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A gift to be simple…
For as long as I can remember, people have been paying lip service to the joys of simplicity. Even before Marie Kondo taught us how to tidy up, Sarah Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance, a Daybook of Comfort and Joy extolled the simple pleasures of coffee in the morning, using the good china for meals other than holidays, and waking up after a good night’s sleep. Now, in the wake of a pandemic and 30 million unemployed Americans, those efforts seem so… quaint. Like, “awww, isn’t it cute how we had to be told to appreciate fresh air. That was before we were cooped up inside all the time!” Two days…
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How to keep your sanity in this new normal…
Well, here we are on day 45,623 of quarantine. And the novelty of it all is wearing off. Here in Spain I’m spending a lot of time doing Instacart orders for my parents, figuring out homeschooling, and wondering when I’m ever going to be able to fly home again. In my last post I talked about the grief we feel that our normal has flown out the window. And so quickly. With so little warning for most of us. It just came up and smacked us upside the head, and here we are, boom, stuck at home watching the economy collapse as we eat banana bread in our six-day-old leggings…
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The trauma of losing our normal
From the looks of my social media feeds, it appears that the world is in some kind of collective grief right now, specifically the first stage: denial. There is so much talk of “getting back to normal.” People are comfort-eating away the quarantine, just waiting for normal life to resume. I don’t think we’ve fully grasped yet that there is no getting back to normal. Normal doesn’t exist anymore. Having spent the past decade in various stages of trauma, and different stages of moving through it, I feel like I’m watching all my friends pass through this place. And for once, I’m kind of a step ahead. I think anyone…
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Spanish Lockdown Day 5: We Keep a Schedule
One thing I am realizing about this whole Forced Confinement gig is that you absolutely must keep a schedule, or you will lose all sense of time, and anything you had planned will go right out the window. You also have to get dressed, and when you live in a house with multiple people (especially children) you need breaks from each other. Living on top of each other 24 hours a day is hard, even if you’re in a large house, and you need some space and quiet time. Today we started our new schedule. The guy who owns Impact Gym in Marbella is doing daily kickboxing classes via Facebook…
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Spanish Lockdown: I go out!
Unimaginably bizarre. That’s how I’d describe the grocery store experience I had today. I was prepared for madness. I was prepared for crowds. I was prepared for empty shelves. What I got instead was silence, wariness, and everyone in gloves. Spanish people are huggers, and kissers, and generally very touchy people. They don’t do personal space very well. They’re also extremely loud. Go into any cafe at lunchtime, and you have to scream to be heard. So when I entered the Lidl here and was met with silence, it was freaky. I saw someone I knew, and instead of the customary greeting of kisses and hugs, we just smiled a…
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Spanish Quarantine Day 3: We make Inspirational Signs
We’re still on quarantine here in Andalucia, and they’re taking it pretty seriously. People at the beach on the coast are being given tickets for being out and sunbathing. A woman was fined for being in the park with her daughter. A friend posted on Facebook yesterday that he thought the restrictions weren’t going into affect until Monday, and tried to go for a bike ride, and got yelled at by three people including a police officer. He quickly rode home, shamefaced. We live out in the countryside, so it’s not as hard, but it’s still weird not having any structure to our days from external sources. There’s no school…
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Day 4 of the Spanish Lockdown: We start homeschooling
My daughter goes to a Montessori school where they do pretty granola–and-nutty kinds of things. Now that we’re off, her teacher is sending work to us each day on a special WhatsApp group chat. We respond by sharing photos of our kiddos doing the work, everyone sends smiling rainbow emoji’s, and such is the new schooling situation. One thing that really helps is creating a schedule each day with our Little One. We make up the schedule with her together first thing in the morning, and it really makes a difference for all of us to know what’s coming, what the goals are, and what we want to accomplish, so…
