contacting the girls. I have not kept him from being a part of their lives. Technology makes that easy but he's still 6000 miles away and not here to help me but he will definitely try to dictate, try to tell me what I'm doing wrong, how I should be taking care of his children because obviously, I don't do things the way he would because I'm not following his beliefs. And all I can say if it's that much of an issue, he needs to come back. So I blocked him on Facebook. Because he only uses messenger though he does text Natalie and he is able to send me emails. I don't need it anymore. I don't need the judgments, the constant questions, the condemnation of everything I do. I was done. I am done. But I sure don't feel any less alone.