I ran into a colleague a while back, who hadn’t seen me in person in a few years due to pandemic, so we caught up for a while, and one thing she said was that I seemed just the same. I keep thinking about that, because people, I am NOT just the same, post-pandemic. I know it may seem that way, because I have a pretty sanguine demeanor as my default, but the pandemic definitely had big effects on me.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but maybe haven’t gone into much detail. I completely lost it in 2020. I managed to keep up with my teaching, and did the bare minimum of parenting and partnering, but that was kind of it?
The house totally fell apart. I mean, TOTALLY. When we had the cleaners stop coming (we kept paying them), and we stopped having people over, I stopped cleaning, basically. I retreated to the guest room, and ended up mostly sleeping there, and I kept that room and adjoining bathroom clean-ish, and everything else went to wrack and ruin.
(Kevin tried to keep up, and I think did a lot more than I did in the house overall, but it’s a big house, and it takes a fair bit of work to keep it in shape. He’s the one who mostly kept the kids fed through all this too.)
I’m not just talking mess, although the mess definitely piled up EVERYWHERE. (If you look at the pics below, picture one is what most of my house looked like by the end of 2022.) It was also pretty filthy — our elderly dog kept having accidents, we did a mediocre job of dealing with it, we ended up having to throw out several rugs that were stained beyond repair, it was disgusting, and I honestly would’ve been too embarrassed to have anyone over even if we could’ve had people over. (We went into pretty hard lockdown in my family — in retrospect, if we’d bubbled with our next door neighbors, we probably would’ve stayed a lot more sane.)
I was depressed, and I didn’t really realize it, because I’m not generally prone to depression, and I don’t know what that feels like. I thought I was doing okay, but what I was actually doing was a lot of watching British murder mysteries (SO MANY British murder mysteries) and probably disassociating quite a lot to deal with the stress?
Once we started seeing people again, I started feeling better, but it’s been a really long haul, excavating our house from that.
To be fair, I could’ve done a quick clean-up a lot faster; I’ve taken this opportunity of going room-by-room for the last year or so to do some serious decluttering of things the kids have outgrown, stuff we don’t use, etc. Lots of re-organizing too.
It’s a lot of work, and even with the whole family working on it, the playroom alone (which I basically ignored for a year, not going up to the third floor) has taken at least four hours of all four of us working so far (so 16 hours total of labor), and we have about 1-2 all-family hours to go before it’s actually done. But we’re getting there.
I think by the time the summer ends, we’ll actually have the house (if not the garden) in order, which feels very healing. Pandemic trauma is tough, and subtle, and weird. I hope you’re all healing from it, and asking for help when you need it.
(I was going to talk about writing too in this post, and maybe also how the pandemic affected my romantic relationships, but I think that’s another post, or several. Sigh. Let’s focus on the nice productive cleaning, shall we?)
1 & 2 are before and after shots — Kavi now has access to her art desk again, hooray.
Pic 3 is Anand’s gaming computer, which we’ve moved up to the third floor, reclaiming the library space. I don’t love that chair (it’s comfy for extended gaming, but ugly to my eyes), so I’m happy to have it up where I won’t see it much, and he’s old enough now that we don’t feel as much of a need to keep an eye on him while he’s gaming. We were worried at age 10 about him wandering into unsupervised chat rooms with terrible people. At almost-14, we can just talk to him about that kind of thing, and he gets it.
Picture 4 is the playroom-converted-to-teen hangout space. We got the TV working again, so Kavi can watch endless Jane the Virgin re-runs up there if she wants to; hopefully that doesn’t mean we’ll never see her again. There’s still some art to hang, but that’ll be the last stage — there’s still a pile of stuff on a rug (not pictured) that we need to sort, hopefully today.
Picture 5 is a mostly empty storage unit (now that the small-kid things that were in there have gone) — I’m figuring they’ll find things to store in it pretty quick. I like how you can upgrade the IKEA basic cubes with doors and drawers and such that really change both the look and the utility of them.
Onwards.
