The Next Chapter
The Next Chapter
If you are a reader, you have probably had this experience before: you are reading a book, absolutely certain you know where the story is going. "Oh, I see what the author is doing. I can totally predict what's coming next." Then, the next thing you know, bam. You are smacked in the face with a completely unexpected plot twist that is exciting, confusing, and upsetting, all at the same time. You promised yourself you would go to bed after you finish this chapter, but now you can't help but start on the next chapter to see what happens next. I think we can all agree that life is a lot like that. For the last few years, my life has been one whiplash-inducing plot twist after another (probably a super relatable concept, given the fact that the world has been slowly erupting since about 2016). Now, I am standing here on the precipice of the most unexpected twist of them all. I am excited, uncertain, and absolutely terrified.
Never in my 33 years on this planet did I expect to become a stay-at-home mom. It was not something that was ever on my radar. Both of my parents worked full-time my whole life, and I always expected to do the same. I have never had any feelings of negativity or judgment toward SAHMs, let me get that clear right from the beginning. I just never predicted that my life would go in that direction. But, here I am. Preparing to take the plunge into a life that has caught me by complete "plot-twist" surprise. To explain how I got to this unexpected chapter, I will have to explain what the last few years of my life have been like.
2019
On December 4th, 2019, I had my first child. A beautiful, feisty, goofy, spitfire of a girl with more empathy than I have ever seen in a kid. This alone was a lot for me to adjust to. Not to say that everyone doesn't need time to adjust to being a parent, but it honestly took me a long time to decide whether I wanted to have children at all. Mark and I had had many conversations about it that had basically landed on, "Maybe we'll have kids, maybe we won't. And if we don't, that's ok." We finally decided to go for it, and now we have Charlie, the light of our lives. I wouldn't trade being her mom for anything in the world, but it was definitely the beginning of a new and overwhelming chapter of my life.2020
Y'all already know. The world exploded in 2020. This was a new chapter for all of us that seemed to be written by a group of crackheads who were making it up as they went. Since Charlie was born in December, I was trying to adjust to being a mother while also dealing with the realities of a pandemic, global recession, BLM movements and other fights against racial injustices, murder hornets, wildfires everywhere, vaccine and mask fights and mandates, and the existence of Tiger King.I went back to work in 2020, 5 1/2 weeks after Charlie was born. 5 1/2 weeks. Puppies aren't supposed to be sold before they're at least 8 weeks old, because anything sooner than that is considered too early to take them away from their parents. But here I was, returning to work less than two months after my child was born. Two of those weeks fell over winter break, fortunately, but I still ended up having to take a few days of unpaid leave just to get me to the meager 5 1/2 weeks I got. This is not a situation that's unique to me, it's a statement of the absolute dumpster fire that is America's parental leave situation. But, I digress. Returning to work was painful, to say the least, but we were fortunate to have a lot of family nearby and available to watch her. Not having to jump right into daycare made things a little easier. What ended up being more of a nightmare than I ever would have imagined was pumping. Trying to find time and space at work to pump as often as necessary was borderline impossible, but breastfeeding was something that was very important to me. I was determined to make it work. Fortunately, my coworkers that year were an absolute godsend. A group of them banded together and created a schedule that had them rotating coverage for me while I pumped. I will never be able to sufficiently communicate to them how grateful I was and am that they were willing to do that for me, with no hesitation. Despite these angels, it was still a stressful situation. I felt incredibly guilty for taking their time, and it was hard to feel ok leaving my class for that long, that often.
Then, March 13th happened. We had a teacher work day that day, because the quarter had ended the day before. Rumors had been flying around about school closures, and we all spent the entire day waiting to find out what we were going to do. As I left work that day, we got the email confirming that we were going to do a 2-week soft closure. We all know now that "2 weeks" quickly became, "We're switching to online school for the rest of the year." To say this was a literal nightmare would be an understatement. Trying to suddenly move everything online, communicate effectively with parents and students, hold students accountable for completing work, and end the school year online was a constant source of stress. We kept changing our systems/policies/procedures/etc. every week or so in the efforts to make everyone happy, which ultimately resulted in making no one happy. Students, parents, and teachers didn't have time to get used to anything before we were told we needed to change it again. The name of the game for two months was Survival. The silver lining of all of this was that it all happened right as Charlie was scheduled to start daycare, and this gave us an extra couple of months to keep her home. I had felt uneasy about starting her in daycare so soon, and it was a relief to be able to hold off until she was a bit older.
