Wrapping my mind around starting to blog again is a difficult thing. I feel like I have so much to say, and so much has been left unsaid, and we’re all in this strange world where nothing is right and I’m White so how much should I really be saying anyway?
But I find myself wanting to blog, so maybe the way to do that is to just go forward and leave the other stuff unaddressed.
We are approaching six months of quarantine on September 13th. In California it was March 13, a Friday, that the world shut down. After living a life that was totally NOT normal in every way, we are finally carving out what is going to be our new normal for a while. Brian is still working both his jobs from home. I have co-opted the back bedroom to teach English via an online charter school. Asher is back at his own school, on site, five days a week.
This new normal is not a bad one. I wake at the crack of dawn, make Asher’s lunch, attach a mask to his backpack, and start work before anyone else is up. I listen to Brian and Asher being silly downstairs. At some point, they leave for school. Asher takes a different toy each day, and daycare staff are sure to check its temperature when they take Asher’s before letting him inside – at Asher’s request.
In the afternoon, I pick Asher up. They hand him off to me, and then I have to convince him that he does, in fact, want to go home. “Can we stay?” he asks me most afternoons.
“No, Love, Dad is waiting for us at home.”
“I’m not a Love, I’m Amber the Brave Ambulance,” he says.
We ride home, snuggle on the couch while watching Robo Car Poli, and eventually I make dinner. Potty training goes well. Asher climbs on Brian while he’s working, or watches Buster The Bus on Brian’s second monitor while he’s checking spreadsheets. Or Asher makes a construction site in the Kinetic Sand, then asks me if he can mash the potatoes. He blissfully refuses to eat dinner but will sit at the table with us. After dinner is over, he steals an apple from the fruit basket.
Most nights Brian goes up to the back bedroom to see clients and I put Asher to sleep, wrangling pajamas onto a body that’s jumping on the bed, negotiating exactly how many books we get to read (I can usually be convinced to read four… it’s at five that I draw the line). He sleeps with his ceiling stars on. I go downstairs and flake out on the couch with a peanut butter cup or maybe some Moscato. We do it all again the next day.
There are brighter spots – meeting family in the park on the weekends; an impromptu dinner on the lawn at the University of Redlands; a trip to hike somewhere. It’s not bad at all.
Until I see the pictures that come up in my Timehop and remember how very together we all used to be back then, last year, a lifetime ago.
It’s then that I know how much I’m looking forward to a newer normal. I hope it gets here soon.
Casey E. Hamilton 