Yesterday, A Year Ago

Hey remember that time we went on a bike ride and picnic and ended up with one of us getting helicoptered to the hospital? That was quite a way to spend Labor Day weekend 2020!

This year, we are doing no such thing, and WITH GOOD REASON. It’s been a year since then and I just read through all the blog posts about it and holy shit, if I have to do that again, I will not make it. So even though it’s Labor Day, Shouty Man is up in his office catching up on things because his job is insane.

This is… a problem but he keeps telling me it’s temporary so… I GUESS WE’LL SEE.

But what a change from a year ago, eh? We went from 11 days in the hospital to moving our family to a whole different place. We’ve been here in Ohio for almost 5 months now and it’s starting to feel normal-ish. We love our house, and once we got it painted, it started to feel like home. We still have some work to do on it but it’s getting there.

The Teenager has jumped into 10th grade with both feet and is doing amazingly well. Better than I had hoped, even. She loves the school and is slowly making new friends and finding her place and this school year is already 10000% better than last year, and we hope it will continue to be awesome! I think it will!

I still miss New Jersey a lot. I really miss my friends and the community I had there but thanks to the internet, we’re all still connected. My heart is breaking for people out there right now who got slammed by the remnants of Hurricane Ida, which dumped a stupid amount of rain on my old neighborhood and flooded the whole place out. So many people are shoveling out basements and so many people lost so many things, up to and including their whole damn houses. I am so sad for all of that but on the other hand I am SO DAMN GLAD I am not dealing with it myself. I know I said in a previous post that if 2020 didn’t break me, nothing would, but I am pretty sure having to deal with hurricane aftermath ON TOP OF ALL THIS OTHER SHIT would have broken me.

So the best I can do is donate some cash to the various relief efforts and be a listening ear for anyone who needs to rant and scream. Hang in there, NJ. You got this.

As for me, I’m all right. I keep an eye on Shouty Man, who has recovered nicely from what we all call “The Accident.” He’s got a couple of scars here and there and his one eye still isn’t cooperating fully, but other than that, he’s as normal as he’s ever been. Still some lingering TBI things, like Big Feelings and not being able to find the right words for things, but that’s fairly rare and/or easily managed. Well, easily enough. I have been on his case to find doctors to manage things but it’s been tough because he’s so busy all day and I refuse to make phone calls on his behalf. Ain’t my job! But he’ll get there and it will all be fine.

He has even been riding his bike, which is not something I approve of but I can’t do anything about it. He took it to the bike shop for repairs and tuneup, got a new helmet and everything. I’ve noticed that whenever he’s away from me, either on his bike or traveling for work, my anxiety ratchets up a few notches, which was never an issue before. I feel like I should get him microchipped like I did with the cat so I can keep an eye on where he is.

Between Shouty Man, The Teenager, and my Giant Toddler Parents, I have my hands full. I am very bad at practicing self-care but whatever. My current self-care is Facebook-related: when you scroll through FB a lot, you will eventually see a few absolutely moronic posts like “if your vagina was name after the last TV show you watched, what would it be?” There are HUNDREDS of these stupid things in the feeds and they were all irritating to me until I decided to answer all of them with “your mom.” Now it’s funny!

Self-care, y’all. This is what it looks like here in the back half of 2021.

So have we LEARNED anything this past year? Sure. We learned that I am capable of amazing feats of emotional strength and resilience. We learned that The Teenager is fairly adaptable to extraordinary circumstances. We learned that our people are the very best people ever in the world. How I would have survived these past 365 days without my people, I do not know.

And now we look forward. September has started and the weather changed to almost-fall pretty much instantly. The air is starting to feel like football and sweatshirts and as much as I love summertime, it’s nice to be able to go outside and not feel like I’m breathing through a sweaty wool sock. Of course, I am not looking forward to winter but my house is cozy, I have socks, and now we have a fireplace, so it won’t be so bad.

This past year was crazy in a lot of ways. Some of it was funny, some of it was terrifying, but we’re all still here. I’m sure I will probably re-visit all of this every year on the anniversary and look back at what it was like and reflect on how far we’ve come since then. Or maybe I won’t. Time will tell.

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