It has been an UNPRECEDENTED year. ("Unprecedented" is the word of the year too, apparently, and fittingly.) 2020 will be remembered like 1918, the first year of every major war and genocide and whatever year it was that Mount Versuvius blew up and enshrined the residents of PomPeii in eternal shame.
For me, it has been a mixed year but mostly good. Although has it been good, really, and how good, exactly - are questions which beg answering and the reason why I am turning to you, dear diary.
My husband, dutifully asleep on NYE night with beautiful 6.5yr old Sol, has been very unhappy. Despite having experienced little stress due to not having worked this year, it hasn't been for him the mental health break it was (mostly) for me. He has positively hated covid-19 and all the doom and gloom that has surrounded it. I remember standing outside on the pavement with him in April or May, in the thick of the circuit breaker (our version of lockdown). He was in a state of anxiety, chain-smoking levels of anxiety, well and truly sloshing about in tragic, hopeless visualisations of a future that held very little of the familiar comforts of his reality til date. The complete and utter thrashing of "our way of life" for example (of parties, movies, restaurants...). The obvious symptoms of the terrible way the lifestyles we have led have tipped nature out of balance into a irrevocable spiral of destruction. How work and jobs will change forever and however will we get back into employment.
He mostly really hated being home with the me this year. I must really drop all defenses and examine if I have been, genuinely, that hard to live with. This creeping guilt and self-hate must mean there is truth to it.
Initially, I started out gangbusters, listing out priorities re. SOL, having daily schedules, doing Taskworld work (a very consuming side project). Then in the circuit breaker, I weakened, started buying into the whole "watch your mental health, its time to give yourself a break this pandemic" wellness hogwash. Well, its obviously not entirely hogwash but perhaps I took it too seriously. Screentime levels went up, somehow Sol got his own iPad. And instead of experiencing more discipline, Sasha now sleeps at 1am arrrrrghhhh
And the rifts in my relationship with my husband, which in the first half of the year were plastered over with a mixture of fantasy-induced sanguinity and actual real life horniness, now seem fresher, deeper and more life-threatening. I had thought our relationship had become better this year. In reality the fundamentals remain rotten as ever. It was not " divorce averted". It was " divorce delayed". I cannot keep the blinkers on and engage my fantasy to bloster the strength of my denial. I really need to face it. To own my role. And to start to address my husband as a vulnerable, emotional being every bit as tender as I am.
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