Spring 2021

It's not an exaggeration to state these past three months were the worst season of my life.

I started spring vaccinated against COVID-19, recovering from the stress of refreshing websites in the strange hours of the night I spent awake responding to my baby's cries for milk. With days running out before we moved out of state, I had scored appointments for the single-dose vaccine at CVS stores in Watertown and Chelsea for every adult in my household. It was a breathlessly stressful process filling out shitty web applications on precarious timers. But it was finally over.

Already drowning under the ongoing vaccine hunt, confusion around an upcoming series of moves, sleepless nights with a baby and exhausting days just living, I answered a phone call from my hometown. The NYPD had found my mom dead on her bedroom floor.

As the only child, it was now my task to do... all of that. During a pandemic, from another city, with minimal useful information.

We had only just started packing to leave Boston. My family had other things to do and other places to be, and so our time there was almost over. The next two months would be spent hopping from one temporary living situation to the next, slowly dismantling my stability and my sanity.

My executive function plummets. It gets better, they say. Welcome to parenting. Give it a couple years. Everyone keeps telling me it's normal and approximately nobody gives a shit that I can see my mind falling apart.

I hate everyone and their platitudes.

In June I finally had to concede and take three weeks off of work, despite my job being the main bright spot in my life. We gained some time to run some belated errands. Everyone else went back to their lives, and I finally gained some headspace to start thinking rather than reacting to everybody else.

I still don't sleep much at night. There are still more loose ends than I would like. But at least my executive function can stop deteriorating now.