It is C+16 since my world changed, and I find myself in limbo.

Pardon me if you don’t understand my lingo. Coincidentally, I am reading “Seveneves” by Neal Stephenson, a story about a BIG world change: the destruction of Earth because an agent breaks up the moon into little pieces. The science is over my head, but everyone has time to prepare for the end of the world because there is a lag between the moon breakup and the Earth’s destruction. The characters decide it’s time to establish a new calendar, and AD and CE are gone, replaced by A (for Agent), plus the number of days since the Agent hit the moon.

Today is March 29, 2020, 16 days after my kids were ordered not to go to school and we were all instructed not to leave our homes unless absolutely necessary. So it’s C+16 (C for COVID) since the Global Pandemic changed my world and the world of most of us. At C+16, it feels like the significant impact has happened, and I am living my new normal.

That…was…fast. As I stood in line at my local grocery store yesterday, two metres apart as the stickers on the floor guided me, I had an out-of-body experience. Suddenly I was a character from one of the endless dystopian books I have read and continue to read.

When I got up to the cashier, I smiled at her. She looked utterly frazzled. I asked how she was doing. “Not as good as thirty minutes ago when I started my shift.” She was an older woman who told me she had just returned to work after being off for four months due to a shoulder injury. Her grown children were mad at her for coming back, but as she explained, she had no choice. I packed my own bags so she wouldn’t have to and tried to channel calm to her, but I knew my chest was tight, so I was probably channelling stress instead. I thanked her and left.

I’ve set up a routine to deal with my new normal. It’s not one I would “normally” choose, but it gets me through the day so that I can do it again the next one. My youngest wakes up, feeds the cat, empties the dishwasher, begs for the Switch, gets told to read instead. My teenager drifts in, gets breakfast, negotiates Switch time with his brother. At 11:15 sharp, someone announces they’re hungry. We eat, we argue about what to do next, we get outside somewhere between one and four. Then it’s happy hour, dinner, more Switch, storytime, bed at 9- Groundhog Day style. Yes, I still make my teenager sit through storytime. We’re making our way through Narnia again. It’s one of the highlights of my day, and I’ve told him plainly: if he wants Switch time, he has to do storytime and outside time first. He is almost convinced.

That’s been my day for the last 16 days, minus the days my kids were with their dad. Hallelujah.

Some of you might think, ” Must be nice.” Others might think, “I don’t think I could do that for 16 days straight.” That’s because it’s my schedule. I built it after knowing all my constraints and what I was and wasn’t willing to live with.

Building it reminded me of my separation. I’ve lived through the end of a world before.

When I was newly separated, I had a schedule that got me through the interim period, that stretch between deciding to separate and actually having two new lives in two homes. I was on mom auto-pilot. My kids were seven and four. I took care of them, and when they were with their dad, I cried, took long baths, and phoned my friend Barb for therapy, because I thought I couldn’t afford the real thing. I cursed the world, and I cursed my spouse for throwing me into an interim period I had no control over.

I drifted for a year, blown around like a leaf, at the whims of family law, my emotions, my spouse, and my kids. Then I began my new normal as a divorced mom of a seven- and four-year-old. I still had day-long cry fests after drop-offs. I still had conflicts with my ex. I dragged myself out of bed to survive the day and to make sure my kids did too, but I was miserable.

About six months post-divorce, I had a breakdown, or maybe it was an epiphany. I decided I wasn’t going to keep going about my days the way I had been.

It took longer the first time. But I built a new normal. I learned how to deal with my constraints, the biggest one being my own emotional state. I realized my thoughts about the unaffordability of therapy were costing me more than therapy actually would, so I hired a coach, someone else’s help, not mine, and we started co-creating something new.

I was building resilience and learning to adapt to hard things and come out the other side still standing.

The separation days were horrid. I was being blown around by a force I couldn’t control. The C+ days are horrid too, and I have no control over them.

And I’m going to be okay.