Sometimes life doesn’t turn out the way you planned. We all know that. And sometimes disappointment follows in the wake when plans are upended. We’ve all had a good dose of that in the past two and a half years, but over the past months, I’ve begun feeling a bit of normalcy return to my life. I felt like I could make plans and actually expect them to happen. Yes, I’m still cleaning stuff like crazy, and I don’t expect that to go away any time soon if at all, but overall, our lives have taken on a more normal routine.
Having said that, once again the newest curse word I know, Covid, has reared its ugly head. Matthew went to bed with a headache on Monday night. On Tuesday he woke feeling much too warm. Headache plus fever in the old world would have meant Matthew stayed home for a few days until he felt better and the rest of us got on with our lives in the meantime. In the new world, it means three home Covid tests, all of which came back positive, many tears, some panic, a mad dash to the nearest county location to double (or quadruple) check, and then a need to actually deal with the reality that Matthew has Covid.
Matthew feels terrible, physically of course, but also emotionally. He is guilt ridden that he’s the one who brought it into our home. For two and a half years we’ve managed to avoid getting sick and now, as the world seems to be spinning in its old, happy way, we have drawn the short straw. But there’s no way he could have known and nothing he could have done to avoid this. He hasn’t knowingly been in contact with anyone who is sick. No of us have. We can speculate about where it came from, but there’s no way to know and no one to blame. We’ve tried to assure him of this, and I think his mind is quieter than it was last night, but I suspect there is still some emotional baggage.
Having said that, one of the reasons he feels so terrible is that Malia and I were supposed to go to Cedar City with my sisters and three of my nieces for a girls’ only trip to the Utah Shakespearean Festival. We’ve been planning for months, and we were both super excited to go. But with someone in our household sick with Covid, our plans have been cancelled. The others are still going, but Malia and I will be hunkering down at home, waiting out our quarantine and hoping the rest of us don’t get sick. Kevin and I can still go to the store and all that as long as we are masked and don’t develop any symptoms because we are up to date on our vaccinations. However, that pesky sense of normalcy got the better of me and neither Matthew nor Malia has gotten boosted as they should have, so Malia has to stay home. We have reassured her that she can still go outside to walk, ride her bike, etc. as long as she isn’t around other people, but I’m not sure it’s all that comforting. She had big plans for this trip, and she is absolutely devastated. I’m terribly disappointed too, but I’ll can easily admit that I’m nowhere near as crushed as she is. It’s hard for me to see her disappointment. Covid has stolen yet another bit of her life away and there is nothing I can do to change that.
You know those white elephant gift exchanges where there is always something really cool that everyone fights over, a bunch of “meh” kind of stuff and then that one terrible gift that no one wants? I feel like we just left the party with the skunk scented deodorant.
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