In the midst of all of this, we sold our house in Pleasant View. We loved so much about our house and the location, but we were house-broke and had big dreams about the custom house we wanted to plan for. We sold for a good price, paid off a lot of debt, and moved into a rental in Farr West. The plan was to be in this rental for less than a year. It is now spring of 2022, and we are about to renew our lease on the same rental. We don't love the house, particularly the layout. I wish I understood the connection between Utah culture and split-level and multi split-level houses. But, we haven't really had an option. The housing market, as most of you probably know, has been a complete disaster. Expecting to be in this house for less than a year, and still being here two years later with no end in sight? An exhausting adjustment.
As Fall of 2020 approached, the overwhelmed feelings took over again about work. Every school seemed to be taking a completely different approach to handling the pandemic. What were we going to do? How would it affect my teaching? My school landed on a hybrid system that confuses and frustrates me to this very day. Students would have three different options for school:
1. Attend school in-person, full-time
2. Attend school online, full-time
3. Hybrid option, students are online every other day and in-person every other day
As you can imagine, life for teachers was nothing short of nightmarish. Our online and hybrid students attended class live via webcam. This meant that I had to try and teach the in-person students in my classroom and the students on the webcam at the same time. I don't think I could ever begin to explain how impossible this task was. We were expected to keep the online students engaged, cameras on, etc. while also keeping the students sitting in front of us engaged, off their phones, in their seats, keeping their masks on, etc. If I was giving "enough" attention to my online kids, I was neglecting the kids in my classroom. If I was giving "enough" attention to the kids in my classroom, the kids online were being neglected. There was absolutely no winning. The hybrid students presented another issue, because it became impossible to keep track of who was supposed to be online and in class on which days. There was a constant battle with a lot of the kids to keep their masks on. We had to sanitize the entire classroom after every period. Desks had to be properly arranged and separated (separating the desks to the level recommended by the CDC wasn't possible for anyone). Students could sense the static in the air from everything the adults were dealing with in the world, and it showed. Everyone was on edge, and motivation steadily dropped. How could students be expected to care about school when the world was in the state that it was?
2021
Still dealing with the school difficulties of 2020. The 2020-2021 school year has been the most exhausting teaching year of my career, and I hope it stays that way. It felt never-ending. On top of the things mentioned before, the school play I was directing was supposed to be performed in November. That got delayed, for obvious reasons. We spent some time trying to figure out what to do with it, since a live performance seemed completely out of the realm of possibility, and landed on filming it and making it into basically a movie. My class joined forces with the digital literacy class to make it happen. It obviously came with a whole lot of bumps, and was nowhere near perfect, but I was just thrilled to be able to get a "performance" done. However, all of these issues and delays meant that we spent essentially the entire school year working on this one play. By the time we were done, the kids and myself were so beyond tired of that play, and it almost wasn't even fun anymore. In hindsight, if I could go back, I would just cut our losses and cancel. We finally all made it through that school year, but I'm not quite sure how we did it, honestly.In August of 2021, another exciting and overwhelming new chapter began: we got pregnant again. We had been planning and trying for this, because we wanted Charlie to have a sibling relatively close to her in age. The kids will be about 2 1/2 years apart, which is pretty much exactly what we were shooting for. While I'm still thrilled and excited to be having another baby and can't wait to watch our family grow, a lot of that pregnancy excitement very quickly diminished.
When I was pregnant with Charlie, it was just about the easiest pregnancy imaginable. Obviously, there was discomfort, pain, etc. But, in general, it was smooth sailing. I didn't have any morning sickness, aches and pains were minimal compared to what I heard from my friends who had kids, we were able to just focus on preparing for this new addition to our family. This time, the story couldn't be more different. I was sick for my entire first trimester. The constant nausea (and when I say constant, I mean it) was almost too much to handle. It was beyond exhausting to feel so sick all day, every day. By the time the nausea subsided, I was dealing with more aches and pains than I ever had with Charlie. This little guy is sitting much higher than she was, so I have had bruised and sore ribs for months. My back and tailbone ache all day, no matter how many different belly bands, PT tape configurations, or supportive clothing items I wear. I have gone to the hospital twice for various concerns. I never could have imagined having two pregnancies so massively different from one another. The other life stresses we are dealing with have also made it harder to just relax and focus on preparing for a new baby. For example...
