Lockdown Thoughts, May 2020

March 16th, 2020 - The first day of the best season of my life. The last 8 or so weeks have been so blissfully amazing & the timing could not be more perfect.

Becoming a mother has highlighted what's truly important in my life. Since Lu was born (since I returned to work, anyway), I've felt this depressing nagging feeling that I wasn't living the life I wanted. It's so fucked up, when the lines between "work to live" and "live to work" are blurred. I felt cheated when finally, I had something great to put my time into -- my daughter & our family's story that we write everyday -- but as a responsible bill-paying adult, my time had to be spent mostly on paying the bills. Working 40 hours week at a job that doesn't take 40 hours a week to complete. Time spent sitting on a computer, trying to look busy in order to keep my job. Time that I could have been at home, raising my daughter. I felt deep sadness week after week. The hours and the days and the weeks blend together, until you don't know what you're doing anymore. You don't know what good you're out there doing for 40 hours a week. All you get is the weekend to catch up on that very thing that you work so fucking hard for. You work 40 hours a week..... just to come home & wash dishes on the weekend, when you should be playing and laughing and enjoying life? What kind of life is that?

So for a few months, we tossed & turned over many ideas as we tried to assemble a plan to get our life back together. A plan to earn ourselves more time at home. A plan to smile and laugh, and to not let the stress of the companies we worked for keep us from smiling. What about a family farm? Ben & I went down this path for a while. We'll be hemp farmers, we said. Ben will quit his job and will get back to himself -- the person he was before corporate America turned him into mush. We'll have a calling, something to work for, something worth doing, something that brings more than just a paycheck. We'll trade our money for happiness. We've had years of making good income, more than most people we know our age, and sure, that money has purchased plenty of things that have made us happy, or so we thought. In hindsight, those fun on-the-whim purchases had a way of covering up the ugly part of our lifestyle: all those hours & all that energy put into our full-time jobs. Shit, might as well put that money to good use, we said. So we went and took out a few loans from the dealership. Those 40 hour a week jobs paid for an entire brand new car, which I drive everyday. When we drove it for the first time, it had zero miles on the odometer, and over $20,000 in debt. Now, it has many more miles, but no debt. Yes, that's a beautiful thing. Working those 40 hour a week jobs is helping us pay off our mortgage to our dream home, and yeah, that's pretty cool too. Don't get me wrong. I'm thankful and proud of all of the progress we've made. Yet somehow, I realized it wasn't enough. And it still isn't enough, especially now after what I've lived through the past two months. When our lives are over, we won't sit back on our deathbeds & bask in the glory of paying off debts early. No - life is so much more.

8 weeks ago, I received what I'd been asking for, and it came packaged in a pandemic that is making hundreds of thousands of people sick in our world right now. At first, the gift was just a week of free time. Stay at home this week, my employer said, and just work from home until we get a plan together. One week turned into two, then two to eight, and now I wait desperately hoping for another week, and another. I'm hooked to this lifestyle and I don't know how to return to life's old version of "normal". It started with working from home and keeping Tallulah home with me; juggling the two along with housework and meal prep. At first, it was a little overwhelming getting my old technology up-to-date enough to do my work from my laptop at home. But given the opportunity to either make it happen from home or come into the office, I opted to make the most of my time with Tallulah. Sure, it was an adjustment, but once we adjusted, I never wanted to look back.

Here's the thing: My job doesn't take 40 hours a week to complete. In fact, I completed my job in half the time at home with triple the amount of distractions & technical difficulties. Why does my company force me to drive to work, pay a daycare to watch my kid (which comes with almost constant illness being spread through our family as she brings home new sickness from daycare), stay for 40 hours a week even though I'm basically wasting their time AND mine, all the while wasting electricity, wasting gas, etc..... the list goes on & on. I have only one life. Why is it requisite that I devote 1/2 of my waking hours each week to being a warm body in an office? This is bullshit. This way of life is bullshit, and everybody knows it now.

I've proven that I can be a wife, a mother, a cook, a maid, a daughter, a sister, and an employee all at once. Yes, there is some freaky dimension out there where it doesn't have to be all or nothing -- and I'm living in it right now. My life couldn't be more perfect, and I don't mean that to gloat -- I just want to remember how fucking wonderful it is. I don't want the darkness to consume me when the world gets back to "normal". I don't want that to outweigh all the mornings holding Tallulah on the couch, both of us with our morning beverages - milk for her, coffee for me. I don't want my sourness to wash away the happiness felt wondering around my yard with my daughter walking at my side, with no time constraints, nothing to be done, nowhere to rush to. The time spent re-organizing my house, getting rid of all of the things that have followed us around from our darker times; getting rid of the things that no longer serve their purpose. The mornings drinking coffee from my bed, watching her on her monitor, waiting for her to wake up so we could get our day started together. All of the meals (3 cooked almost every single day) that I made from scratch, with ingredients found at our local market, grown close to home. The sink that doesn't overflow, but is in near constant use as I actually have time to wash dishes as I use them. The garden whose tomatoes are plump from adequate waterings (I have time to water the garden now!). The time I've spent making masks for our family back home, or anyone at all who wanted one. Wow, I've actually had time for that -- crafting! Before the pandemic, I didn't even have time for that on the weekend. But now, I have time for that on a regular Tuesday. What kind of beautifully weird dimension have I been living in? And why can't life be like this without a pandemic?

Why can't I keep on like this? It's working for me. Yet, I have bills to pay. We can't just live without an income. But our world is ready to return to normal, COVID-19 or not. My peers are miserable and bored at home, and come to the office for socialization, or to avoid adjusting to our new normal. Acquaintances are dying to go out & get their hair dyed, toes painted, eyebrows waxed. Me, I'm just dying to stay the same & happy to be living a less demanding lifestyle. When I'm at home, I don't have to dress up to feel mature or pretty. Who gives a flying fuck about my make-up? Surely not my daughter or my dog, in fact, not even my husband. So why do I return to this job that steals so much of my time, and demands so much of me and my appearance, just to pay my bills? What about me and my happiness? I woke up this morning to come to my office to work a "mandatory" day -- just to sit at my desk doing basically nothing all day. Am I weird for being at peak wellness at home? Is home not supposed to be a peaceful, joyous place? I can't imagine how bad some people must have it, to be so eager to return to what we once knew as regular life. The days of working overtime just to feel appreciated at work, and the days of giving more & more of our home life away to corporate America. How can I return to that without protest?

I don't know what the coming weeks hold, as my state is forcing everything back open, even though the virus is still just as damaging as it was eight weeks ago when I was told to work from home. It's my guess that this is my last week, and that life will return to its shitty normal next week. Next week, I'll sit at my computer for 40 hours, with the facade that I'm "working" -- in actuality, I'll be thinking of all the useful things I could be doing with my time at home. Or, maybe I'll think about all the memories I could be making with my daughter. I'll think of all the better ways I could serve in this life, and how this has to be the stupidest one. I'll feel like a hamster on the wheel, stuck, just as I have for months before pandemic hit. With a new job change in the works, I am optimistic that "work" will bring some kind of new value to my life other than monetary. But at the end of the day, the most valuable work I can do is the work I've been doing at home. There's nothing I can do for a company or entity that outshines my role at home. If you think I'm a good employee, you should see me at my real calling, being a wife & mother. Because I fucking rock at that. One of these days, I'll retire from the desk and return to what I was made for.