Quaratine: The Beginning

I decided to blog again at the beginning of quite the international pandemic leaving us in quarantine. Not really on purpose, I just wanted to write again and decided to start the week before last, and then this rolled into town.

 I guess this is a great way to pass the time, write, but preferably not with a child hanging from my head that has been stuck inside for too long and has lost all touch with reality.

Some people are saying it started with a man in China who ate an infected bat. So that’s what I tell my kids as the reason why they stuck at home for an amount of time no one seems to know for certain. Someone decided to eat a bat. Perhaps his mother didn’t tell him to, so here I am, letting them know, don’t eat bats, or any wild animal for that matter. Let’s just stick to farm raised meat. They aren’t saying, or don’t know who patient zero is, but it’s probably for the best since people hold extreme hatred for the man that caught the ball from the stands of some baseball game by dangling over the wall. I’m not even sure that he really ate the bat, what I am saying is that I’m doing my motherly duty of using the fear tactic so that my kids don’t mix themselves with infected wild animals in China. You just never know where life will take you, so its best to be prepared.

We are one week into a quarantine. It’s as if time and date don’t even exist anymore. I went back and forth trying to determine what day it was a few days ago, or maybe it was just a few hours ago, I don’t know anymore. We sleep when we are tired and eat when we are hungry. We are going down like a sinking ship; order needs to be restored. What’s of even more important of a reason to get it together is that our supplies are dwindling. It’s become apparent that now, since the people I live with are home all day, their need for snacks on the hour has been made their top priority. I know for a fact they don’t eat all day at school, work, and all that we run around and do after, it’s time to get this place under control.

Outside of all that is going on within these walls, it’s almost as if perhaps the rapture happened. But I call my mom, and she still answers, so I know I’m still good. You worry about those things at a time like this. Apocalypse? Is everyone really just inside their homes? Who is making certain?

In the past week I have rode on this roller coaster of COVID. I will be doing ok, distracted even, and then something comes up across something I’m looking at and it’s the rise up the hill of panic and before I know it, I’m up over the edge and cruising down the other side, the bucket of diluted bleach is out and I’m not ok until every surface has been swiped. Every surface. I chased the kids around with Lysol disinfectant spray until I ran out yesterday. And then I am back down at the bottom of the hill, ‘let’s play BINGO guys!’  I also then do this thing in these moments where I’m not going to peek at what is going on with the virus; the rise of cases, its proximity to our family, and then it’s just a real quick peek, and….here we go on up again, and just as fast flying back down top speed wondering if this slight cough and chest pressure is me going under. Turns out for now its inhaling too much bleach and anxiety. So then I’m laughing at memes, ripping around the fast turns, cruising right along. But before too long, I start getting so frustrated with our present leader and just how he talks, for the love of God, somebody just tell him to shut up, and what is with the orange skin and the white around his eyes, that’s not even tanning bed… is Melania looking into this, Ivanka? Sometimes I just want to scream and shout and just kick things when he is talking. How do reporters just stand there, I would be doing my in frustration sound/scream and stomping through the press room, kicking folding chairs over on my way out. Stop telling us we are going to defeat this and it’s going to be the greatest thing ever… can we just work on masks and gloves please? Barack…Michelle…even George W. at this point. Anyone else feel like this is all the beginning of a reenactment of the 10 plagues? My sister just texted me yesterday about lice being detected in my nephew’s school prior to the closure. So help me. Now I’m going to need to purge all the stuffed animals. Someone make this carnival and its roller coaster end.

Anyone else grow up going to church and now have, ‘Pharaoh, Pharaoh,’ stuck in their head, as well as remember every motion to it?

My hands are raw. They are raw from all the washing. I wash my hands 2473058435 times a day and then I wash two toddlers hands, which is also my hands again, 84309545 times. Then I’m not near a sink, and I know I touched lots of things, and so I use the sanitizer, on my raw hands. Brilliant. The pain. It’s unreal, and then it’s a portrayal of my press room tantrum in real life, on my sidewalk.  I just read people are showing up at emergency rooms with sores from all the hand washing. It’s either this or the virus that’s taking me in people.

But it is nice. It is nice being with the people I chose to live with, in my space and face all day long. Someone in this house today just said in reference to the littlest sisters, ‘why are they freaking out so much!?! Mom, you need to do something about that!’ I don’t know, perhaps it’s because on most days they only see you all 3 maybe 4 hours tops, and here you all are 16 hours a day involved in what was their daily routine, that is now a skeleton of what it once was, and they have no idea why. I mean I want to curl up in a ball and cry, so let’s give those under 5 a little slack. But let’s also rewind and go back to when you just told me about how to do my job…first off…

Tonight, for dinner we had spaghetti with a meat sauce. A member of this family actually sat down at the table, in the midst of a quarantine, where a governor just made an announcement to live off only the essentials, to shelter in place unless its for supplies that are essential or an emergency, of whom we just went over it and explained it all over again to this person because they are a teenager now, and this person just sat down and asked like we instead told them tomorrow’s weather forecast…’where’s the salad and fresh bread?’ Thank the Lord above I can now say as an explanation to all future moments like this, ‘don’t mind them, they are children of the Quarantine.’

This is how it’s going.