I have been going with the flow on this whole pandemic. I used to be of the variety of people that had anxiety about everything I couldn’t control. Thanks to a divorce, an unplanned career change, and being temporarily homeless, I feel like I can handle staying home, working at home, ordering groceries online, and washing my hands frequently. Sounds quite simple compared to the last few years actually.

With that being said, I’m grateful and thankful, and everything in between. In times like these, I’m so happy to be working in a much-needed department for an essential business. I’m working remotely. I am getting a paycheck and staying busy while the rest of the world is becoming unemployed and losing their minds.

On that topic, working at home with two kids is a bit challenging. My 11 year old daughter is the impromptu interrupter, like right when I’m starting a web conference call. And my 4 year old wakes up soaked in his on pee while I’m on a work call, then proceeds to shart himself three times throughout the morning while I try to answer emails and calls,  wipe kid butt, clean shitty underwear, do laundry, and wash my hands 500 million times so I can simultaneously avoid coronavirus and rubbing poop in my eye.

But I’m employed, I like my job, and I love my kids. I am very lucky to be in this situation.

After a full day of multitasking today, my kids were entertaining themselves while I started dinner. I was planning to make some breaded chicken tenders. I heated up the oven, prepped the breadcrumbs, and then decided I should also prepare the rice. I got out a glass Pyrex dish right after turning on a burner to heat the water for the rice. I placed the Pyrex dish on the stove, purposely on the cool burner.

The next thing I knew, the 9 x 13 glass Pyrex dish exploded all over my entire kitchen. I screamed one of those stupid delayed horror movie screams. I realized what had happened, but my adrenaline wasn’t aware of that. My daughter tromped down the stairs to see “‘who died?” and my son, in his socks, tried to make his way into the kitchen to see what was happening. Everyone got yelled out to just “GO AWAY!” as I sadly realized that I had turned on the wrong burner for the rice. Instead, the burner was on that I placed the glass dish on, causing it to explode.

My heart was racing. My brain was on overload, And I was mad that I had just lost one of my favorite dishes, wasted food (because most of it now had shards of glass in it), and the clean up effort was going to take some time.

And that it did. It took me about 45 minutes to throw way the big pieces of glass, sweep, vacuum, vacuum again, clean off the counter tops and stove top, wipe everything down, clean dirty dishes and pans barely used because they’d been filled with pieces of glass, and then I had to continuously use a wet paper towel on the floor to attempt to pick up any remaining shards of glass.

And all I could think was that this process is how eliminating coronavirus could be. No matter how hard and long we try, there may always be that one lingering shard of glass that can catch your bare foot when you least expect it. And that always causes the most unexpected bloody mess.

Let’s hope I got every shard. I damn well tried. And let’s pray that this virus only has to last long enough to teach us a lesson; change our mindset on our appreciation for life and each other. But let’s pray it doesn’t break us. Each of us must try. Every shard counts.

Stifle Me Not