Dear Wendy
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Hey, Ver, you didn’t ask for advice so forgive me for offering this, but: what if you just didn’t have a relationship with your SIL? Like, what if you mostly ignore her, let your husband be the one to deal with her, use covid as an excuse to avoid her for at least the remainder of the year, be civil when you have to see her at family events in the future, but otherwise have nothing to do with her? You really, really don’t have to have a relationship with all extended family members. It’s perfectly fine to just peace out. Maybe one day you’ll both have kids who will be cousins and that might be an opportunity for deeper engagement – or not! – but until then, I don’t see any reason to have much to do with her. I’d skip her wedding and tell her now – well, let your husband tell her – that you aren’t going to go because you don’t feel at all comfortable committing to a destination wedding when we’re in the middle of a pandemic with no end in sight. let her have her meltdown about your absence now, who cares. you don’t have to see her or deal with it. You seriously have THE PERFECT excuse to simply not see her. Tell your husband to deal with it and just turn it all off in your mind. It doesn’t have to exist. No one is making you deal with her or have a relationship and since having anything to do with her causes stirs up negative feelings, stop. Just stop doing it. Problem solved!
The irony! This country is full of dumb-dumbs.
I 100% agree with Miss MJ’s assessment. Things are going to get much worse before they get better (and better is a long way off still). The only possible saving graces: extending the unemployment benefits (or doing a basic income of $2000 a month per person); protecting renters from eviction; canceling mortgage and property tax payments; universal healthcare (ha, yeah right); and trump losing the election and going peacefully into the long night with all his idiot followers (haha).
I’ve been taking a much needed mental health break this week (and also celebrating Joanie’s birthday). I spent the week cleaning out closets and organizing and bagging up shit and taking it to donation bins, and pitching a bunch of stuff. This always makes me feel better. But the real gift to myself was hiring a cleaner for today – the first time someone other than me would clean our house in four months. With the whole family home day in and day out, it’s a lot of work to keep clean, and sine I’m a clean freak, I spend about 1-2 hours a day cleaning (and it still is never up to my standards). So I was SOOO excited for today – literally the most excited I’ve been about anything in four months.
And a fucking tropical storm is heading our way – expected to make landfall in NYC in a few hours – and I had to reschedule the cleaning and it really kind of broke me. We also had to keep Jackson home from his last day of camp since it’s a mostly outdoor camp in the park and they’d have to be indoors all day because of the rain and we aren’t comfortable with that. So, I’m kind of feeling sorry for myself right now because today was going to be my day to try to relax a little, enjoy a quieter – and much cleaner – house after what’s been an emotionally and physically tiring couple of weeks.
I hate covid.
Fyodor, sorry to hear your trip to PA stirred up the grief a bit. You’ve been through a traumatic experience; I can’t even imagine. Be easy on yourself. We’re all thinking of you and sending warm wishes.
No, MG, our three sources of income – mine, Drew’s, and our rental income – have all taken massive hits. But we are lucky that we have savings (and unemployment benefits, through July), but we’ve definitely taken a big hit, financially. But, really, I am much more concerned about my kids than about how much money we’ll have left to retire on. And I am very concerned for kids whose families are not as privileged as ours. It’s a mess. Working families, kids, older people, people whose health or age puts them at higher risks – they are really suffering right now. I don’t have the answers. I don’t know if there are any answers. It’s just all sucks so much. And as a parent, I hate that I can’t make this better for my kids. I worry about the toll all of this isolation and lack of quality education will have on them.
Raising kids through this has been the hardest part. The financial stuff, my own well-being, feeling anxious about loved ones’ health and friends’ businesses – all of that is hard, but the kid stuff is the worst. Remote learning does not work for us. I have one kid who got robbed of almost half her pre-k year, and will likely miss out on in-person kindergarten – experiences that are so instrumental in developing a strong social-emotional foundation. And another kid who is 8 1/2 going on 17 and doesn’t think he has to do anything his parents tell him to do, which makes being the fulltime teacher a challenge to say the least. And I worry about his social-emotional foundation, too, if he misses too much more in-person organized structure and learning with his peers. We’re sending him to camp next week, which meets in small groups in the park. I don’t feel 100% confident it’s the right thing to do, but the benefits outweigh the risks when we ourselves are in a low-risk risk, we’re not mingling with anyone with higher risks (we’re only seeing a few people at all and always outside), and the transmission rate in NYC is currently very low and we’ve had the virus under control for close to two months.
But yeah, I don’t know about school in the fall. Camp outside for a week in very small groups is a different beast than crowded indoor classrooms in a school with 1000 students. We lost a third-grade teacher at the end of March and several parents soon after, so the anxiety of putting teachers and family at risk feels especially acute. And Jackson has said a few times that if school opens in the fall, he “hopes we don’t have more teachers die.” It’s a fear that is really real for our kids because they’ve lived through it already. They attended a zoom funeral for a favorite, beloved teacher and no one wants to do that again. (But no one wants their kids home, with no structure or social interaction for many more months either!).
The Ozarks guy went to several places, Fyodor. I read about it in some Missouri source that I don’t feel like searching for now. But there was a list of places he visited and the dates and times he was there.
I’ve attended two, and at both I saw maybe 2-3 people without masks (out of many hundreds of people I personally saw).
NYC reported zero covid deaths yesterday, which is incredible (we – just NYC alone -were at over 500 a day less than two months ago). I know the protests will lead to a spike in cases but given how low the case count currently is, the protests are all outdoors, everyone wears a mask, and people are still mostly avoiding public trans, I hope the spike will be manageable and not prolong things too much.
Helen, congrats on the four weeks of sobriety!
I read that article about the antibody tests yesterday and showed Drew, who is still convinced we both had covid in April. I guess it really doesn’t matter beyond just knowing to know, except if there are any long-lasting health issues, it would be helpful to have an accurate previous diagnosis to share with medical staff in the future. My symptoms were pretty mild and I feel no lingering anything now, but Drew’s symptoms lingered for many weeks. We have friends – couples where both partners had symptoms around the same time we did and one partner tested positive for antibodies and the other tested negative. How can that be? So much uncertainty about everything – and in the big scheme of things, uncertainty about the presence of antibodies or whether or not someone was once infected is, I guess, a pretty small issue.
