Isolation | Part 2 of ?
This morning I got woken up by a small person at 6:20am. I realized that on any other Thursday morning I’d be up, dressed, yelling at kids, making my lunch, pouring coffee, you know basically doing normal morning things. Instead, I rolled over and attempted to go back to sleep.
We’ve been in quarantine in our homes for the last 18 days. The first 14 were for everyone else’s sake. Since we went to Disney World on March 15th (the last day it was opened) it seemed our exposure risk was very high and as a result we stayed safely tucked away from all family. Now, 18 days later, healthy by the grace of God, we are tucked away because our city and finally our state have ordered us to do so. That’s fine. Where would we go right now anyway? The outside world seems pretty scary, invisible enemy everywhere.
The thing is, I’m grateful for so many things right now not just our health. I’m grateful that I could roll over and get more sleep this morning instead of getting up when it was still dark (raise your hand if you’re like me and not sleeping well.) I’m grateful that I’m not putting 2000 miles a month on my car. I’m grateful that hubby isn’t driving 183 miles A DAY for work. I’m grateful that we don’t have to eat dinner at 7:30 every night- the normal time we eat since Andrew’s swim practice goes until 7. I’m grateful that I can sit and drink my coffee slowly in the morning, while sitting at my breakfast table. For that matter, it’s nice to eat meals at my table and not at my desk or in the car. There are some definite perks to life right now and it would be wrong not to acknowledge that. I feel like everything went from 100 miles an hour to, like, maybe 5. I don’t feel a constant sense of being rushed. That’s a good thing.
Sadly, all that has come at a price and that’s the price we stay for being safe right now. I don’t love eating meals at a work desk but I do love being able to go to work. I enjoy being able to get more sleep but not for this reason, that’s for sure. I love being able to eat dinner earlier but I hate that Andrew isn’t swimming, and that there’s no meet this weekend where I can cheer him on. I hate that my kids miss their friends and that I miss mine.
So I come to the idea of BALANCE. I see the need to slow down but that means sacrificing something and right now I’m still not seeing exactly WHAT that should be. There is nothing right now that I wouldn’t trade to have our normal life back. Not even the extra sleep.
Right now Allison is doing a virtual dance class while on FaceTime with her friends. They are having a hard time syncing up the video with each other but they are figuring it out just like, when all this is over, we will have to resync our lives, putting things back into the little time slots we carved out for them with a new found appreciation for why we are doing them in the first place.