Year Two seems harder than Year One and I’ve been trying to work out why.
People are very quick to say it’s ‘because people have disappeared’.
It’s definitely not that people have disappeared.
People have absolutely kept showing up.
Amazingly so.
And in the last week, so much so.
We have been spoiled with food and wine from people who just somehow seemed to know that we were hitting Emotional Struggle Street.
And I am actually feeling guilty that I am thinking this is so hard at the minute when I’ve been supported so well.
I mean - how can I feel so low when so many people have helped pick me up? It seems so counter intuitive... Shouldn’t I be happier / Feel like I have more of a handle on it... when people are helping so much??
Maybe it’s because I have had such support that I’ve been able to fall down - I have no idea.
But each time someone has appeared - in person or anonymously or stealthily via door drops in the last week I have burst into tears.
Perhaps it’s the pandemic?
I am a social creature.
The combination of restrictions in Victoria disallowing visitors, locked borders, working from home and remote schooling has not been great.
I took my job because I knew that working from home every day could easily send me spiralling downwards. I needed the reason to get out of bed, showered, dressed and out and door with a deadline to make sure I did, in fact, function.
It was probably one of my earliest widowing realisations - being alone in a quiet house all day would not be good for me.
I’ve now been working from home since March.
Remote schooling means there’s other people in the house, but there is no circuit breaker to our days - we just get up, do school/work from home, merge into after school, which melds into dinner and bed, then sleep. Then: repeat.
I’m lucky this time around the big girls can remote school from their school’s library. It’s giving them and me a bit of a routine in the day. The younger two have been (mortifyingly) known to undertake school google meets with teachers and classmates while in bed!
I’m trying to break up the day and do the things that people tell me are good for good mental health:
I’m trying to walk.
I’m trying to talk to people.
I’m using supermarket shopping as a social outing.
I’m trying to drink less.
I’m trying to write stuff down down.
I’m trying less screen time / less news bulletins, more book reading.
I’m trying to do all the things everyone says should make things easier...
But Holy Smokes it’s hard - not the least of which is because August in Hamilton is COLD!
If it’s not raining, it looks like this - not cracking double digits on the thermometer.
Coupled with all of that is the emotion of the fact this is Year Two.
And last year we did all the things.
So many things.
I said yes to everything with the idea that celebrating Pete at every opportunity and keeping things as normal as possible was the right thing to do.
And we did it all.
But now we have to do it all again.
Without the Adrenalin... which is what I think fuelled my ability to do all the things last year.
Year Two, oddly, almost seems to be harder than Year One.
I’m realising that I really have zero idea of how grief works.
People are telling me it isn’t linear. And that’s hard for me to get my head around.
I figured that once I had done the hard things once, the second time doing them would be easier.
I mean, isn’t that how everything works? The first time you do a new or hard thing, it’s hard, but then it gets easier each time you do them...
If I was learning a new skill set or being taught something, and I was doing it every day, I’d get better at it.
But grief doesn’t seem to work like that.
I said to someone recently that if I was learning to paint, and had been painting every day for this long, surely I would be a better painter.
And they (probably quite rightly) replied: But you’re not just learning to paint every day... it’s like you are learning to paint, and you had all the colours, and then today you have one hand tied behind your back, and then the next day you only have green paint to work with, and then the next day all the colours but no brushes... and then just blue paint ... and you never know from one day to the next what you’re going to be working with.
And I remember thinking: then how the bloody hell do I master it??
It seems my inability to accept I can’t control things is working against me... turns out, grief isn’t something you can control.
And people tell me I just need to let things go. To lower my standards. To stop having such expectations.
And I do. Well, I try to. And I’m trying to learn to.
But just when I think I’ve done that, and that I’m managing ok, and I’ve let something go or eased up on myself and am accepting the new normal ... something else comes along and I think ‘oh FFS... the sands have shifted again!!’
I spend a lot of time looking like this emoji: 😩
And recently the manifestation of Victorian Covid restrictions which limit my capacity to break away from the monotony of our reality has really hit home.
As have my feelings of not meeting the needs of the kids when I’m struggling so much to try and just hold it all together.
In the last week - despite all the love and support - I have had a meltdown, the kids have had meltdowns, I’ve had kids tell me they aren’t ok, I’ve felt completely inadequate as a mother - not possessing the skills set needed to handle all this - and I’ve cried at people at my doorstep (bra-less in PJs at 11.30am) as they deliver warm scones and jam and cream to me...
But once I’ve done that, been through that, I have had the thought ‘Righto you, that’s the bottom, time to get back up again ... get in the bloody shower and get dressed... that’s a good start ...’
And thanks to even more supportive people, I have picked myself back up again.
Then... along comes another hard thing... Flipping Father’s Day.
It’s not even for another two weeks, but for some reason I’m noticing the advertising is earlier this year, it seems more prominent.
Maybe that’s because last year it totally slipped under my radar until the last minute.
This year I’ve been being made aware of it for weeks already... and it’s still weeks (plural) away.
And we have already dealt with Father’s Day once - but because we were busy doing all the things, it kind of snuck under our radar last year.
Not this year, this year it seems like a big bloody blip on the radar looming closer and closer.
The only upside I can see to shopping and looking at this at the end of every other aisle, is the Ferrero Rocher chocolates are 1/2 price...
I’ve decided I’ll just amend one of his favourite sayings when finding rum on special: The more you drink, the more you save! to be about eating copious amounts of Ferrero Rocher...
Think of all the money I’ll be saving buying them on special!
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