Better

Today I had a FaceTime session with my counselor, whom I hadn't seen in three weeks. Two weeks ago she was on vacation, and last week I was worried about being around other people when I had mild respiratory symptoms, and -- what do you know? -- three weeks is a leetle too long for me to go between counseling sessions in a global pandemic with accompanying economic collapse. I guess I'll know for next time. (Hahahaaaa, what a hilarious joke that is.)

A month ago I had been thinking that it might be about time to wind our sessions down. I sought her out last summer with three specific issues on my mind, and I had been feeling better about all of them. GOSH, the world seemed different a month ago. Thirty days ago I was complaining about other parents at school drop-off, and now I'm like, "Come baaaaack, other parents at school drop-off! Be as weird and overprotective as you wish!" (Only of course I do not actually want them to come back, not until their presence is less likely to spread a deadly disease.)

My husband saw what was coming down the pike more clearly than most of us did. It still sounded like an improbable dystopian future when he first said that I should be prepared to teach online and work from home. It seemed preposterous at the beginning of this month when he suggested that the schools would be shuttered by its end, but he said we should be prepared for that as well. It seemed bizarrely cautious and entirely out of character when he said at the end of February that he didn't think it was a good idea for me to go to NYC and see Alex. And maybe it is bizarre that going to NYC was genuinely a bad idea, but my husband was not the source of the strangeness. I guess a math degree will teach a person to take exponential growth seriously.

We are settling in, I guess, the six of us rotating in and out of the various spaces in our snug house. People who need Zoom are taking refuge in the office; people who are recording audio lectures (that's me) are sharing a chilly basement room with the teenaged boys who have set up a makeshift weight bench down there next to the desk. We're muddling through, I guess. I guess that's all we can do.