Project planning

Last winter and spring, I started work early every day, and I usually finished my day at 4. (I still start early but I don’t finish early). I would go for a walk outside, returning home by 5 when it was still deep winter and a bit later as the days grew longer. My sons and I would reconvene after we finished our remote work and school days from our desks in various corners of the house. Then my husband, who was no longer working remotely, would come home. I would make dinner and we’d spend the evening in the family room, sometimes watching a game or doing an online crossword puzzle together and sometimes entertaining ourselves separately. 

Weekends were completely unscheduled. As restaurants began to re-open, my husband and I would go for sushi at our favorite local place. We’d go together to pick up groceries or other supplies and then we’d return home for a quiet evening in semi-lockdown. There was a lot of reading. There was a lot of Netflix bingeing. Someone was always napping on a couch. 

The thing was that I knew at the time that this state of suspended animation was artificial and temporary. And I wanted it to be temporary. In fact, despite how pleasant it sometimes was, I really couldn't wait for it to end. I wanted to go places and do things and see people. I wanted to take the mask off. I wanted my normal, busy, over-scheduled life.

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Now, of course, in a case of “who could have predicted this,” I am nostalgic for early 2021. But this is not just me being neurotic and ridiculous, and it’s not just “be careful what you wish for.” I’m not just missing the slow pace and lack of scheduled obligations. It’s something else. 

In the early spring of 2021, things seemed to be taking a little turn for the better. The vaccines promised an eventual end to pandemic restrictions and a return to whatever constituted normal pre-COVID. TFG was gone from the public spotlight, or at least he was no longer the center of attention. He couldn’t even tweet. I walked around my neighborhood in the sunny early spring chill, and the cherry blossoms seemed to promise a new beginning. 

Last week, my son’s high school sent an email about a coming delivery of free test kits, and I was like “what? COVID tests? Still?” I know that the pandemic is not over yet. As a matter of fact, when I called her on Wednesday to get her shopping list, the old lady I shop for helpfully told me that I should be careful because there’s a new variant coming because of course there is. Still, COVID seems like a dim and distant memory now. Even the dreaded Omicron surge of late 2021 seems ages in the past. And amid 24/7 coverage of the dreadful war in Ukraine and the worsening humanitarian crisis and the growing danger that we’ll end up in a bloody ground war or nuclear war with Russia, the quiet mid-pandemic languishing of early 2021 seems like the gosh darn good old days. 

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Two years ago, on the first Saturday in March, my son played in his first high school baseball game, a scrimmage against a Middletown school. Middletown is in Frederick County, about 30 miles north of Silver Spring, and according to Google, about 200 feet higher in elevation. I remember that it was chilly when we left our house in Silver Spring and that it was absolutely freezing cold in Middletown. The other Rockville mothers and I huddled in our folding canvas chairs, bundled in winter jackets and wrapped in blankets. Later that evening, I shared pizza and spinach-artichoke dip and a bottle of wine with two other mothers while our gang of young teenage boys, who weren’t yet able to drive on their own, celebrated a friend’s birthday at the Stained Glass Pub. That was the very last normal Saturday before March 13, 2020, when Maryland and most of the rest of the United States shut down.  I remember almost everything about that day. And now it’s Saturday morning and the sun is shining and although it’s cold, it will warm up today to a spring-like 60 degrees. Rockville will play its first scrimmage later today, against Winston Churchill. We have Capitals tickets. I have errands to run. The cherry blossoms are starting to bloom and I have even started to see a little bit of yellow on the forsythia bushes. It’s a prototype of a normal early spring Saturday. 

Spring used to be a time of crushing anxiety and panic attacks for me. Part of this is related to an old trauma that happened in the spring. Part of it was just over-scheduling and over-commitment and too much to do. The trauma part is long in the past now, so far in the past that I hardly ever think about it. The spring onslaught part is very different this year, because my younger son now drives and has his own car and so all I need to do is show up at his games and cheer with the other parents. I don’t have to drive him back and forth to practice, and I don’t have to get him to his games 90 minutes before they actually start and then try to fit as many errands or to-do list items into that 90 minutes before I return to watch the game. I just wave goodbye and watch him drive away. 

That’s it, I guess. Other than the worry and sadness about the state of the world and the plight of Ukraine, I am acutely conscious that I’m almost done with all of this, the school concerts and sports and PTA and all of the other mom things that have made my life very busy and very good for the last 21 years. Pretty soon, I’ll wave goodbye and watch them drive away knowing that it will not be hours, but days or weeks or even months before I see them again. Last spring, when the world was on hold, my children seemed years away from adulthood. Just one year later, and they’re already 80 percent out the door. I guess I just don’t know what I’m going to do with myself when they’re out on their own. I guess I’ll need a project.