Back Again

                Hey, look!  A new blog post!  Life fell apart a bit with Tiny Magoo getting bigger and my attempts to have a career and a baby at the same time having to be renegotiated (the kid won, as she should), but I am going to try again, armed with the knowledge that only my sisters and about three friends read this, so I can say basically whatever I want.

                Let's start with the obvious.  When everything shut down in March, I was toggling between three jobs--one day a week filling orders at Renaissance Fabrics, and working on productions of 9 to 5 and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.  We were two weeks from tech on Priscilla at the college, and three weeks from tech on 9 to 5 at the local center for the arts.  It was a push, but it was all getting done, and I thought I was doing a pretty good job keeping all the balls in the air.  I had even started my traditional "Once This Show is Open, I'm Totally Gonna..." list, including luxuries like getting my hair cut, cleaning the sewing room, and maybe even just putting Tiny into day care for one extra day to give myself a few hours of just hearing my own thoughts.  Oh, the irony.

                Sheltering in place with the kids has been a mixed bag.  Kiddo Magiddo was going through a difficult time, and we were able to get her into weekly zoom meetings with a therapist, which has also allowed her to have a place to vent her frustrations.  After all, when I picked her up from school on March 13, her heart was broken due to the cancellation of her class overnight trip to a Gold Rush experience.  By the end of the day, school was closed for the next two weeks.  She still hasn't gone back, other than the reverse parade put on by the teachers and admin, and the materials drive-through pickup.  Her birthday trip to Legoland is still postponed.  Fourth grade, and now fifth grade, has turned out to be more about learning resilience and recognizing that one is living through history than about the usual school stuff.  Tiny Magoo is enjoying having unlimited time with Mom and having a regular naptime, but I worry about her development, as all her peers live inside the television now.  We've been in the new normal for almost a third of her life now, and while I look forward to the day she can be part of a playgroup again, I worry about it as well.  Unfortunately, we live in an area in which science is only believed when it is convenient, so it's going to be a long time for things to settle.

                We are safe and only moderately inconvenienced, thankfully.  One of the jobs was near the Costco and closer to Kiddo's school than home, so any time there wasn't enough work to fill the whole time before school pickup, I ran through for free samples and to prep for the back-to-back techs.  At our house, we have always done our best to prep the household for the solo parenting times.  By the second week of March, we had a full stock of paper goods and non-perishables, and Fuzzy and the kids did a grocery pickup that week as well.  I had tried out pickup services when I was hugely pregnant, and it was (and continues to be) deeply convenient for us.  Instead of creating a list and being available by phone for the person who went out, we put together the shopping cart online and finalize it together.  Long story short, we had a decent setup going into the emergency, especially since I had combined a button run with a baby food restock that Friday morning, before everything started shutting down.  Grocery orders for the next month or so turned into wishlists, and getting the ingredients for Kiddo's birthday cake was a slog, as that was everyone's moment to be obsessed with baking.

                You know how in every war movie, someone always says that it's going to take a month at the most to defeat the enemy and then come home?  And then later on in the movie, there's a sad scene in which they realize that the enemy was also planning on winning, so this is going to take a much longer time?  That was this spring, as I watched my career completely disappear.  The theatres closed immediately, which is reasonable, and I am intensely fortunate that both jobs paid me for the hours I had worked, and promised to hire me again in the fall to finish the shows for opening when it was safe to open again.  It wasn't safe to bring the kids out to RF, so I had to back down from that commitment, other than filling in for sick leave while Fuzzy took the day off work to take care of the girls.  Then they started closing fairs, and the folks for whom I was doing wholesale piecework scaled back their orders.  The next blow was the complete cancellation of Dickens Fair, which represents about half to a third of my annual income, between extra piecework, custom costume orders, and working in the onsite costume shop, where I do alterations and repairs for participants and performers at the Fair.  By May, I was working under the assumption that my only income for the foreseeable future would be unemployment.

                Meanwhile, Fuzzy's job continued exactly as before, but with masks.  He works for a government contractor that makes parts for the military, so his job was declared essential immediately.  He had also earned a raise a few months before that made it possible to cover almost all our bills without too much contribution from my work, so we were going to be okay for right now.  It's scary, though, to wonder how fast an infection might go through his workplace.  I have never seen the inside, and I never will, unless I start working there, so I have to work off of his assurances that it will all be okay.  I decided to take anything that came in on my end and use it to add to our security, so for the weeks that the government added to the unemployment benefit, I made sure our mortgage was paid ahead, that our emergency fund grew, and that all bills were paid before they were due.  If the bottom fell out, I reasoned, we needed to at least not be behind.  I also continued utilizing the things I had learned growing up in a place where snowstorms could make a weekly grocery run a bit uncertain, keeping a reasonable stock at home and avoiding food waste as best I could.  

                It hasn't been easy.  In a lot of ways, my stress level is lower for the lack of a commute and for not having large, looming deadlines, but living my life at the whim of two small people who would rather eat ice cream and watch tv all day instead of learning to become useful members of society has been difficult.  Losing access to a career in which I was skilled, helpful, and valued has created  a major crisis of identity for me, and while I am lucky that we are in a financial position to allow me to not work for the time being, I miss contributing in a way that can be calculated.  I can't be the only one who is finding herself in a feminist crisis right now.  I am a stay-at-home mom who used to have side hustles, who is trying not to step on the toes of the people who genuinely need to sell things like masks to keep their lives afloat.  I'm incredibly lucky, but I spend a lot of time worrying that there won't be a place for me in the industry when it comes back, then wondering if that would be a terrible thing.

So, there you have it.  We are okay, it's a slog, we're doing the best we can, and we're learning to forgive ourselves that it's very very far away from where we thought we would be right now.