I Used to Have a Life
I remember. I used to leave the house, go to work, go shopping, go to exercise class, go to a friend’s house and visit. I remember going into a store just to look around. I remember going to festivals and fairs and holiday light sight seeing. Around this time of year, it was finals and grading final essays, and running grades and turning them in on the computer. I remember going from stressed to bored in 15 minutes. I remember rushed Christmas shopping and hurrying to get everything wrapped before I had to ship it out, so it would get to my kids and their families in time. So much rush. So much action, and I remember complaining, not seriously, about all I still had to do. I remember.
And now there is now. I get four weeks to a gallon of gas. I haven’t been out of my own yard in weeks. I wasn’t working anyway; I hadn’t been able to find any adjunct teaching work since I moved down here nearly two years ago, so life had slowed way down already. And then, just a week after Dave and I went to Winchester, Virginia, to get married, stopping at my daughter’s house on the way there and back, everything stopped. Places we would have gone, the fairs and festivals, the museums, all cancelled and closed. We went for the 4th of July picnic at my son and daughter-in-law’s house, but there were no fireworks displays, no parades. Labor Day came: ditto. We did take our lives in our hands and joined my daughter and her family for a few days at the beach, and what a joy that was. But then, things got even worse. The covid numbers began to go up again, this time everywhere, not just some hot spots away from here. Other states had big red dots around the big cities. Our state looked like it had the measles, just a bunch of red spots all over the whole state. Nowhere looked safe.
It’s amazing how little you can get done when you have all the time in the world to do it. When I was busy, I had to schedule my time to make room for everything. Now, why do today what I can put off until tomorrow? It will still be there. Nothing’s going anywhere.
I’ve never been good at entertaining myself. Oh, I was when I was little, when I was an only child for over four years. My mother wasn’t a woman who sat and enjoyed playing with children (as I wouldn’t be years later when I had my own.) My sister could come up with all sorts of things to do with her little ones — she made homemade play-doh and organized hide and seek games and sat and colored with her kids. I read my kids stories and then shooed them off to play on their own while I cleaned or talked on the phone with an adult for relief. Those years I spent at home with little kids were the most boring years of my life. I loved my kids — don’t get me wrong — but staying home made me feel useless and worthless and bored out of my skull. When I went back to college when my younger child was two, I felt alive again. I only took two courses a semester, but my brain was alive again. I finished my masters degree at the same time he left for first grade, so I started working and never stopped for 34 years. There was a pattern to my life, a purpose. I felt important. I enjoyed my five week intersession from mid-December until the end of January, and I enjoyed having summers off, but I always looked forward to going back to work, to start feeling alive and having purpose again.
Do I have Christmas presents to wrap? Yes. Do I seem to feel any urgency to wrap them? No. They will be there tomorrow. I remember students telling me they worked best under pressure, and I told them no, they just worked under pressure. But there’s no pressure here. I guess I’m not good at self-propelling.
I’m hoping I’ll snap back when this is over. I’ll suddenly have energy again and will be back to the old me. I’m hoping this will teach me not to take things for granted, that once the Black Death is not outside my door, I’ll bounce out and run errands just to run errands and enjoy freedom. But my birthday is Sunday, and I’ll be 69. My hope is I’ll still be strong enough to bounce, that a year of inactivity will not make me so weak and lazy that I’m incapable of enjoying life again. A year of home confinement won’t leave a lasting scar.
I hope we all can begin to love life again and unite in our freedom from fear and lose the anger that seems to have come with it. It’s early for a new year’s wish, but after this year, we all deserve the wish that next year will be better, maybe better than it’s been in a long time. Maybe I still have hope after all.
