I feel like I didn't sleep at all last night. I just feel exhausted and I have no idea why. My brain was insisting it was Saturday when I woke up to take my morning medication. So, with out much in the way of qualms, I laid down on the couch and fell back asleep. I woke up again as the kids were demanding food telling me it was 8:30 am and Beloved was getting ready for work. I was confused and then remembered it was Friday.
My back is feeling somewhat better than it was yesterday, which is an improvement over how I was feeling on Sunday. I have a pretty arrangement of bruises in the middle of my back and scattered about the rest from all the random crap I landed on. I think I figured out what was in the middle of the rug where I hit. A plastic dinosaur. With spikes on it. I resisted the temptation to throw it the hell away after I found it. I handed it to the resident dinosaur fan (Snuggle Bug) and told him to put it away in a tone that came out a bit harsher than I intended. He was about to ask why and pile it up with the Transformers that he was playing with and changed his mind when he saw the look on my face. I apparently looked angry. I was, with the stupid dinosaur and the whole situation.
Yesterday was a day of near misses. I kept tripping over my own feet and barely missing falling over stuff. I could say that I kept having near misses with flashbacks too. I kept feeling myself beginning to fade out of the situation and then I would ground myself, partly by making a point to sit in a hard backed chair so that I would feel the sting of the bruise on my back. Not the healthiest method of grounding, I will confess, but it was effective. The bruising across my back was part of the reason why I kept almost having flashbacks because it's pretty much all in the region where mom broke a dozen wooden spoons about my head and shoulders when I was around Snuggle Bug's age. (Speaking of Snuggle Bug's age, when the hell did my baby turn into a pre-teen? Oh, yeah, he turned 11 last week. I'm doomed.)
I kept having near misses with panic attacks regarding the kids going back to school. I know it is the beginning of August and they're still getting everything sorted out. The pictures that came out of the school down in Georgia scared the shit out of me. The school's reaction to the students who shared the pictures made me angry. We're in the middle of a pandemic and these kids have no social distancing measures in place for hallway passing. The number wearing masks I could count on one hand out of at least a group of thirty or so in that picture. At least one school in Florida is shut down because of COVID19 after opening for less than a week.
We're in the process of trying to source masks for the kids to wear to school. We're discussing decontamination procedure for when they get home from school. We are quietly struggling with enormous anxiety over how the school is going to handle social distancing on the buses because they're not designed to keep kids 6 ft. apart. Rumor has it that they're going to have students sit together by family. That's ok if you have a small family like we do, but what about the families in the district that have single children or more than three kids. (One family my friend knows has seven kids. Gods only know how they're keeping up with all of them. That must take a ton of organization and coffee. I'm struggling with two.)
The school is giving us the option of staying home and doing distance learning for the semester but we've discussed it. I simply can't handle it. I'm getting frayed at the edges. It's effecting my mental health in bad ways. As much as we don't want to do it because of the fact that I am in the high risk pool if I catch this thing, we are sending the kids to school for face to face learning. There's the negative effect hitting me on the psychological front that is pushing us towards this decision. There's the fact that I simply can't provide the two very different levels and styles of educational support that both kids need, that they will get from face to face instruction. And there is the fact that the kids need the socialization with their peers for more than an hour. It's more than "they need to be with their friends" both kids have some socialization cues that they're missing and they can only learn them from experience. We've tried teaching them, but we can only do so much. They need to go back to school for their counseling to help them develop the skills to handle social situations and learn appropriate ways to socialize. They need to go back to school to get the occupational therapy that we can't provide.
There's a whole list of reasons why my boys need to go back to school and it's longer than my list of reasons why I need them to go back to school. I am afraid that this is going to get one of us sick. Not because we're not following safety precautions but because I have watched my neighbors become increasingly lax about following personal safety precautions. I'm thankful that Snuggle Bug seems to have grown out of his asthma problem. At the same time, it can put him in the same risk pool as me. It's scary. I'd make our own cloth masks but I can't get the tension fixed on my sewing machine and, honestly, I'm not as good at using a sewing machine as I am with hand sewing. And the prospect of hand sewing bias tape is hell.
I'm horrified by the way people are pushing so hard to put some of our most vulnerable population at risk for this disease based upon the false assumption that it doesn't effect kids as dangerously as it does adults. I've been following the data since April. It is as lethal to children as it is to adults. Especially if they have a preexisting condition. I get angry when someone says "It's not as bad as polio." The numbers say that it is exactly as bad as polio except that 1/3 number is dead instead of paralyzed. And I'm worried about flu season because there is a variant of the swine flu brewing in Asia that has the potential to be as bad as the Spanish Flu pandemic. Which is thus named because Spain was a neutral party during WWI and only place reporting on it, not because it originated there. It started out in an army base in Kansas. But no body mentions that bit of history.
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