I don’t know if I fit the complete definition of a Type A personality, but….yeah, ok, maybe I kinda do. Do you know how hard it is to be someone who likes to have everything planned out? I’m relatively organized. I like to know what I’m doing. I don’t love spontaneous plans, although I have tried to learn to embrace them a bit more the last few years. So 2020 has been a bit hard. Last fall, I had a plan, a plan of when my mortgage would get paid off on our old house. That was important to me. I don’t want to be paying for my home well into my retirement years. My home would have been paid off about 7-10 years prior to retiring.
And then we completely changed courses. We decided to look at selling. I crunched numbers. It ate at me for a while. I crunched them again. We discussed some longer term financial plans that were going to need adjusting. So that was the first change of plans. I had no idea what I was in for later on.
When the news of COVID-19 started to swirl, I started to get nervous. It was slowly starting to become obvious that I was going to have to learn to become….flexible—because we’d already committed to building a new house. Gulp.
All of this—the pandemic, the moving, the school stuff, the work stuff— was Overwhelming. Yup, Overwhelming with a capital O. Plus all the fun stuff that was planned for the year was off the calendar. All appointments were cancelled. I had to learn to go with the flow more. I’m trying to because I know I have to, but my goodness this hasn’t been easy.
(Photo credit: my husband)
I keep wondering what’s going to happen to my kids and school and I see parents and teachers posting incessantly about all the what-ifs and unknowns. The debates I see on social media make me a little crazy. School systems are still figuring it all out and yes, school starts soon and it’s hard to plan for any of it. But I’m trying to realize that I’ll figure it out. Maybe part of it is the ugliness that has been a result of this virus. Maybe I’m just exhausted and don’t have it in me to stress about the unknown right now. Maybe it’s because I know I’ve raised resilient children and I’ve encouraged them to accept the crap that we’ve dealt with this year. I don’t know. I know 2020 hasn’t been easy on me and it hasn’t been easy on anyone, but for the first time in my life, I’m realizing the importance of going with the flow a bit. My sanity kind of depends on it.
