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March 17, 2020, around 8:00 am, was the dreaded day we were told that we would be working from home starting on March 20, 2020. We were asked to pack it up and head home due to a pandemic. At first, it was like ok guys see you in a couple of weeks or less and we all hugged and parted our ways. Little did we know that was the last time we were going to be able to hug anyone, for a while.
My kids, one a fifth-grader and the other a senior in high school were told they were going to begin learning online on March 23. Now I felt bad for both my kids, of course, and each had different things they dealt with when it all happened. The Senior pretty much lost everything that was coming to them as a senior, you know prom, granite, and well graduation for that matter. My fifth-grader had a tough time adjusting to learning from home and the last couple of months almost blew their academics, simply because they were not doing their work. The funny thing is that the parents were told, due to the pandemic and situation of distance learning no student was going to be failed – no matter what. That could have easily been why my fifth grader sort of gave up, but I wasn’t having any of that and we sat together and worked through a lot of overdue assignments, it was a mad scramble, to say the least.
Anyhow, as for me the first couple of months were ok, I had no issues. Then I started to feel like the walls in my home office were coming in, yeah I know that sounds like a movie, but it’s the truth I felt isolated, like time had no essence, one moment it was 7 am and the next it was lunch. The days started to blend together. There were days that I just sat in front of my computer and before you know it, it was time to log off. I mean what happened to lunch, my breaks, the day simply flew by. I think when you are in an office, you tend to get up and walk a little, you know chat with a coworker, get some water or in some cases, it was coffee, but you get what I mean. I felt alone, like I was just paddling away in the middle of sea and was headed nowhere. Of course, the days led to weeks, then months, and at some point it even felt like years. In the pandemic I saw my daughter isolate herself, the few friends she had was getting hard to keep in touch with. My son went off to college and was stuck in his dorm. Ever so often he’d complain about the teachers not being available, or just giving out busywork, it seems drastically the same for my daughter. Not saying teachers are bad, ok, just saying that his pandemic took a toll on everyone. Then you started to hear about business, such as restaurants starting to close, and of course other business as well. Then there was the toilet paper and water hoarding, it is funny but man I could just keep on the writing of all the craziness. Of course, then all the protests, and what happened at the Capital. This past year was just incredible, life changing, and just left me with no words.
All through this, we are now in 2021, and we are almost in May. I started to not mind working from home, but I still do miss the interaction with the people, the smiles, the arguments, the useless meetings that were only to schedule another meetings, yah those, I miss that. As the year keeps rolling by, I realize I made it this far. Man, I even started to exercise seriously. I started the T25 Focus thingy, and I am three weeks in. The first day I could barely breathe, but now into the third week, I am making it through most of the routine a little better, not nailing it yet, but better. I am hoping before my fiftieth birthday I will lose some weight. You know now that I think about it, one good thing did come out of this all, I did complete my degree in business. Hold on, I almost forgot, my son, tore his ACL and required surgery back at the end of 2019. Then came more bad news at the end of that same year, my father had cancer. Wow, ok now that I think about it, I guess I made it through all that, the pandemic, and I am still here. Of course there is a whole lot of in between stuff that happened. To think that 2020 was said to be the perfect vision of a year, well we know how that went. Anyways I am simply ranting, I have so much more to say, but for now, I will leave you with this thought. We all went through this pandemic and our own struggles, but if you are reading this, you are alive, healthy, and able to look back at the year behind and say – “I made it this far, I am ready for whatever is next!”. Thank you for reading and please have a wonderful last day of April.