(Old Post: September 8 2020)
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move." Douglas Adams
I had to cancel therapy this week due to schedule conflicts.
I haven't written a blog in 3 months due to... brain... conflicts.
The thoughts have been having trouble thoughting. The brain has not been wanting to create the sparks that make the things do.
You guys already know the situation around us. I'm not updating you on that.
The resulting situation has made me very much a walking pile of nothing coherent.
I wake to screaming most days from a toddler who is more of a morning person than i'll ever be. Sometimes I wake to cats breaking something. Or doors being shut. I'm a really light sleeper.
Most nights I don't even sleep anymore. The meds aren't working anymore. I can't take more safely than I am. At best I sleep in a cycle of 2 hours after taking all the meds, wake up in a sweat from a nightmare or terror, and turn the tv on for a while to feel safe. Sometimes I go back to sleep around 5. Often I don't and I lay in bed shoving my eyelids as tight as I can in the dark silence praying for peace until I feel the sunlight or hear the screaming.
My small housemates have had their own sets of battles, god knows.
We haven't been outside much in the last 3 months because of the heat, the mosquitoes, the hornets and the poor air quality. They're just as tired of seeing me every day as I am of "waking" to screams, and living with the constant complaints and ill mannered ways of a preteen.
So i'll not throw them all the way under the bus. If you're a parent you know what I mean when I say incessant.
I used to be a person and have hopes and dreams and desires. I think that fades some when you start having children in the best of circumstances, because they rightfully come first. But this is not the best of circumstances.
My dreams centered around travelling the world. My aspirations include living in other countries. I wanted to travel with a ren faire circuit as a vendor, but I never got around to picking and perfecting a craft. I double majored in a language so I could travel and do language immersion, but the first pregnancy overlapped those courses in time precluded me from becoming insured with student travel insurance so that wasn't allowed.
Lately I've been focusing on trying to control the last parts of my life that are left to be controlled by me, the pilot of my meat ship.
I've been looking seriously into moving our family out of country, making lists, gathering documents, listing fees. The biggest challenge was going to be saving enough cash to move. It was, at the time, a challenge that felt nearly impossible, but perhaps possible. Enough possible left for hope. Time went on.
and it fucked us. As it is prone to do.
The scoring system assigns points for: language skills, education, years in qualified skilled job (at least 3 for max points), family already in the country, and age. After a certain age you begin losing points.
There's a minimum threshold for applying and getting selected for a visa.
I quit my masters when I found out I was pregnant 3 years ago because I was about to start internship hours with a high risk health population and I couldn't continue down that path while pregnant.
I resumed school with a different career choice last year. Teaching (TESOL). I hope you can see where I'm going. There is going to be a swell of unemployed, and underemployed teachers with years of qualifications that I don't have. There will likely be an extreme competition for these positions, in an uncertain economy, that makes my continuation of that program problematic at this time.
I would like to resume social work, as I feel it is my calling anyway, and I predict a mighty need for social workers in the coming years.
If I were able to resume that program in Spring, I would not complete the program and be able to get all the certifications I need until I'm 36. I won't have regained points for career if I immediately am hired until I am 39. We will be losing more points than I gained for simply aging.
We will never meet the minimum threshold required to legally move to that particular country unless they lower it, no matter what we do, regardless of money, which we also don't have.
My response to that gut-punch was to start emailing the social work programs anyway. It'll take a lot of work to get back on track and i'm currently awaiting a response to a question where I asked if field hours were on hold due to the pandemic. I still wont be able to return, straight into field hours, during the pandemic.
The stress level i'm currently experiencing while on morning noon and night sedatives is the highest level maintained for this length of time to begin with. Add graduate school, rangling sufficient child care and working for free during a pandemic with higher-risk populations and you'll likely get a single parent household after I die at age 34.
But here we are.