I'll Be Home For Christmas

 A few minutes ago, I finished the last of my work before the Christmas to New Years break.  I did so sitting here at the table in our library where I've been working for the last nine months and counting since all of us who aren't actually involved in manufacturing at work got told to work from home.  I did so with three kids playing and tussling in the background.

Now I'm on vacation, and so I'm sitting at the exact same table, at the exact same computer, with the same kids playing in the background.

All in all, we've had an easy pandemic of it.  With 8-9 people in the house (depending on whether the eldest is off at college) we're not lonely.  The kids get some playing in outside with friends on the street, and they spend other time socializing in the odd worlds of Roblox and MindCraft and AmongUs.  We had to upgrade our wireless router to handle up to three people on video calls at the same time.

But I'll admit, despite knowing that I have it quite good, the thing that I find pretty wearing at times is that it's always the same 8-9 people I see, and only one of them is an adult.

It's not as if I had much of a social schedule before.  Like a lot of middle-aged men, I only saw actual friends outside the family in person a few times a year even in the before time.  But I did see other adults, even if it was primarily people with whom I only had office work in common.  And while I knew it generally wasn't great for mental health to not have (or perhaps more accurately, not make) time to see other adult friends in person, I'm fortunate enough to be married to someone with whom I really can't spend enough time.  

But pandemic living has taken that not-great-but-there-it-is-maybe-there-will-be-time-when-I'm-fifty routine and pushed it just that much further.  That much less exercise.  That much less seeing other adults.  Everyone online (where I spend too much of my life) that much more crazy.

Eventually this is all going to be over.  The people whose normal life involves going out and socializing several times a week will go back to doing that.  And those of us in the long haul semi isolation of middle aged parenting will go back to trying to figure out how to find time to stay sane.