Single Parent of Teens

Edit below the ~~~~~~

Let's face it: life is just strange right now.

I mean, it has been - for everyone - for about a year. It's been weird longer for us because of the death of my second husband in 2016 (I'm divorced from my first), but that's a whole different story. Suffice it to say that I'm a single parent, in a rural/suburban (exurban?) pocket of lower income in a high-income school district. I work for the school district in question, which - were it not The Year(s) That Shall Not be Named - would still be pretty awesome. But I'm low on the seniority list as I've only worked there for a couple of years before... all this.

As it is, thanks to my union, I get paid for a few hours a week of being on-call, to attend two meetings a week (one all-hands and one as a member of a special team for racial and educational justice) and to be ready in case the 132 drivers above me in the hierarchy are all out sick or something. We can't bring the students to school, but we can bring the school to the students, in the form of hot lunches and library books.

As I said, life is strange.

You'd think it would be great - the opportunity to be at home with my kids, whom I actually like most of the time (don't give me that look; any parent knows that while we love our kids, we don't always like them (and vice-versa), and see what they're doing and all that. We have decent internet service and everyone has a working computer in their own space to do classwork and fun stuff. My girls - in spite of their practically opposite personalities - get along with each other very well, and they even like to spend time together more often than not.

It's kind of awesome.

But all the other worries - my eldest has aged out of child support payments, the youngest is not thriving in the distance-learning environment (the eldest hates it but can deal), my country is apparently on the brink of civil war, there's a pandemic going on out there, and I want to work and earn money - these worries really make what could be a reasonably positive time... not so positive.

It balances out, though. Despite the worries, we are currently safe, healthy, and as mentally well as can be expected in these stressful times.

That's all a family can really hope for.

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Huh. This was my first Vocal post, and when I made it back in late 2020 or early 2021, they accepted it in spite of the short length. Presumably this was because it was my first post. I vaguely recall a note of the "they need to be longer but we'll let it slide 'cause you're new" sort.

I'm not super bothered by this, honestly, even though I haven't been Writing For Fun or even Writing for Catharsis for a week or two. I'm just so overwhelmed by the world at large right now that I'm retreating into my shell. And besides, I was trying to figure out a way to write a Vocal story on that topic and stretch it out to the 600-word minimum, because I'm just not feeling it, you know?

Maybe this is what they call writers' block; I don't think I've experienced it before.

So, Vocal? Thanks very much for throwing me a way to post this short, approximately 150-word add-on to one of my older pieces. I needed to get it out, but six hundred words of it just seemed so huge that I'd never get it done.

Now I don't have to.