What the Heck Does Square One Look Like Now?

Momservation: It’s time to stop looking for happiness in the place I lost it.

♥ ♥ ♥

I was just settling in to my new normal.

I was getting used to this Empty Nesting thing. My kids, off at college in Boise and Santa Barbara, were happy and thriving. Hubby and I were enjoying Friday and Saturday nights out with friends; weekday evenings open to possibilities; adventures with no restrictions on our time beckoning us.

The quiet house no longer the sound of my heart aching for what was—the chaotic symphony of raising a family. The drumbeats of blissful productivity were growing louder: less laundry, less shopping, less cleaning, more writing, more organizing, more accomplished.

I was finally seeing the vision ripen that dozens of parents with adult children promised would be sweet and delicious: “You’re going to love this time. It only gets better.”

I was reaching up, about to pluck the first exciting offering of 2020: a trip to Hawaii with my Hubby while the kids were in Mexico on Spring Break.

Next would be Stagecoach music festival in Palm Springs with my kids.

Followed by visits to see them for Parents’ Weekend and Mother’s Day.

A trip for Hubby and me in May to Boston with wonderful friends that included catching a Red Sox game with my brother and his wife.

Kids joining us in the summer for our favorite annual camping trips with friends.

Us finally taking that dude ranch adventure with friends in September that we had been wanting to do for 25 years.

Then a worldwide pandemic hit.

College classes went online. My daughter returned home before spring quarter even started when dorms were essentially shut down. Campus visits off the table.

Spring Break in Mexico was cancelled. Hawaii scrapped right before the state locked down.

Stagecoach was moved to October (likely, still, to become another casualty of Coronavirus).

Trip to the Coronavirus hotspot of Boston cancelled; MLB season postponed.

We told my son, who was living in a house with four other roommates, it was safer to stay in Idaho than California as our state instituted a Shelter In Place order. He caught Covid-19 in quarantine. He is fine, suffering only minor symptoms and is back to work.

“What the hell just happened?” I feel like we are all saying, waking up in the middle of street wondering what hit us.

It all changed seemingly overnight.

As we now stretch into the second month of the officially declared Coronavirus Pandemic, the hope for life returning to “normal” by summer has rotted on the vine. In fact, as wearing masks in public for the foreseeable future is taking hold and the death toll continues to climb, all hopes for anything normal in 2020 has turned out to be the wrong crop planted.

People have died, in this country alone, by the tens of thousands. Millions are out of work. We have our lowest wage workers out on the front lines providing for those who can afford to shelter in place. Politicians are talking about our sick and elderly being expendable to get the economy going again.

A moment of silence for normal.

Now, as we try to figure out how to function and survive in this apocalyptic movie we’ve suddenly become the stars of, there are so many things to worry and wonder about that our fears and anxieties continue in our sleep with pandemic dreams!

So beyond being plagued (both literally and figuratively) by Coronavirus, we have no choice but to adapt to this Brave New World.

“Okay. Fine,” I try to say bravely, chin up, a tenuous hope for the future. “Back to square one.”