Between the 2020-21 school year and this year, there were massive changes at my school. The words "mass exodus" seem almost too mild. Our entire admin changed. We lost a lot of teachers, including some of my very best friends at work who had been here since I started. With the change in admin came changes in many aspects of my school. We are working with a brand-new platform. One that parents, students, and teachers all have a love-hate relationship with. For parents and students, the relationship is mostly hate. For teachers, it's a little more 50/50, but it's been a nightmare to figure out how to teach with it while also fielding the hate storm that comes from the students and parents. We have new policies and procedures. Dress code changes. The list goes on and on. This is not to say that the changes have all been bad, but it's been incredibly overwhelming from the get-go.
I was offered a job at a school much closer to me (roughly a 5-minute commute). This put me in the horrific position of having to choose. If you know me very well, you know what a nightmare this was. I have a very hard time with change (I'm working with my therapist on it, ok?). There were a lot of benefits that came with switching schools, but I still had so much love for HighMark and the community of students and teachers that I had there. I had a theatre department that I had built from the ground up (literally from non-existence to a full department). I had comfort. I had stability. I had smaller class sizes. It was a difficult and tortuous week of lots of tears as I made my decision. Ultimately, I decided to stay with HighMark. Despite the difficulties I have been facing at work this year, I am happy I made the decision I did.
Even though most of the Covid restrictions have been lifted in schools, the lingering effects are still making things harder. Quarantine guidelines are still causing absences to skyrocket, and that is the least of our problems. Anyone who works with kids or teenagers will tell you that Covid has done something to these kids. Motivation, attitudes, work ethic, etc. have all plummeted. I haven't been teaching for very long, comparatively, but I have never seen it as bad as it's been for the last couple of years.
Again, I ran into issues with my school play. Between all of the unexpected time I had to take off and the constant absences in my Theatre II class, we couldn't get more than two or three days of rehearsal in a row. We postponed, and were on the verge of postponing again when I had a flashback to last year. I didn't want to keep pushing this until we all hated it again. We had to make the decision to cancel the performance. This was incredibly disappointing for me and for my kids, but we talked it out for a long time and agreed it was the best choice. Despite agreeing that it was the best choice, it was difficult to find peace with "throwing away" months of work and preparation on the performance.
Mark was absolutely miserable in his government IT job. Watching him go through that kind of stress and unhappiness was unbearable. Through a lot of discussing, finagling, and one big leap, we decided he needed to start a new chapter for himself. He started his own construction/home renovation business. As scary as this was, he quickly became a different person in so many ways. He felt more fulfilled, more independent, happier. He loves doing this kind of work, and he is so good at it. The work he does makes me proud. Unfortunately, the state of the world made things difficult. He had jobs coming out his ears, but supply chains were a complete mess. Any supplies he tried to buy in-store or order online were so backordered that he couldn't finish any jobs in the amount of time it should have taken. He had to try and plow through with a career that was making him much happier, but was also causing stress and frustration in other ways.
We noticed that Charlie wasn't talking nearly as much as she "should" be at her age. She was very vocal, yelling and babbling and whatnot, but she seemed to show no interest in mimicking or saying any "real" words. We soon discovered she was suffering from frequent ear infections, but because she wasn't showing the typical signs (tugging at her ears, fussing, etc.), we weren't aware of them. It seems like the problem was that she just couldn't hear us enough to start to develop her language. In June, she had tubes put in her ears. This is a very simple and common procedure, but no parent likes to have their kid at the hospital to be put under anesthesia. The good news was, we noticed a big difference after the tubes were put in...for a while. She very quickly plateaued again with her speech progress. We got her evaluated for early intervention, and she qualified with a speech delay. We have been working with a wonderful speech therapist for about six months now. In November, however, we took Charlie to the doctor because she was sick again, and they told us that one of her tubes had come out (God knows when). She had to get her tubes redone. So far, these new tubes have stayed in, and we have noticed her speech steadily improving ever since. We are relieved about the improvements she has made, but it has been hard not to stress out about her being behind.
Covid was (and is) still affecting all of us, obviously. The biggest way that our family has been hit is with daycare. Because of state regulations and guidelines, we have had to keep Charlie home from daycare any time she seems sick at all (cough, teething fever, etc.). While we both completely understand and support our daycare's need to follow the rules, this has become a nightmare for us. Between everyday illnesses, her tube surgery, and other issues we were facing, Mark and I have both had to take obscene amounts of time off of work. I ran out of PTO by the end of December. Mark, being self-employed, had no PTO. All time he took off was unpaid. The way we were living was unsustainable, and we both knew it. Every weekend has become a waiting game of whether Charlie would come down with a mysterious fever or cough before Monday morning, forcing us to figure out care for her again.
