Frankie (Frankenstein J. Cat is his full name, yes for you that have seen it, it's a Ren and Stimpy reference.) does not understand office hours. He just wants his pets, he wants them now and really, mom? If you're really detail oriented, you can tell that those are seeds besides him. I wasn't actually in office hours before he jumped up on the table, but my lead needed me so I had jumped on zoom and he came to hang out. This pretty much the circus my life has been in lately. I'll have to explain.
Four days after my last post, I recieved a phone call from one of my aunts, asking me if my sister was okay. That was a hard question for me to answer, why? My sister disowned me a couple of years ago and cut off all contact due to somethings I don't feel comfortable with sharing right now, but the gist of it is, no one really knows how to deal with loss and it's unanswered questions. I had to search for some answers I never wanted to hear. My sister passed from what are thought to be Covid-19 related complications and I'll be honest...I didn't know what to feel. I was numb for days.
I've met loss of loved ones many times in the last decade, which is werid, because I still feel like everyone in my family is so young and vibrant. Before you lose someone, you always think you'll have time to ask all the questions that you need answered, to right the mistakes that you have made, that all you all really need is time. You always think you'll be able to take care of that tomorrow. Truth is, nothing is promised to you, and when you make plans to do things sometimes that is the bravest thing you are doing at the moment. Promising yourself future time.
I have always felt as though I was on the outside looking in with my siblings. Always there with a deep need to be loved by them and wanting to be wanted. At some point as a teen, I gave up. You can't make someone love you if they don't know how and even then, you have to let them make their way on that journey. That door has been closed forever with two of my siblings at this point. The hardest thing with my sister is I never had a chance, she couldn't let me in and quite frankly, I don't think she knew how.
Alas, The only choice to have at this point is to let go and hope for the best. I did gain back somethings in the loss itself. Where I lost a sister, I gained a brother in law who will treat me like family, and I the same. I gained back a niece, who's love I can tell never left, and who I can tell is going to need me from now on. That's pretty much what I can say about that, it's a process and all I need to do is work through it.
In the midst of loss, there's always other stuff, life just keeps moving whether you want it to or not. So in this big top, school happens to start on the tail of this event. Distance Virtual Learning, or DVL isn't easy to do if you work with the pre-kindergarten set. It's actually kind of frustrating at times and the whole lot of us text, call, and email our way through it. It almost feels lazy and it's anything but. Even as I type this, I'm trying to get my teaching team ready for September, despite administration thinking we're going to move to a hybrid model...it sounds like it's going to be a no from the county, so it's best to be prepared. How do you teach a parent to engage their child in your lessons? Be enthusiastic as you can, even when you don't feel like it. Or when your cat wants pets and you're trying to schedule your zoom meetings for the week? Just adjust, pet, let your coworker know. When are office hours? Who am I? What am I? Jester, Ringleader, Janitor. Whatever I need to be, moment to moment. There's another metaphor for life in general, somewhere in here. Update soon, this time it will be off a garden variety. No more disappearances, hopefully!