Can’t survive till Spring

I knew this lockdown was coming since at least the start of December. I knew schools would close again. I don’t know why it has hit me so hard this time but it really, really has. Nina being home all the time is driving me up the fucking wall. Whatever the government is promising about February half-term is batshit crazy, especially for secondary school students, and home-schooling is here until at least Easter. I am deemed a critical worker this time and she can go to school to do her remote learning under supervision from an education assistant, so I’ve booked her in for 3 days a week from tomorrow. But 1) that doesn’t feel enough given this is the worst time of year work-wise for me and I’ll be working weekends as well for the next month or so, and 2) apparently the environment there is really not conducive to learning and she’d be in a room with other Y9 students doing different ‘live’ lessons so it will be hard to participate as they’ll all be disturbing each other. She needs my help to organise her learning (we’re waiting on an ADD assessment – a topic for another post, sometime, maybe, it’s too overwhelming right now) but I don’t have capacity. It’s a shit show. I was already really worried about her future, GCSEs, etc. before this latest school closure because of the ADD, but this just makes it 100 times more overwhelming. She is going to see how the learning is in school but I suspect she’ll end up home anyway after next week.

Add to this that work is mad but I can’t focus or sleep enough to settle things, the world is continuing to free fall through disaster, I can’t see my friends, and the fact that K didn’t bother to read or reply to a new year text I sent on Monday (ffs!), and things feel pretty dire.

This afternoon I’m going for acupuncture with R and having my first hug since January last year (yes, I hug Nina all the time, but that is not ‘having a hug’, it is not reciprocal, it is all giving and no soothing) so basically I’m paying for a hug and someone to listen because I can’t do this anymore. The next few months feel totally unmanageable and I don’t know how to restabilise when work is so intense and Nina is here all the time

I also think I need to arrange 6 online sessions with K to end our work. This feels a devastating prospect in some ways, but I think it might be best. When there is talk of needing Covid restrictions in place next winter, and possibly the one after that as well, I strongly suspect she will keep working online only indefinitely. I suspect she partly didn’t reply to my message on Monday because I asked if we could still go back later this year and she is aware that I probably won’t be able to. Maybe I’m wrong and I’m just trying to protect myself by creating certainty where there is none, and preparing for the worst in a defensive way, but honestly – she has enough clients willing to work online and probably always will now. She doesn’t need to see me. We would both be sad but I can’t help thinking I should draw a line. Our work feels so unfinished, so many loose threads and open boxes, and maybe it would feel better to pack it all up together, even online, and for me to let go and move on.

I won’t act on this desire for closure yet, but things feel so bleak right now with this fucking virus, and until humans change their destructive, planet-destroying ways I think it will just keep evolving and demanding that we develop different ways to beat it that will take time each time, and so I can kind of see it coming as a necessity. Maybe I need to continue to find ways of supporting myself that are unaffected by the virus and people that are willing and able to work in-person despite its presence,because it is too unsettling waiting. I really want K’s support around Nina’s ADD, and this is something that will be valuable forever really, or at least until she leaves home, but at the same time remote work causes me so much pain that it would come at too high a price. And sometimes I think I would be better cutting ties with all this uncertainty and focusing more on the strength I have inside myself and in the people who aren’t wanting to keep me at arm’s length for any longer than they need to at this time.