2022
Even though we are only two months into 2022, it has already been another parade of dumpster fires. After Mark and I made the decision that I would stay at home after this school year, that meant Mark had to close the doors on his business. I have felt terrible about this. He got a new IT job that he is liking so far, but I feel incredibly guilty about him having to go back to a career that was making him so miserable. I hope that this new company is going to be a better fit for him.We had to make some other really difficult decisions to prepare to become a one-income household. We sub-leased the RV to Mark's parents. Mark is having to sell his truck and work trailer. We're having to financially tighten everything up. We have had to decide how to handle daycare. Neither of us felt great about the idea of taking Charlie out of daycare entirely, because we both see the value in her having that social interaction with children and adults outside of the house, especially with her language delays. We want to keep taking her at least a couple of days a week, and are trying to work out the details of that (how many days can we justify paying for daycare that we don't "need?" Which days can/should she go?).
In January of 2022, Charlie got sick again. What we had dreaded for so long seemed to have come true: we were pretty confident she had Covid. She had a fever, a cough, crazy congestion, fatigue, all the tell-tale signs. However, this was in the middle of the Omicron surge, and tests were impossible to get. Everyone was saying, "If you think you have it, just stay home." Charlie had also already had to be tested 3 or 4 times before this, and we didn't want to put her through that torture again unless it was absolutely necessary. So, we kept her home. Yep, more time off work and inconveniencing family to take care of her. About 4 days later, Mark got sick. Sicker than I have ever seen him before, and sicker than I ever want to see him again. We got him tested, and he was (obviously) positive. It was inevitable that I would get my positive result, which happened a few days after that. All three of us being so sick at the same time was about as bad as you could imagine. I sometimes don't know how we made it through. Me being pregnant threw another wrench into the game. I was instructed by my OB/GYN to get a pulse oximeter and monitor my pulse and oxygen levels regularly. I was to go to the ER if either number went sideways. At one point, they did, and I had to go spend an afternoon in the ER getting fluids and monitoring. The only silver lining was that Charlie was on the upswing by the time Mark and I started to get really sick. For a while.
Suddenly, Charlie got knocked back down. Her cough got really bad again, and she was constantly fatigued with no appetite. My mom took her for an afternoon for us, since Mark and I were still so sick, and then I received a terrifying phone call. My mom calling to ask if we could use my oximeter on Charlie to test her oxygen levels, because she seemed to be having a hard time breathing. Mark and I were more scared than words can say. We drove her to the ER, where they would only let one of us back with her. It was an agonizing wait for both of us as they ran tests, gave her oxygen, x-rayed her lungs, and figured out what was happening. Then they told me that the Covid had induced either pneumonia or bronchiolitis, and she was being admitted to the hospital. I begged the ER nurse to let both Mark and I go to the hospital with her, and she pulled the strings to make it happen. But, because she was positive for Covid, we were in an isolated room. For two days, we were trapped in a hospital room. Stressed. Exhausted. Scared. We were finally able to go home that weekend, but Charlie had to be on oxygen and a monitor for a while at home. It was a relief to be out of the hospital, but there was still a constant worry and stress about whether she was ok. Then came the other kick in the teeth: because her first positive Covid test was the day she was admitted to the hospital, her ten-day quarantine time reset at that point. More time that she couldn't go to daycare, and more time would have to figure out how to make that work. Mark was still sick, and still hasn't been able to quite shake some of the symptoms. It was almost 4 weeks before he was able to go back to work, which put him way behind on the last construction jobs he was trying to finish up before starting the new IT job. This also came with obvious financial effects for us.
In the midst of all of this, I am also just trying to be pregnant. The constant stress and never-ending wave of obstacles has kept me very concerned about the baby and whether I can make it to full term without any complications. A couple of weeks ago, I was having some concerningly-frequent contractions, and spent yet another afternoon in the hospital while they monitored/tested/made sure everything was ok. It was, thank goodness, but it was just one more thing to deal with. Doctors' schedules being what they are have meant that every appointment I have requires taking time off work. I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes, and am having to follow a strict diet and test my blood sugar four times a day. I haven't been able to just focus on and be excited for this amazing new thing about to happen to us. I feel immense amounts of guilt that this baby has been almost put on the back burner. We are so unprepared for his arrival, compared to what we had ready to go for Charlie. It's just all too much.
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